Last Thursday, I met with Gyusang from South Korea for our first tutoring session. He expressed to me that for our weekly sessions, he wanted to review his essays that he writes weekly. I feel that the first session, overall, went well. His essay was about why he thought it was important for High School students to be able to choose their classes, like College students do. His teacher took off points for not having a thesis. I explained how a thesis is the roadmap for his paper and he showed me a previous paper he had written with a perfect thesis. I told him that it was a great thesis, and this is how he needs to structure his introductory paragraph and thesis. Another patterned I noticed was that he didn't use articles. He later explained to me that in Korean they don't have articles, which is why he was having such a difficult time with it.
We corrected the essay together, which took almost the entire hour.
I understand the article problem. I am tutoring a girl from South Korea as well named Somina and she has the same issue. What I told her might help is if she reads it out loud, and if that is not working that usually all important nouns in a sentence get an article. I know English breaks nearly all rules but I think to get them thinking about the importance of articles is a good first step.
ReplyDeleteSounds like you are providing great support for this student. Great work!
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