Allison TP - 6

Since I typically meet with Yasuko during CIES lunch hour, our time together is usually pretty short and I know that she needs a lot of help, especially when it comes to her pronunciation. Thus, I agreed to meet up with her on the weekend. She lives on the other side of town, but it's not too much of a trek because I was already out there anyways. When I walked in, I met her daughter, Marine. She is an adorable special needs child with the age of 7. Although I tried to engage her in conversation, she is quite shy and other than a simple hello, she sticks to watching youtube videos. Due to my arrival around noon, Yasuko insists on making some lunch for all of us. She made pancakes (for Marine), spinach salad with what she said was a carrot vinaigrette, and potatoes au gratin. It was quite yummy but I wanted to focus on the tutoring more than anything so we set to work.

Apparently, Yasuko has just recently moved up to Group 3 for her reading class because her group 2 one was far too easy. However, this move has not gone off without a hitch. Now her material is quite difficult! She takes out her reading assignment and I see that the article is discussing a magnet lab. Earlier in the week, the class took a little trip to see FSU's magnet lab as well. Either way, the article had several tricky scientific terms that I had no idea how to explain such as "megajoule" and "quantum". I was just happy that I remembered how to pronounce them, honestly. I was never much of a science gal.

I really wanted to work on her pronunciation with the speaking packet that we looked at in class but Marine was monopolizing the internet and I figured we can just go over it next time. Thus, I had Yasuko read the article aloud and I copied down each word that she mispronounced. I had her go paragraph by paragraph. At the end of each one, I would reread it aloud so that she could hear how it was supposed to sound and also give her a brief summary of what it meant (to the best of my ability...like why in the world would a teacher assign such a useless article!? I realize the need for students to understand scientific material, but I feel like a Biology related piece would have been considerably more relevant to the average student). After summarizing the paragraph, I went over each mispronounced word with her individually, repeating it until she could say it properly.

Doing this task took a lot longer than I thought it would. Before I knew it, two hours had passed and I needed to hurry off to work. Yasuko thanked me graciously for my time as always and said that she really appreciated me coming out to her apartment to work on this.