Tutor Session: March 4th, 2014

Time: 1.5 hours

Plan: Our last class session was cut a little bit short because of poor planning on my part. So, the schedule for this week’s session is full of material. The focus of today’s class will be the word study exercise from the previous session and introducing strategies for the TOEFL test.

The word study activity from last week will be turned into a strategy to help front load the vocabulary from today’s chosen text. While reading the text I will introduce 3 strategies that they can use when they take the TOEFL reading test.

Actual: I started class today with a discussion about the TOEFL test. Both of my students have taken it before so we talked about their difficulties as well as what parts were easier for them. After this brief discussion I introduced the topic for today and that I would give them some help with understanding a text in English and answering questions about the text.

At this point I handed out the “Word Study” worksheet and wrote our 5 new vocab words on the board. The worksheet instructs students to describe a word in many ways. It prompts students to brainstorm the meaning of a word including the words synonyms, word parts, examples, and non-examples. The worksheet even has a space for students to write a sentence that uses the word and to draw a picture that encapsulates the word’s meaning.

I also gave a mini lecture about how to find the meaning of a new word. I laid out steps that they should take to find out the meaning of new vocab. The steps are as follows: 1. Context clues inside text  2. Remove word and replace with synonym  3. Ask Tim  4. Use your dictionary.  With this framework students went about completing word studies for our 5 new vocab words.

After completion of the word study I introduced the article for today and our reading strategies. Student’s were tasked with reading quietly with a set of questions in mind: What did I just read? What do I think about what I just read? What will happen next?

At time intervals I instructed students to stop reading and discuss their answers to these questions.

Finally, after they finished reading they answered the comprehension questions that followed the text.

Changes: My changes were minimal. While we were reading I noticed that Wubayheu was reading at a much faster pace than Cake. So, instead of stopping every 5 minutes I decided to have the students stop after reading 3 paragraphs.

Also, while we read I noticed that the student’s interest in the comprehension questions decreased quite a bit. As a result, I decided to have an informal discussion about the strategies at the end of class. I asked if they were helpful and if they preferred one of the questions. Both students said that the predicting question was too hard for them and quite boring.

Analysis: These students are both English language learners with hopes of attending college here in the US. While the text today did not align with their interests, they stayed engaged because it related directly to their needs. The article that they read was directly from an online recourse that gives out sample TOEFL reading tests. The comprehension questions at the end were also useful because they gave me a chance to highlight some of the tricky questions that are often found on the TOEFL.

We did the word study exercise in response to some of their exit pass responses. Cake mentioned that she wanted to know how to better memorize and use new vocabulary. I love the word study because it is very useful and surprisingly fun. Drawing pictures always livens up a class.

Overall today’s class was great. It was full of a lot of information but we packed it all in. I think students appreciated the fast paced class today.