For this meeting with Toshie I brought more practice for the TOEFL test. Because I know that this is her main concern I'm more than happy to focus on this. The reading I brought for last week seemed a little two easy, she only got one question wrong. This time I brought practice that was a little bit harder. I worry that this practice may have been too hard because rather than getting only one wrong as she had last time, she only got one right.
This practice was particularly difficult because it was about paleontology and dinosaurs. I'm not sure if it was the vocabulary or the topic, but this article went over much differently than the first. This was practice for the reading portion of the TOEFL. I brought more reading practice because last time Toshie and I had met she expressed that she thought that the reading practice was very helpful because she came across new vocabulary and phrases.
I'm afraid that this reading was a little too off base. In the last reading (which was about trains), Toshie learned a lot of useful vocabulary but in this reading most of the words were science terms she will likely never see again. When tutoring her I wonder if it is a waste of time to read things like this. I have heard that the TOEFL is pretty academic so this reading was my attempt at introducing that type of language.
After completing the questions, Toshie highlighted any words she did not understand and we went over the reading word-for-word. There were some sentences she did not understand but by slowly going over each individual sentence she was able to completely understand this article and acquire a lot of new vocabulary. At the end of the reading she told me that her weakness has been listening. For our future sessions I hope to bring a combination of both. We finished our session by going over some of her old tests that she felt she had done poorly on and I had helped explain her mistakes.
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