My third tutoring session was with Sing-Hyun Kwon from South Korea. He is 31 years old and is a level 3 student. We talked about the fact his writing and composition tends to get graded at a higher mark than his speaking skills. I quickly surmised this was going to be a lot like my other tutoring sessions with adult students, mostly they want conversation skills. I prefaced with the idea that while we were in tutoring session, that I would want him to work through the sentence and express complete thoughts rather than pause and think of the wording he was looking for. My reasoning for that was that it gives me something to correct and change to the right form, thus benefiting the student by allowing them to hear the thought correctly. I noticed a slight aversion to making mistakes in this session, as if the student would rather not be "wrong" than make an effort to say a wording the aren't completely sure of. This is understandable, of course. The only issue was it keeps them from learning to speak fluidly rather than the stop and think pauses I was getting. We still were able to carry on a very interesting conversation about his life experience, such as being in the army, his mother was in the 1980 winter olympics, and he plays ice hockey. For our next session I will draft a quick vocabulary list for Mr. Kwon, and use a more topic driven conversation.
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