My first day of tutoring was actually more like a conversation session. I met with my tutee, Jongouk at the CIES lounge. Most people cannot pronounce his name correctly (including me), so he changed his name to John. John came to the U.S. on February 2011. He is studying Electrical engineering at Seoul, but he wants to take a little break from that and study English in the U.S. He likes playing video games and watching movies. I asked him if he likes to play sports, but he told me he rather watch them on TV.
After talking for a little while, we decided to move to a quieter place to discuss our future tutoring sessions. John told me that his hardest class is composition. I started by asking him the basic questions like do you know how an English essay is structured and so on. He told me he knew how it was structured, but he had problems on connecting paragraphs. I read his essay and noticed that his conclusion was very different from his topic. Immediately, I remembered the video we were watching in class. Different cultures have different writing patterns, so Koreans are expected to write differently than Americans. I corrected his essay, but it was almost time for me to go to class so I gave him feedback on his essay and decided to leave the rest for next week.
Try to not correct, as much as help identify errors. You can then assist if he cannot figure out the answer.
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