Brittany CP 5

For my fifth CP meeting I saw Gyusang and persuaded him to meet with me outside rather than the student lounge, which gets pretty noisy during teatime. He speaks English pretty well most of the time, but with some of the pronunciation issues, I wanted the quiet to avoid asking him to repeat himself over and over, since that seems discouraging. This Tuesday was just days after Gyusang had taken the TOEFL exam, and, unfortunately, he didn’t feel too great about it. I asked him what had given him problems, and he explained that each section has presented its own challenge: with reading, he ran out of time in the end, but found it fairly easy; in writing, he explained the topic wasn’t difficult and he thinks his essay was ok. We discussed the topic (“Should you judge a person based on who they’re friends with?”) and the points he wrote about make me think his essay was on track, but the sections he really struggled with were speaking and listening. For those of you aren’t familiar with the exam, the speaking and listening sections both involve listening to a variety of recordings, some conversational, some academic discussions and lectures, and students have to respond and/or answer questions to show comprehension. I’ve gone through some practice sections with my tutee, and these sections are pretty difficult for ESL learners mainly because they can only hear each recording once, and the terms, especially in the academic ones, are not very common. Overall it’s test anxiety and pressure to do well that all of us have faced, so I tried to reassure him, based on what I’ve seen, that he has no reason to worry that he did poorly, and the best thing is you can take it again! I even got him to laugh when I said I took the SAT 3 times!

Gyusang and I spent the rest of our time talking about trips we’ve taken after he mentioned going to Orlando and New York recently. I told him I’m going to California to visit a friend this summer, and he told me about his time there, especially in Koreatown, which he said was great since he got to eat authentic foods you can’t get in Tallahassee.