DJ TP #10

Last Sunday I met up with Kwang again. It was interesting to see how different he acted in his reading class than he does with me. I think this was due to his affective filter, which goes up for him when he is in class. He acted much more hesitant to reply to questions in class than he does with me. In some cases, he would be called on to answer a question in class and would reply back "Yes?" to the teacher, trying to avoid giving an answer. For this sessions, I decided to do some tutoring instead of just conversing. Since Kwang wants to work on his speech, I did some speaking practice with him. We picked up one of the Newsweeks from the library and I had him read me one of the articles. He was very hesitant to do this. He considers himself to be a very high level English speaker. To be fair, he has a very good handle of English, and he is probably the most knowledgable student I have. However he thinks that he doesn't need to do any practice other than conversing, and he considers this sort of practicing as below him. Maybe it is, but I don't think so. Anyways, while he was reading I jotted down notes of anything he said incorrectly. He still has some pronunciation errors, but very rarely do they affect the meaning of the sentence. When he was done speaking, I went over the mistakes that he made, which were very few. He also seemed to know each word that he mispronounced, and when I would tell him he would nod his head and say "Yes, yes". That makes sense, because when I speak German I know which words I am saying wrong.