Miguel Derett - TS #2

November 7th, 2018. ½

            For this tutoring session, I was scheduled to tutor a student named Xueyao Bai. She went by the name “Alina.” Although this was a diagnostic meeting, she asked if we could have a three-hour meeting. For the first half of the meeting, we reviewed some of the questions that were given to us (TEFL students) for tutoring guidelines. Some of these questions include: “What country are you from,” “When did you come to the U.S.,” as well as “What do you think of the U.S. and Tallahassee.” Those were the non-academic questions, for academic questions I asked her: “Why are you studying English,” “what are some things you enjoyed about studying English,” and also “how much do you use English outside of class.” Her responses were all adequate, however they seemed to lack depth. Similar to Byeongsoo Kim, Alina seemed to be practiced in writing, grammar, and speaking to an extent. Yet, her listening skills were somewhat lacking. For example, she would tell me that she enjoyed learning English. She said it was interesting to her. I tried asking her what exactly interested her, yet she seemed to misunderstand and continued to say that she did enjoy learning English.   

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