Tyler-CP10

Before I left Tallahassee, I managed to meet for lunch with Tugba. We met on Thursday during the CIES lunch hour, and walked to a spot in the shade outside. Tugba gave me some Turkish cookies that she had brought along with her, which were delicious. She asked me what I was going to do when I got my Tefl certificate. I told her my plans (rushed as they were) of moving in with a friend in West Palm Beach and working a part-time job until I could get out of the country. I let her know that I was always available to help her study should she need it. Her plans are to remain in CIES until she passes her TOEFL and gets accepted to study art history.

We talked for awhile more about what we hoped to do and where we hoped to go. I'm glad I got the opportunity to meet some interesting students in the CIES program. I feel like I learned quite a bit from them. At last the time came when the lunch hour was over and I wished Tugba the best of luck in the future. I hope to keep in touch with her and a few other students after I leave Tallahassee. Overall it's been a very good experience in the TEFL program.

Tyler-CP9

Today was Tugba and I's 4th day working and speaking together, and I enjoy our time together. Somehow as conversations often do, ours took a turn in an interesting direction. I don't recall how it began but it eventually lead to religion and philosophy. I found out that she is a Shi'ite, and I asked her how that was different from the other sects of Islam. She explained to me that it was a different way of interpreting the Qu'ran. She then showed me her favorite teacher, who turned out to be a Shi'ite mystic named Rumi. I often enjoy mystical teachers because despite the religions that they represent they all come to the same conclusion, and that is that we are all one.

We watched some of Rumi's videos on youtube, and his general message reminded me of a teacher that I often read and watch; Osho. I showed her one of Osho's videos also because, essentially he says the same thing that Rumi does, only in different words. Afterwards I thanked her for introducing me to new information and for a particularly interesting conversation.

Tyler CP-8

Today after tutoring was over with, Tugba and I got to talking again. Luckily I had my computer with me to aid in our interesting conversation. I began our discussion by asking her about music. Tugba listens to many kinds of music, but especially enjoys folk and classical Turkish music. I pulled up youtube, and asked her to show me a few examples of the music she enjoys. She began by showing me a more traditional folk artist. I then showed her a few songs of my own, ranging from folk to bluegrass. She seemed to like them and even wrote a few down. She then showed me a few more, including one that I really enjoyed. Hayko Çepkin, is a kind of gothic Turkish rock singer, whom I quite enjoyed. To be honest, I was surprised (as I often am by foreign music) at how much I enjoyed it. All-in-all, it was a great conversation, and I feel that I learned quite a bit, and I hope that she did also.

Tyler-CP7

Tugba and I had the opportunity to talk freely again today after our tutoring time. I began by asking her some of the customs of her country. One of the things that she explained to me was the evil eye. It is a common Turkish symbol that originated in ancient Mesopotamia as a protection against evil spells and curses. Now-a-days it is used more as a cultural fashion symbol, or an homage to the past. Tugba says that the blue evil eye is found almost everywhere in Turkey and that she has jewelery featuring it. I found this to be quite fascinating because I have seen the symbol (as most people probably have) many times throughout my life, and have always wandered as to what its' origin was.

Tyler-TP12

I met with Tugba today after Cies classes to help her study for some of her assignments. The material she was working with consisted of mostly reading and vocabulary words. I read the worksheets she had with her and we began to go over them. In order to complete the work, the vocabulary words given from the story had to be used in a sentence. I had Tugba write the first sentence on her own. She had the general idea right, and used the word correctly, but seemed to have some trouble with her tenses. I explained to her what the problems were, and demonstrated what the correct tenses were. Tugba seems to have a very good grasp on most of her vocabulary, but like many other foreign students she has trouble with tenses. This is understandable because English doesn't always follow its own rules, so many specific word uses must be simply memorized.

Tyler-TP10/11

This was my fourth tutoring meeting with Tugba in one week, and I believe she was a bit burnt out from studying, but we persisted on. I attempted to make this lesson more fun than some of the previous lessons. I found a few youtube videos that were funny and appropriate, and I asked the general who, what, why, etc. I figured that this would be a nice break after several days of studying more intense Toefl exercises. Some of the video's I picked were humorous, and it seemed Tugba thought so as well. She did very well, and got the majority of the questions right. The ones that she got incorrect I explained and we went over in more detail.

After we were done with those videos, I showed her what I had hoped to be my final lesson plan. It was (at the time anyways) an Edgar Allan Poe story, which proved to be to advanced for the level I sought to teach it in. She did understand the majority of it though, with some help via vocabulary explanations. After our lessons were done we had the chance to converse for awhile.

Ayerim - CO3

The last class I observed was Vicky’s Grammar Class. Today we practiced making interview questions. She talked about different fears people may have, also known as phobias. The students interviewed each other with questions they created themselves. I really loved Vicky’s energy and willingness to help the students. We did a group activity, in which students interviewed each other to find out what their fears are. The second activity was a short review on the benefits of living a healthy life. The students we asked to write some interview questions in which the answer was located on the passage. During the activity, one of the students sitting next to me was having some difficulties with forming questions. So since her partner wasn't helping her much, I did. I asked her to pick a sentence and together we formed the question. I was a bit difficult trying to give her the answer. After class, Vicky said that I picked a good place to sit and thanked me for helping student.

Ayerim - CO2

Today I observed Mr. Ross’ Listening class. The plan for the day was to take a quiz. I thought it was quite long for a quiz, but fairly easy for the level. So the length made up for the level of difficulty. Most of the quiz was dictation, telling the difference in pronunciation and listening to a track of a silly call center advertisement. Most of the students did not understand the joke of the advertisement, so Ross had to explain it at the end of the quiz.

Chris H. CP 6

In lieu of Marcel, my new conversation partner Elder Sandoval met with me last week. Elder is a Colombian student from Cartagena, in Tallahassee for two weeks visiting mutual Panamanian friends. Just for fun, I took him to Super Perros, a local Colombian restaurant on the corner of Ocala and Tennessee, to see how it measured up in his eyes in authenticity. We had bandeja paisa and salchipapa, which were both delicious, with sides of frijos negros and mini gorditas. He expressed that the food was simplistic compared to the food in Columbia, and that the steak seemed slightly flavorless. We talked a little about Colombia and what he liked to do there. He told me that he just graduated high school and would be attending the Universidad Tecnologica de Panama, pursuing a degree in electrical engineering. He told me that ultimately he would like to work in the States. His English was good, and although I supplemented it with some of my own prior Spanish knowledge, I could tell that he had a fair understanding of English grammar and tenses. His accent was his main obstacle, and he confused English words, such as star with start, and others. I felt that he quickly became unreceptive when I tried to correct his word usage and accents, which was slightly less encouraging than Marcel in many ways, but I did enjoy his depictions of Colombia, which is a country I’ve never been to but have always wanted to see.

Chris H. CP 4/5

This unfortunately was the last conversation partner meeting I had with Marcel, as I was unable to get a hold of him in the weeks following. However, on the other hand, it was a double date evening and a lot of fun! Marcel called me as he promised midweek, and we agreed upon a time and place to meet with our female companions for a dinner out on the town. Unfortunately, my girlfriend, Chelsea, and I were slightly late, ten minutes or so, and met Marcel and Stacey, already seated, at Sakura Sushi and Grill. During dinner, we talked about school. Marcel told us how he decided he wanted to go into business with his father after getting a degree in international business and German studies. His father owned a car parts manufacturing plant outside of Arnhem, and he mentioned that his brother already was an understudy for a management position there. I noticed discreetly that Marcel’s vocabulary was certainly improved from the first time I met him, and he relied less on word substitutions from others and more on finding alternative ways of expressing the same idea. Stacey seemed unaware that Marcel wanted to return to Berlin prior to this moment, and the two exchanged nervous glances during the conversation that Chelsea and I purposely spoke through. Stacey wanted to become a nurse, and to ultimately graduate from the FSU school of nursing. Marcel joked that it was the best job besides an animal caretaker for someone with her compassion. Chelsea asked Marcel about his sister’s wedding plans, to which he described an elaborate weekend planned in a cottage in Belgium. He said that most of his family was from Holland but that his sister’s fiancé was from Brussels and wanted to have it there. The ladies got into a conversation about honeymoons, and Marcel and I turned our conversation towards English competency and the direction that he wanted to go with the language. He told me that ultimately, if when he returned to Europe over the summer, and felt his English still needed some work (which in my opinion, his grammar certainly could use some more practice) he would return to Florida and enroll in a university here. I encouraged this, but told him that there are also many different states within the United States and other countries that are ideal to form a base for practice and working towards a TOEFL, and that if he needed any assistance, I would be happy to help. At the end of the dinner, I gave him my personal e-mail address and told him to call me when he next wanted to meet. Chelsea and Stacey said goodbye and, following, have kept in touch. Overall, it was a fun night out, and a great chance for Marcel to speak vibrantly and in a relaxed setting about his past, present, and future ideas and goals.

Chris H. TP 5

This was my final tutoring group meeting with Ryan and Nikolas. Following a similar format to the tutoring sessions beforehand, we again presented the tutees with an audio segment. This time, the subject was a multi-perspective, historical account on the Civil War, the battle of Fredericksburg, with witness accounts from white property owners, Confederate soldiers, and slaves. I think that the context of the video drew in the tutees quickly, as it involved a key element of American history and, moreover, impressions of battle. Again, we asked the students to write down words and phrases that they did not understand, or could not gather meaning from in the context of the documentary. One particular part, which I noticed was the most challenging for all of them, was a recorded teacher in a museum speaking on the historical significance. The dissonance of the audio sample, which was not digital like the rest, made it just slightly more difficult to pick out the words. This certified in my mind the profound importance of clarity in listening samples to students, and how even the slightest distortion can turn familiar words into foreign words in their mind. Our quizzes were generally successful with the students, and facilitated conversation on the meaning of confederation versus federation, militia, and, funny enough, the word dastardly. Words such as glisten and exhibit were also highlighted as words unfamiliar in the audio sample and I felt that the tutoring session overall was a great success. At the conclusion of it, the students turned to youtube and showed us some of their music from their native countries, including West African rappers such as Bebir and DJ Arafat, and Myanmar street musicians in local festivals.

Chris H. CP3

I met Marcel in the TCC library when he was done with class and once again began talking about the events of Spring Break. He told me that his plans had fallen through and that he had remained in Tallahassee, which was not a terrible thing as he was now dating a girl in his school. I asked him how she was affecting his language ability, and he laughed and said that he has never had a better reason to talk. He told me that he was doing well in his classes, but was homesick nonetheless, and was looking forward to returning to Europe the following month to see his family and attend his sister’s wedding. We conversed further on his lady friend and how he had met her (in a class) and what he liked most about her (her southern accent and blond hair!). Marcel has a natural sense of humor and likeability around him, and I find that the more I’ve met with him, the more his willingness to speak his mind, despite vocabulary obstacles, has increased. I told him a little about my girlfriend, and asked him whether he would like to have a double date, to which he agreed. He insisted he was obligated to leave a little early because his roommate didn’t have the apartment key, but that he would call me later in the week to schedule the date.

Chris H. CP 2

I met again with Marcel by the pool near my apartment complex. The weather was not great that day and we had to get under the pavilion when it began to rain a few minutes after he arrived. We talked some about Spring break and his plans for the upcoming week. He said that he was going to go the Panama City with several other Dutch students who were seeking pilot’s licenses in the area. We began talking about flying, the drawl of airline flight, and we both agreed that on both sides of the Atlantic it was horrible. I told him how I too pursued a pilot’s license at one time, and that flying had always excited me, especially with the prospects of landing and traveling. After that, we began speaking about conservation skills in English. He struggles most with tenses and finding the correct vocabulary word to facilitate flowing thoughts. Often he will say a sentence and motion for me to fish for a concluding word or phrase. This is helpful, to a degree, for him, but I feel also that it limits him from real comprehension in the language because he is all too often provided the missing piece. He told me how his sister learned English in under a year while studying abroad in London, and then described to me several of the cockney phrases she taught him on her return to Arnhem. He surprised me on his ability to mimic accents, both British and American, and I told him that it is a real strong point in linguistic ability to be able to resonate the tonality of speech. I encouraged him to join my tutoring group the following week, in which I planned to practice speech and listening skills. He agreed and I hope that he will follow through as most of his difficulty with English arises in word comprehension and usage errors, not in listening and understanding.

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.

Chris H. TP3

Due to scheduling difficulties surrounding the end of the semester, I was unable to meet again with Sammi, Abdul, and Alaa again for tutoring. In place of them, I met at the CIES lounge during finals week with several other TEFL-seeking students to provide tutoring. I met Habib and Nasser, both students from the Cote d’Ivoire, and both highly motivated to study areas of their upcoming TOEFL exam. Writing and listening were specific areas that they were interested in working on. Through the computer, we watched a documented segment on Marilyn Monroe’s life, which discussed her rise to fame and the various exploits that she was most famous for, including her song to President Kennedy. Through the video, my tutoring partner and I would pause the feed at various segments, typically after 30 seconds of running time, and ask the students how they comprehended the video’s content. Moreover, during the length of the biography, we encouraged the students to write down questions of their own, as well as unfamiliar vocabulary that they heard in its content. As tutors, we prepared a few questions and suspected difficult vocabulary and prepared short mini-quizzes at the end of each segment of video time. The procedure was overall a success; we were able to abstract a conversation on pop icons, the origin of meaning of words about starlet and stardom, fanatic, and leisure time. It was an interesting listening exercise, as the subject matter encouraged an intensive role from the students and their focus, although I feel that from the resulting conversations on words, their applications, and meanings, it was informative and a success.

Chris H. CO2

My second Classroom Observation was an Intermediate-High composition class. I focused on the management layout of the class, as when I came in they were preparing for a quiz. I sat down in the far corner and watched how the instructor, Andrea, conducted the examination from a teacher to student perspective. With the tables attached and the students sitting near to one another, it seemed that there was a fair risk of cheating involved. However, to overcome this, the instructor maintained an aloof position throughout the classroom, circling the tables and observing, handing out the tests, and being clear in her expectations for the students by writing them on the board. For the most part, the class was obedient and silent throughout the test, which allowed me a chance to ask her a few questions about the delivery of exams, the frequency that she preferred in providing them, and whether or not she felt that they were effective in motivating student participation. She told me that she typically preferred to have a quiz once a week, enough to encourage the students to be familiar with classroom environment but not overly intimidated to the feedback process. She also said that peer-review quizzes were a great idea every now and then to allow small group discussion feedback, instead of solely teacher-student. She then collected the papers and the students seemed again to be in good humor. Following this, the class began a lesson on the age of exploration, discussing when it began, and engaging the students with conversation on what they knew about the Hawaiian Islands.

Chris H. CO 3

My final class observation was a low intermediate listening class with Vicky Ledbetter. At the beginning of class, the instructor incorporated the pertinent vocabulary into a picture drawing activity, in which the vocabulary was communicated in an interpretative context that challenged both speaking and listening skills. The teacher spoke informally but with authority to the class, and seemed to foster a sense of camaraderie and acceptance among the students. The activity itself involved a picture of a living room, in which one student would describe what he or she saw in it to their partner, who was facing in the opposite direction and unable to see the picture’s contents. This was a good activity because it motivated students to use English practically, deducing images from the picture, connecting them to relative vocabulary definitions, and then describing them to their partner. For the partner who recreated the scene through listening, the main challenge was recognizing oratory commands and vocabulary and then drawing it onto a piece of paper. Remarkably, most of the papers were very close to the original photographs being dictated, revealing positive feedback to a multifaceted exercise. So far as improving upon this method, I see potential for group and classroom endeavors of a similar fashion, in which the game of charades is carried out with one (or several) students drawing on the white board to the specific directions of their peers. This exercise had many different applications and I thought that it all around was successful in motivating students to participate and engage use with the language through its structuring.

Chris H. CP 1

My conversation partner is Marcel van Veen. He is an exchange student from Arnhem, Holland and has only been in the United States for two months prior to my introduction to him. His English speaking abilities are limited, as he studied specifically French and German in his high school, yet in the short time he has been in Tallahassee he has picked up enough to have short, choppy sentences of exchange. His intention is to improve his English here until the end of the summer, while taking classes at TCC, in order to travel to Germany and have a better chance at being accepted into an accredited university in Berlin. I met him through a mutual friend in the German club of FSU who was hosting a tour of facilities on campus, and we ate lunch at Chilis and got to know each other. He remarked on the accent of our waitress, who had a slight southern drawl, which I used as a conduit to a conversation on dialects in this country and the many different ways that people speak English. We humorously practiced some expressions of the south, such as y’all and ain’t, dividing the words and showing their relation to proper English in a condensed form. Likewise, I verified what chicken fried steak was, and attempted to explain the importance of sweet tea as a cultural phenomenon to the southern region of the United States. He remarked that ice was a rare request in Holland to be put in drinks, but that he was coming to see the logic of it due to the already rising temperatures in Spring Tallahassee. After our short lunch, we planned to meet again the following weekend.

Chris H. TP 2

My second meeting with Sammi and Abdul was staged at the Starbucks on campus in the Strozier Library. We waited for Alaa for a few minutes but when Abdul received a text that he wouldn’t be able to make it, we decided to carry on. All three of us grabbed coffees and took the elevator to the third floor, at which point we strolled through the aisles and found books on English pronunciation and grammar. When we returned to the front desk to check the books out, I was informed that the CIES students had temporary FSU cards that may not have been activated yet. Slightly disappointed, my tutees and I headed across Landis Green instead, towards the Harold Goldstein Library. When we got there, the librarian pinpointed a wide collection of children’s books, with elementary concepts of English grammar. We began by skimming books, focusing on ambiguity tolerance and grasping key context clues. I used my watch to time the students, only allowing fifteen seconds per page of text. This method was effective as it motivated extensive reading skills from both Abdul and Sammi. Sammi struggled the most with deriving contextual meanings so, in the next book, I encouraged him to select one of slightly less text on the page. This allowed me to maintain the same time scheme for both students (not isolating one) and continue with the exercise’s format.

Marina CP-6

Yesterday I briefly met with Fatih for the last conversation partner meeting that I need for the certificate. He was assigned to me again for the summer term so I will continue meeting with him once a week as previously.

I haven't seen him in about two weeks so he told me that the week before he was studying for his TOEFL exam since it was his last chance. He said that since he did not have CIES that week he utilized every hour to get better and I was glad to hear that it worked out for him because he got a higher score than he was required to.

From that conversation, I realized how difficult it must be to start a new life at an adult age when you are struggling with the language. I started experiencing that more as this semester began. I'm taking a class in Spanish Cinema, which is entirely conducted in Spanish. Although I have a pretty wide knowledge and control of the language, it is still difficult for me to spontaneously participate in the class discussions. So after Fatih told me how happy he was that he passed the exam, I realized that it was a significant achievement in his life.