Ganem TP-11

On June 30^th, I had my final tutoring session with Tugba. We met in room 415 in the CIES building. She wanted to practice speaking exercises from her TOEFL book. The first exercise was an activity involving Tugba reading a prompt and explaining her opinions. The prompt was “if you had a month to absolutely do anything you want, what would you do? Explain your reasoning.”She answered she would go to Brazil. Her reasoning for wanting to do this: she wanted to travel there ever since she was a small child. She thought Brazil was an interesting country and she wants to experience Carnival in person.

There were sample answers in the back of the book and we looked over them to compare. The sample answer gave the activity of traveling. The reasoning was that it would allow the person to experience different cultures and learn more about the world. The answerer would get to be exposed to different languages and ways of life. These were similar to the answers that Tubgba gave.

We then looked over another exercise that involved listening, reading and speaking. This required her to use the audio CD that came with her book. I brought my laptop with so I put the CD in. There was a pre-reading part that gave a general description of what the passage was about. Then she would listen to the audio track. After listening to the audio track she would summarize and explain the main points of the recorded speech and reading. The first subject was about heart valve operations. The reading explained what the valve was in the heart; it acts as a gate to let the blood flow properly. The recording went into greater detail; a speaker talked about porcine and artificial heart valve replacements and what their advantages and disadvantages were. After reading and listening, Tugba summarized the ideas of the passage. She talked about how porcine heart valves were heart valves from pigs. Their advantage was that the human body does not reject and their disadvantage was that they didn’t last more than ten years and had to be replaced regularly. The artificial heart valves advantage was that it would last many decades but the disadvantage was that they were often rejected by the patients’ bodies.

We looked at another prompt for the same exercise. This one had her read a factual passage and then listen to a discussion between two people. She then had to summarize and explain the opinion ofone person. The reading talked about how a university was going through a budget cut and had to get rid of departments. The discussion was between two students about the budget cuts. One of the students explained why it was a good thing. Tugba had to say why the student believed the budget cuts were a good thing and point out examples of why he supported the budget cuts. She explained that he supported budget cuts because saved money for the school and that the speaker talked about how none of the professors were fired, their classes were still being offered, and they were just placed in bigger departments. One example was that the folklore department was gotten rid of but the professor was placed in the anthropology department and was able to continue his research and scholarship.

She struggled a little with the speaking exercises. She needed some help with vocabulary and conjugation of verbs. I had to correct her whenever she made a mistake with plural and singular nouns. Overall, Tugba has strong speaking abilities and is easy to understand. When the session ended, we said bye to each other and went our separate ways.