Jade TS #4 - Paola

Date/Time: Wednesday, January 29th 6:30pm-8:00pm

Location: Tutee's home

Topic/Skill: Conversation practice, talked about what she did yesterday using the past perfect (Ex: By 9am, I had already eaten breakfast), went over her grammar-in-use homework for the past perfect form that I assigned her last week, pronunciation practice, when to use gerund vs. infinitive, when to use "to" vs. "for"

Feedback provided to the tutee: I repeated the corrected version of the phrases Paola had mistaken and had her repeat them back to me before continuing the conversation. I also wrote down the words she struggled to pronounce so she could see them visually, and then we went over them again.

Lessons learned: Paola has a formal knowledge of English grammar, so she frequently asked me about specific verb tenses and parts of speech. Some of her questions I found really hard to answer, as there was no fast or hard rule for some of them. For example, explaining to her when to use the gerund vs. the infinitive form was quite difficult as I couldn't quite understand the nuance myself, so we did a practice worksheet together to get her used to the difference between the two. I wanted her to intuitively remember which form sounded correct in the sentence rather then thinking really hard to apply the grammar rule to each sentence.


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