Elizabeth-tutoring-Week 3

A few weeks I met a girl named Jen Chu through penpalworld. We usually send e-mails to each other or we chat through web-cam. She is from Jiangxi province in China. She attends Harbin University at the provincial capital of Heilongjiang. She is learning English right now. Her writing skills are great, but her speaking abilities are somewhat lacking. She was really happy when I told her about TEFL and the different things we were learning in it. Jen was fascinated by the different learning methods that we covered and asked me if I could help her by using some of those techniques as well. We talked about intensive and extensive reading and she told me that her professor at the university told her that the most important was extensive reading. She asked whether her professor was correct or not. I told her that the great outcome of extensive reading is that by doing so, later on she would unconsciously start reading intensively. Right now she is reading a lot in class, and is having a better time learning too.

Last Thursday she asked me what it meant when people say, "It is so sick! I love it."? How can people be sick and like it. I told her that in America we have certain expressions which can mean the opposite of what the actual word means. I asked her whether she could gues what "sick" meant by the context. She told me that it seems like the person was saying that it was really good. I explained to her that sometimes if she does not understand something to try to guess by the context. We worked on a few more saying such as "Just hanging" or "Out of the blue". I told her to look out for expressions like those that we talk about and guess again what they are trying to say. Jen says that sometimes it is hard to understand because even though she is capable of reading English, these expressions come out and she doesn't have anyone who can explain why they are written a certain way or why it seems to be the opposite of what they are saying. It was really nice meeting her and so far tutoring went great because I can apply all the new techniques that we are leaning in TEFL. My tutoring times vary with Jen because of time differences but it is great. I am always making tutoring times with international students so it is great to have a feel at what different students need or want. Next time she wants to talk about