Ted Hong - TP3

Yesterday, May 13th, I met with Quyen for the first time. When I selected her for my tutoring partner, I was under the impression that she was a guy. The reason being that my uncle's name is Quyen and so I assumed that it was a male name. Turns out it can be used for both genders.

Anyway, our tutoring session was brief. While we scheduled to meet during her lunch, she didn't get to eat her lunch and I felt bad. So we rescheduled our next meeting for a more appropriate time.

Quyen has been in America since September. Originally, she studied English in California but she was surrounded by other Vietnamese speakers that she never got the practice she wanted/needed. She gets a little nervous when speaking but that's understandable. She has trouble remembering certain reasons as to why structures are the way they are in speech and I think that also factors in on her anxiety of speaking.

I assessed her strengths and weaknesses. While she says she wants to work on her writing, she does quite well. I suppose I'll find some practices for this, too. She definitely wanted to focus on speech and listening and I have some ideas for that.

She said she had a quiz on new vocabulary tomorrow so I decided to help review it with her. We went over like enthusiastic, optimistic, pessimistic, vague, aspect. Defining some of her vocabulary was a little difficult but she got the idea down pat. I wrote down as best I could words she had trouble pronouncing phonetically and it's surprising how quickly it's picked up.

I made note of her skill level in terms of subjects she's learning: listening and speaking she's on an elementary level while in composition and grammar she's in advanced elementary. Something I should have done earlier with other tutees to help me determine definitively a more elaborate plan. However, I do enjoy getting to know "my students" better through interaction, trial and error.