FSU TEFL Certificate Course_Spring 2025

Date/Time: Friday 5/23 @ 5:00-7:00pm (2 hours) Location: FSU College of Medicine Topic/Skill: Listening/speaking & Questions Dojun and I have had scheduling difficulties for our final two sessions, so I asked Wei Wang if she'd like to meet once more to help me meet my tutoring hours requirements- she said yes. After our previous lessons, she has been challenging herself to watch the news without using subtitles- only using them if she could not grasp the main ideas of what she was watching. For this lesson, we did a longer video listening and speaking activity focused on current events. I had some difficult vocab prepared in advance, plus some other words that I wanted to quiz her on after watching the video- their meanings could be determined using context clues. I also had some questions prepared about main ideas as well as some more specific, critical-thinking related topics.

Date/Time: Tuesday 5/6 @ 5:00pm Location: Dirac Library Topic/Skill: American culture and news For our final lesson, we had a lesson on American news sources. I covered the difference between opinionated and objective sources, as well as different forms of media like classic news outlets, podcasts, and blog pages. We talked about how to spot biases based on the language used in the headlines and throughout the articles. This was our final lesson. I told Wei Wang to keep in touch if she had any questions or needed any advice on different things. I really enjoyed teaching her; she had a high intermediate knowledge and I hope that our practice sessions increased her confidence in speaking and interacting with English speakers.

Date/Time: Thursday 5/1 @ 5:00pm Location: Dirac Library Topic/Skill: Listening and speaking This week, we both listened to a 30 minute podcast by The Daily from The New York Times. It covered the first 100 days of Trump's presidency and covered a lot of key political topics- things that Wei has been wanting to learn more about. We discussed complex topics like global trade, immigration, and international relations. I created a word bank for vocab to know prior to listening, as well as a fill-in-the-blank word bank for complicated vocab that could be deciphered via context clues. After the podcast, we answered comprehension questions about it. Next week, we will have a discussion about American culture and news.

 Date: 4/26/25 10:30-12:00pm Location: Tutee's home Notes: Similar to a previous lesson, we did a hands-on lesson while cooking brunch! Stephanie wanted to continue learning cooking and kitchen related vocabulary. Lessons learned: This style of lesson makes it hard to stay on track and might not be the most efficient for learning, as she was only able to write one new word down. Perhaps following up with another lesson or a brief activity that tests her knowledge of the new vocabulary learned during the cooking lesson will be useful in the future in aiding her retention levels of the information.

 4/29  In Tuesday's session, Karim and I continued working on some more advanced level reading comprehension and conversation. We have been reading lots of international affairs related news articles so Karim can prepare for his master's program with the International Affairs school. The past couple sessions have generally been conversation between Karim and I where I speak to him as I would my friends, so he is more exposed to more everyday speech. When we converse I jump in to correct him or give definitions to any unknown vocabulary.

Date/Time: Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025, 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. (two sessions) Location: Online on Zoom Topic/Skill: Active and Passive Voice Feedback provided to the tutee: For this session, Livio and I worked on the differences between the active and passive voices. This topic came up during our last lesson when we were learning about writing emails in American English, since Livio did not fully understand the difference between these two tones. The activity we did was modeled after an activity we did for a different lesson that he really enjoyed, where we used his social media page as a vehicle for the activity. I asked him to write sentences about the image on his Instagram in both the active and passive voice so he could learn the difference between the two in practice. Lesson(s) about tutoring: I continue to be reminded that the extent to which your tutee or student enjoys the lesson plan has a direct impact on how much or how quickly they learn the material. I always try to find wa...