Yesterday I met with Kwangsoo, who is in a CIES program in order to improve his English before he starts research in the fall. He works for the South Korean department of education, and will be doing research on early childhood education.
Kwangsoo's English is very good, but his speaking level is very far behind his reading and writing levels. He doesn't need to take the TOEFL, so there would be no use practicing TOEFL speaking prompts. We agreed that it would be most helpful to spend our time talking as if we were conversation partners, except with me correcting all of his grammatical errors and helping with pronunciation. He seemed to enjoy talking about himself and his field of study, but also explained that he is often frustrated with how little he can express in English (compared to in Korean).
While I could usually understand him, he did make grammar mistakes often. It took me a while to get used to correcting him. I know he won't be offended when I correct him, but it was more difficult than I thought it would be to catch grammatical errors and correct them while we were having a conversation, especially since he would pause often to collect his thoughts. Because of the pauses, I would often forget which tense he should be using, or if his sentences were constructed correctly. It definitely became easier as time went on. I also had a difficult time correcting his pronunciation, because he finds some sounds indistinguishable ("r" and "l" for example). Next time I will be more prepared to use minimal pairs to help.
Overall the meeting went well, and I think our meetings will continue the same way in the future. I will try to come prepared with minimal pairs and maybe audio samples, though.
Kwangsoo's English is very good, but his speaking level is very far behind his reading and writing levels. He doesn't need to take the TOEFL, so there would be no use practicing TOEFL speaking prompts. We agreed that it would be most helpful to spend our time talking as if we were conversation partners, except with me correcting all of his grammatical errors and helping with pronunciation. He seemed to enjoy talking about himself and his field of study, but also explained that he is often frustrated with how little he can express in English (compared to in Korean).
While I could usually understand him, he did make grammar mistakes often. It took me a while to get used to correcting him. I know he won't be offended when I correct him, but it was more difficult than I thought it would be to catch grammatical errors and correct them while we were having a conversation, especially since he would pause often to collect his thoughts. Because of the pauses, I would often forget which tense he should be using, or if his sentences were constructed correctly. It definitely became easier as time went on. I also had a difficult time correcting his pronunciation, because he finds some sounds indistinguishable ("r" and "l" for example). Next time I will be more prepared to use minimal pairs to help.
Overall the meeting went well, and I think our meetings will continue the same way in the future. I will try to come prepared with minimal pairs and maybe audio samples, though.
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