Joel TS#1

For my first tutoring session I met with Yuma from Japan. He told me that he was preparing for the TOEFL and wanted to work on reading and writing. He is in the 2A level classes at CIES, but I wanted to get a better idea as to what his abilities were. I started off by just asking him some simple questions and getting him to basically just introduce himself so that I could see where his speaking and listening skills were. He didn’t have too much trouble answering, although there were a few expected mistakes, but he seemed to struggle understanding some of what I was saying. In order to see where his reading skills were I gave him a number of different articles at different levels. The news article seemed to be too difficult for him and he had trouble understanding me when I tried to explain some of the difficult words. I kind of expected this though, so I had him read some intermediate material. He seemed to understand this much better and although there were a few words that he didn’t know, they were simpler and he was able to understand the explanations. We started to talk about some of the basics of writing but there wasn’t enough time to actually have him write anything. For our next session I will probably have him write just a short paragraph or two about anything he wants. This will help me see where his writing level is. He also stated that he would like to work on listening and I feel that is an area that he could definitely improve on and will be very helpful for him. So for our next session I will also prepare some listening comprehension material and ask him questions about the material. We may be able to use this to help with writing as well.