Lucas Erickson TS #5

On November 7, 2018, I had a tutoring session with Zhuanling Bai after 3 PM in the CIES lounge. We introduced ourselves and I immediately began working on Listening skills to practice for the TOEFL exam. She was in Group 3 for listening and she wanted to improve her listening skills. She told me that she wanted to practice listening to audio that was unrelated to her field, chemistry, so we selected a listening passage about biology, specifically the animal behavior of the blind mole rat. During our session, we practiced different listening strategies. I asked her to try three different things. First, I asked her to take down notes the way she usually does. Next, I asked her to write down only the nouns in the passage. Finally, I asked her to write down only the words she thought were stressed. The exercise was not to show her the best method of note taking but rather to practice listening to not only vocabulary but the elements of pronunciation that will be lost when written down. We also practiced some note-taking strategies by implementing graphic organizers while listening to the passage. I was completely unfamiliar with teaching listening at this point so I had to acknowledge that I wasn't sure the best approach for Zhuanling to take. We were using TOEFL practice test materials so I used them to assess the difference in comprehension before and after the session. I learned I neede more experience before I was completely comfortable with teaching listening or note-taking skills.

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