Today I tutored a student from South Korea. His name is Sungeun. His speaking skills were not very advanced and he had to look up a lot of words in his dictionary as we were speaking. He will be here at CIES for the next 4 sessions! His brother lives in Tallahassee and he has relatives in Tampa as well.
We worked on some of his homework. He had to outline a Description Essay, and Sungeun chose to describe a famous street in Seoul. He had picked out the topics he wanted to cover in his paragraphs already, so I helped him form a full thesis statement, topic sentences, and concluding statement.
He told me here is NOT here to take the TOEFL and is frustrated by all the writing he does at CIES since he does not see how it is applicable to his future. The reason he is here is because he is a bartender and he wants to improve his English skills so that when he returns to Korea and opens his own bar, he can appeal to a more international crowd. He wants to own a fancy nightclub and told me he can juggle liquor bottles.
Sungeun brought in a newspaper, but when we looked at a few of the articles, he got frustrated with the hard vocabulary. Next week I will bring in something easier for him to read.
I helped Aylin with her description essay too during the hour that I tutored her. She picked a very broad topic which was "What makes a good teacher." She came up with a few of ideas about what makes a good teacher. I on the other hand had to stop and think- what actually makes a good teacher?
ReplyDeleteTry to think of ways you can use his interests in bar tending to motivate him to read, write, speak, etc.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.scribd.com/doc/3323138/Bartender-Magazines-Annual-Worlds-Top-20-Bars