Chris H. TP 4

At the next group meeting with Ryan and Nicolas, we provided a video on the Golden Gate Bridge to further challenge the tutees listening skills. The video had a lot of challenging engineering vocabulary, and at first I could tell that they were slightly overwhelmed by its content and subject matter. Because of this, we stopped the video early on and switched directions to an article below the video that summarized its contents. We read through it slowly as a group, silently, and requested the tutees to write down words that were foreign or too ambiguous to derive meaning from contextual evidence. After the first slow reading, Ryan began the video a second time, and like our first tutoring session, we wrote down pertinent questions for comprehension and vocabulary that we noticed. At thirty second intervals, we paused the film and posed these questions to the tutees, most being simply stated questions, like “Why is the Golden Gate Bridge the color red?” or “What likely is the meaning of the word suspension to the context of bridge construction?” SoSo, one the tutees present, asked the question of the difference between “premier” and “primer”, which was an interesting conversation point and highlighted the profound divergences of meaning that English words can have over just a letter or two. I believe that this lesson was more successful as we had a larger group then the time before, and the subject matter, while slightly more complex in vocabulary and topic, was more engaging to the tutees, most of whom have never seen a suspension bridge quite like the one in San Francisco.