DJ TP#12

For my final tutoring session, I met up with Kwang again. We started off with some conversation, even though it was a tutoring session. I talked to him about the weather and climate change. We talked about "the green movement" and how advertising agencies have turned it into a fad. Kwang told me that in South Korea, they do a good deal to take care of the environment. Then he mentioned the Fukashima incident and we talked about the pros and cons of nuclear energy. Since he wanted to practice speech, I figured we would do a listening and speaking lesson. The first thing we did was dictocomp. I used the handout that I used for my culture lesson again(because it's a good length and average difficulty). I read the whole thing aloud very quickly, and told him to just listen without taking any notes. After I was done, I asked him to try to recap the piece to the best of his ability. I think I should have let him take some notes, because he had a very sparse recap. From doing the dictocomp in class, I can attest to it being difficult: you will have a general idea of what was said and will be able to answer comprehension questions, but rewriting word for word is hard. After I had him recap, I asked him the comprehension questions. He did much better on this than the recap part, which makes sense to me. Next, I asked him to read the piece. He was not happy about this, and is often upset about the work I give him because I think he considers himself a higher level than the work I give him(to be fair, he is a high level, but not as high as he thinks). He read the piece and did a good job, never mispronouncing a word to the point of it being a different word. He struggle with his "r"s and "l"s the same as Wayo, and I tried to explain the mouth movements the same way I tried to teach Wayo. He was less receptive to this training, however. I think it felt to elementary to him. He is a tricky student to work with, because he is very good at grammar rules and writing, and therefore he doesn't think he should have to do simpler exercises, even though he still needs to work on his fluency and production. And a final note: this is my last post! I wanted to say thank you to Mrs. Kim for a great session! I loved the class, the book and the tutoring and conversation sessions! Such a great cultural experience, it made me question my own culture as well as learning about others. Thanks to Rahmin as well for grading some of my work, and thanks to everyone in class for making it a good one. Bye guys :)