Isabelle TS#12 with Livio

Date/Time: Tuesday, February 25th, 2025, 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m.

Location: Online on Zoom

Topic/Skill: Speaking with Grammar (Past and Present Tenses)

Feedback provided to the tutee: For this lesson, Livio and I continued to work with grammar tenses but this time, we focused more on speaking with grammar instead of grammar on its own. Although I had originally planned to complete all three grammar tenses in this lesson, we only got about halfway through the activity, so the remainder of the lesson will take up our next session. My go-to feedback strategy with Livio is asking him why he thinks certain answers are correct even though they are incorrect. He responds really well to this and most of the time can find his mistake on his own. However, when he needs a little extra support, we will look at the grammar tenses chart together that I made and try and find the answer he needs there. This way, I am allowing Livio to fix his own mistakes rather than fixing them for him!

Lesson(s) about tutoring: From this lesson among our past few sessions, I continue to be reminded of how difficult English grammar can be. Livio said he struggles particularly with understanding when to use certain tenses, and it wasn't until we started learning more about the grammar tenses that I was able to see what he was talking about. As a native speaker, the English grammar tenses can sometimes be used interchangeably, and that can be really difficult when learning the language. I learned that it's important to offer extra motivation and support in these times of confusion to keep my tutee engaged and excited about learning English!

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