Stephen Tutoring 4

I met John at CIES this past Wednesday and helped him work through one of his writing assignments.  One of the first big challenges we had was getting past the idea of why sometimes people add "the" before some nouns but not others.  The example I made was: "I like to go to the school" vs. "I like to go to school".  For some reason John thought that the second way was how British people would say the sentence.  I had no clue what he was talking about and so then I started to realize that there were nouns that we never said without the "the" in front of it. The sentences: "I go to gym" and "I go to the gym" was the instance I came up with.  I think that confused John even more, and he kept insisting that one version was the British way to say it.  So then I figured out that Ryan had taught him the concept so we found him and asked him about it.  He said that he had heard John say "I go to University" and that this was typical of British English.  Then all of a sudden everything clicked into place, so the choice of whether to use "the" in front of a noun or not is apparently not universal.  I explained to John that depending on where you live you will have to learn what is accepted in that region.  Maybe somewhere else it's okay to say "I go to gym" instead of "I go to the gym".  The next thing I helped John with was Direct and Indirect objects.  I felt so good to have learned this concept when I was learning Spanish.  I gave him an example sentence of "Bob made a pizza for his sister".  Then I explained that the DO was what was receiving the action, and also that the IO was for whom the action was direction towards.  Following my explanation I let John mark the subject, action, DO, and IO of the sentence.  He did a really good job with it and so then I asked him how this grammar structure was different in Korean.  He showed me that in Korean the verb is at end of the sentence so it's really different when compared to English.  Just that little example made me think just how differently Koreans and English speakers think about things.  Next tutoring session I will have a formal lesson plan, and a microphone so that I can record my lesson for the class.  I get nervous just thinking about it ahhh! Ciao.