Adam TP # 6

Today I met with Bayasgalan at 1:00 pm in Room 409 of Eppes Hall. He was in a good mood and said that today was a holiday in Mongolia called Naadam. He told me about this celebration, which included horse racing, wrestling, and archery. We held a brief conversation about horse racing, wrestling and Mongolian culture before we began our tutoring session. I used this to introduce some new vocabulary to him, such as mentioning the word "bet"/"betting" when we talked about horse racing. I told him that his conversation and expression had been improving greatly. He seemed much more confident in speaking, although he still had some difficulty with grammar.
While Bayasgalan had been in a jovial mood when I greeted him, he was not so happy about his progress in his class. For example, he showed me an in-class quiz he had taken on which he had not done well. He said that he was frustrated with his results on the quiz. The topic of the quiz was the topic of pronouns, which we had (if I remember correctly) gone over in our last tutoring session. I felt disappointed that I had not been able to explain pronouns in such a way that he would be able to remember correct usage and do well on his quiz. I was also very concerned, as I want him to do well in his class and improve his English (his speaking is improving greatly, or at least he is quite a bit more confident) . I looked at his mistakes, most of which had to do with the placement of pronouns that are usually objects ("him") in places where subjects ("he") should be and vice versa. I wrote sample sentences including blank spaces to text his comprehension. I gave him context clues as to whether he should use "him", "he," or "his". Bayasgalan occasionally struggled with this, but I made a point to let him know which terms were used as subjects, which were used as objects, and which were generally possessive. He caught on relatively quickly. I made a chart for him explaining the usage of these words and asked him to show me a page in his book that covered similar content. I let him know that the book was a good starting point, but that he should also keep factors in mind that contributed to exact usage: for example, is the pronoun possessive? Is it an object? Is it a subject? etc.
Additionally, we also reviewed modal verbs. Bayasgalan said that he struggled with the exact concepts, so I modeled specific sentences for him and gave him examples of usage. I gave him some examples of where a person could use "could," "may," "might," or "should" and gave him specific example sentences that talked about these concepts.
We agreed to meet again on Tuesday at 3:00 p.m. in the CIES lounge.