Sean TS #14

     Dorothy told me that she took her TEFL exam and that she was not happy and satisfied with her results and manner of test taking. She told me that her computer used for test taking had several technical difficulties. The volume was slightly inaudible at parts, the interface suffered from glitches, and her computer had to restart. These events made Dorothy immensely nervous and anxious which I am sure affected her test taking mentality and capability. However, the only solutions to her problem was that she could either accept her score, or retake it.  But she cannot retake it as she needs to provide two TEFL scores to her hopeful employer. As a result, Dorothy was quite discomforted that her first TEFL score was severely affected by technical difficulties and is stuck with that score representing her whole capability with the English language.

     I worked with her more on practicing the TEFL exam on the Chinese practice site. She had difficulty with the sections of the practice that asked what a specific word meant given the context. I found these easy as a native speaker but could understand her frustration as we both agreed that the exam passages are both boring, non-interesting, and use already difficult phrases and words. She was frustrated that she was asked to define a word based on context from other words that she already didn’t understand. I remember from my High School days how tedious these exams were. Not because of the difficulty or questions, but because of the often times dreary and mind numbing topics the passages discussed which were hard for me to grasp, but even harder for a foreigner.

     We focused on working on those word definition context questions and understanding the primary theme of the text. I helped her by going through some popular Latin terms for her to derive meaning from as well as extensively reading and thus skimming text for the main topic idea as well as scanning text for quickly searching up an answer or context for definition.