Meghan TS #6

Date/Time: September 29th, 8:00 am

Location: Sykpe

Topic/Skill: Speaking/listening skills 

Feedback provided to tutee: During this session we focused on his listening skills and his ability to respond to a speaking task based on his listening skills. To begin with, we played a game I'm calling "Cause and Effect" (though it may have a different name somewhere, I edited a more boring version I found online) in which I began by saying "If I had a million dollars, I would buy a house", to which he replied "If I had a house, I would sell it at a higher price", which I replied to and so on. During this game, we ate six lobsters, bought two houses, moved countries twice, drove a boat to Hawaii, and witnessed the worlds biggest ball of yarn. It was fun and he seemed engaged, only asking once or twice when I used challenging vocabulary. We then watched two comedy videos, which I asked him to summarize. He struggled listening to the videos at full speed, so I slowed them down to 75% and he did better.

Lesson(s) about tutoring and/or the tutee you learned: 

Today I learned that it's very important to check for comprehension during listening activities, and that if a speaking example (especially one on YouTube) is too fast, it can be slowed down easily. I also learned that it's very important to specify the genre of a video before you show it. I showed him two comedy clips, and although he understood the first one was comedy based on the audience laughter caught on film, he didn't realize the second one was comedic. He told me he had a vague idea that it was supposed to be funny, based on the strange way one of the characters was behaving, but he wasn't sure, and that made comprehension of the scene itself a bit more difficult for him.