FSU TEFL Summer 1

Dojun and I had been using news articles for  many of our sessions, so I decided to change it up a bit and show a 5 minute clip of the show Friends. The clip is about a discussion between Phoebe, Joey and Rachel (titled “Joey doesn’t share food”). The speech was a bit fast, but Dojun mentioned that the subtitles helped, although we did have to pause the video often to ensure he was understanding the video. Each time I paused, I asked him to summarize what the scene showed and then asked if he had questions about vocabulary used. It was difficult to explain what clams are until I realized I could google a picture and send it to him.

With the qualifying World Cup games going on I decided to discuss an NPR article about an “alternate” World Cup. Dojun and I had previously talked about sports and sports culture in our home countries, so I felt this would be an interesting topic to learn more about. The confederation of independent football associations World Cup is made up of teams that are not a part of FIFA. The articles goes in depth about a team from Tibet but also touches on the team from the United Koreans of Japan which Dojun commented was quite interesting. I had Dojun read this article to me so I could evaluate his speaking as well as comprehension.

Mohammad was given a homework assignment about Hawaii’s “ethnic rainbow.” The article discussed Hawaii’s history and the cultural diversity found across the state. The objective of the homework assignment was to employ both skimming and scanning skills to easily find key information. We discussed ways to quickly scan reading passages for specific  information. For instance, one of the questions asked about comments made by a precious governor about Hawaii’s diversity. We scanned the article got the word “governor” or the abbreviation “Gov.” and quickly found the piece of information necessary to answer the reading questions. We continued this until we answered all of the questions.

Mohammad received his essay back from the instructor about the different modes of transportation he had worked on previously. Although he did not get the highest score possible, he still did well. However, the instructor made a few of the same comments throughout his paper - basically that he was not fully supporting his statements with appropriate background information. We discussed the importance of creating an outline so that it’s easier to organize ideas and then easier to write the assignment. I’m not sure that he will employ the use of outlines every time, but we did discuss the different types of outlines he can use, and then created one for the paper he had worked on. It seems his instructors also incorporate outlines for writing assignments, but he is not doing this for himself when working on homework.