TEFL 2021 - Madison Elford

9:00am - 10:00am    06/29/2021 Paper Fox Coffee Cafe I am starting to realize how bad I am at English. We reviewed his vocabulary quiz and I realized that if I were taking this quiz, I would not have gotten a hundred percent. I expected it to be a bit easier than what it actually was. I did notice that some of the definitions we were matching the vocab words to were not completely correct though. In that, I helped explain the discrepancy to Xing. He seemed to have a better grasp of the vocabulary after that though. We also talked about study suggestions. He is having a little trouble keeping up when trying to write notes in class. I suggested that he record the lesson so he can go back later and listen to the parts he missed before. I have always done this to keep up with my class notes in note-dependent classes (because I am a slow writer). I'm not sure if he will try this or not, but it was the only suggestion I could think to give him. 

Date : 06/26/21 Time : 3:00 - 4:00  Location : Zoom Meeting Topic Discussed : We did introductions, and asked basic get-to-know-you questions.  Cultural topic : We spoke a lot about soccer teams. Steven really likes Columbia's soccer team, and the U.S. team. We also discussed the cultural relevance of English in his chosen profession, Computer Engineering.  Personal Thoughts : There was a lot of confusion, and it was difficult to communicate. I wrote out every question into the chat box to make sure he was able to understand it. His reading and writing seems to be better than his speaking and listening skills. I also felt that on top of a language barrier, we were also struggling to communicate over Zoom because of the bad internet signal, and computer errors. I enjoyed the meeting but felt that it wasn't as smooth sailing as I expected it to be. 

 9:00am - 10:00am     06/24/2021 Paper Fox Coffee Cafe This session went smoother than the last. I realized how many mistakes even I, as an native English speaker, can make. We spent about fifteen minutes looking for one word that he needed for his homework. I showed him different ways to find words (google translating from his native language, using a thesaurus, and looking for antonyms to find the opposite word). This resulted in the word Genuine. And when I went to tell him how to spell it, I couldn't do it. He probably thinks it is weird that a native English speaker cannot spell correctly. It is probably very different from a character based language like Chinese. I think it was a good thing for him to learn though. Xing is very focused on how bad he is at English, (because people have told him that in the past) without realizing that most English speakers are pretty bad at English grammar/spelling as well. I hope to help raise his confidence more because his En...

 Date : 06/22/2021 Time : 1:00pm - 1:50pm  Topic/ Skill : Opinion question with reasoning and details               "Do you believe in love at first sight?"                "Answer, Reason 1, Detail 1, Reason 2, Detail 2, Conclusion"  Teacher Presentation : Dr. Rios had a chart projected with the boxes for each part of the response. The                                                        students went down the line and answered each part. Then when the student was                                                 finished, Dr. Rios went over their response with the class. Classroom Managem...

 Date : 06/22/2021 Time : 11:00am - 11:50am  Topic/ Skill : Reading and comprehension of an article from the textbook. The article focuses on good                                     practices of finance and saving money. This part is mostly a review from yesterday when                                 they actually read and reviewed the meaning of the article. Teacher Presentation : Dr. Rios displayed the article on the screen and went over the main points of the                                                  article with the students. He called on different students to have them explain the           ...

Date : 06/22/2021      Time : 10:00am - 10:50am  Topic/ Skill : Inseparable Verb Phrases           - "To come with"          - "To put up with" Teacher Presentation : Dr. Rios used a document with the verb phrases on them and included examples for                                              each. He carefully went over each verb phrase and explained all of the examples to                                              the students.  Classroom Management : Dr. Rios went around the room asking each student to explain the verb phrases                             ...

 9:00am - 10:00am  Paper Fox Coffee Cafe This session was mostly a meet and greet where we discussed goals, college majors, weird quirks of English and answering questions he had for me. I realized that we had a lot in common as people learning second languages. Pronunciation is something he struggles with a lot (similar to me). I introduced him to the pronunciation chart (IPA pronunciations) because it displays where to put your tongue when pronouncing English sounds. He said he would look into a few videos discussing it and we agreed to talk more about it on Thursday. The IPA might be a difficult concept to understand but I hope it helps him. I gave an example of "hello". He pronounces it "Hallo", so I described the placement of the tongue for those syllables so he understood it better. We got along well and I think we really enjoyed meeting up.