Ted Hong - TP1

I sat down with Rose (Hong Tran) yesterday in the CIES lounge and figured I'd get to know her before suggesting whatever academic help she sought. I wanted to make her feel comfortable and approach it in a social learning way and not in a nerve-wracking tutor/tutee manner. However, as soon as we introduced ourselves, she wanted to get right down to business. There was a bit of a nervous vibe going on but that eventually died down, thankfully.

I asked to see some of her work that she'd done for classes to assess her strengths and weaknesses. On one of the pages of her work, She asked me for help/correction. I thought she was trying to figure out determiners when she was asking about how to know when to use "the" or "a" but she said something about linking verbs, which threw me off. Unfortunately, I don't think I answered what she wanted to know based on the blank look and awkward nodding after my explanation. ...Sorry.

On another point, she wanted some help in pronouncing and enunciating certain words: crab, grab, and wrap. I had her practice the words with me aloud and found out that her "cra-" sound came out instead of "gra-" and "puh" came out instead of "buh". Needless to say, she ended up saying "crap" quite a few times. I tried explaining what "crap" meant to possibly deter her from using it but I think I spoke too fast.

She noted that she had difficulty listening to people either because of how fast or the way they spoke (vernacular). As for speaking on top of pronouncing words, she said her difficulty stemmed from the way English vocalized words through the diaphragm compared to the shallow breaths used in Vietnamese.

I explained how to produce certain sounds and had her do some diction exercises with me focusing on "guh" "kuh" "buh" and "puh" by repeating each sound by itself 10x in a sort of tune. By the end of the session, she was able to say "grab" with little effort. Success!

In the middle of the exercise, another student was watching us and seemed fascinated. Rose knew her and invited her to come practice with us. This gave a nice little break because Rose was relentlessly trying but was getting frustrated. It turns out that that the student, who introduced herself as Nok, was another one of my conversation/tutoring partners, however, more on her later.

Rose told me that she desperately wanted to improve her speech and listening skills as they were lacking compared to her reading and composition skills. She wanted more than her normal 2 hours of class practice a day but it was difficult since she lives with her uncle and his family, whom primarily speak Vietnamese. Her diligence and passion to improve is admirable as she admitted to applying for 3 tutor partners.

After this brief session, we set up a schedule and parted ways. Rose preferred to have Nok included in the session since they were both in the same speech class... I thought it'd be great, too. I'll have to figure that part out in blogging, though.

I have to admit, I had no idea how I would be able to offer any sort of didactic help starting off. Rather, I wasn't sure I was qualified enough to provide any sort of tutoring. There were times where I could not understand what she wanted in terms of help and I hated to disappoint. I wrote down notes of our session figure out a plan to help her, as well as any shortcomings on my part that I could improve.

For my next session with her, I want to suggest reading aloud, possibly a script of sorts. This would provide a dialogue for her to engage in as well as keep track of sounds, words, speech flow, etc. Another option would be to watch a movie or sitcom with English subtitles. I have some other ideas, too... but maybe next time.

In any case, that concludes this post so... wocka wocka.