Patrick TS #14

Date/Time: September 24, 2018, 3:00 p.m-4:00 p.m.

Location: CIES Student Lounge

Topic Discussed:  Relative Pronouns

My Tutee wanted to work on relative pronouns today. Because the previous lesson on articles was fresh on my mind, I planned to check for understanding during today’s lesson. It had been three-days since the last lesson and I hoped she still held that knowledge and ability to work successfully with articles. As it turned out, there were several opportunities to check her retention of learning on use of articles. She remembered well.

During the lesson today, I observed yet again that modeling is an extremely valuable and useful tool, particularly as an initial point of student learning. For example, starting with two sentences, I re-wrote those sentences as one sentence and located the relative pronoun clause in different places. I spoke slowly and used relatively simple sentences in my explanations. Because I did not simply want to provide an answer to activities which I had created, I asked simple questions to check understanding. “Who” vs “whose” can be tricky, even for native speakers. I was careful to explain simply the possessive aspect of “whose”. I noted several examples where “whose” was appropriate and asked my Tutee questions to check her understanding of and ability to use relative pronouns in sentences. It appeared that she understood, based on her correct answers to my questions. I sent some additional practice items via email for her to work on. I look forward to checking on her understanding of relative pronouns during the next lesson.