Jennifer- TP 09- 9/29/10

Tonight I met with Biou and her friend Alan outside of Strozier to go over some speaking questions as practice for their upcoming TOFEL test. They took turns speaking and timing each other and we tried at least one of each category of questions: Description, Preference, Agree/Disagree, Why/Do you think. After each question, we would all listen to the playback of the speech and they would critique each other and then ask what I thought. I would repeat some of the phrases they said incorrectly back to them and they would immediately know what was wrong once they heard me say it aloud to them. There were also a couple of words that they had trouble pronouncing: internet, computer, important, support, and a few others. They did a really good job answering the questions completely and there were only a couple that they struggled understanding (for the Agree/Disagree I told them it would probably be better if they picked one side to argue instead of trying to argue both sides). Alan struggled with one particular phrase, “that can help make people’s lives more convenient.” It didn’t matter how many times Biou and I said it to him; he struggled with it each time. He was starting to get discouraged when I reminded him that he was doing a really good job and to be proud of himself. I told him if it was in Chinese I would probably struggle a lot more than he was…he then proceeded to translate the phrase into Chinese and had me attempt to say it over and over again. Yeah, they had a good laugh at my horrible pronunciation :)