McKenzie TS #2

 McKenzie Heeter

Tutoring Session #2

July 8, 2025- 12-1pm

Advanced student

Grammar/Speaking focused session


    Today was my second session with my tutee Mariana. Last meeting I did a needs assessment and got to know her, and her goals for speaking English. She is an advanced student and wants to use English for scholarly, professional, and casual purposes. She expressed interest in wanting to work more on grammar and speaking the most. 

    To start the session we talked about our weekends and practiced some conversational English that will be super common to encounter. For the first activity I asked her to think of someone, anyone, she would like to interview. I then gave her a list of words: Decide, Hate, Love, Offer, Prefer, Move, Win, Continue, Buy, Wait, Consider, Change. I checked with her to make sure she knew and understood every word before continuing the exercise. Then I asked her to pick 5 of the verbs and write down 5 full sentences/questions that she would ask the person she thought of. After this I had her read her questions aloud and we went through them one by one correcting her mistakes and explaining what would be right and why. She mainly had problems with infinitives and verb tenses. After we went over them, I asked her to think of another person and to use 5 more verbs she hadn't used the first time. We went over each of these sentences and I corrected errors/explained as we went.

    Next I had her do an online grammar activity regarding verb tenses, where she is presented with a sentence and multiple choice answer options. She did this by herself but I watched and whenever she got a question wrong we'd talk about it and I'd guide her to the right answer and explain why hers was wrong. Then I had her do another online exercise regarding relative pronouns where she was given a word bank and had to fill in the blanks with those words. She only got one wrong and we discussed it. Lastly I had her do an exercise with mixed conditional sentences where she has to come up with the words by herself to fill in the blanks. She had the most trouble with this one and we spent a lot of time discussing these. 

    I learned a lot this session about teaching and her. I have a few things noted I need to research better so I can better explain them and also learned what she struggles with. With that said I was surprised on how well I was able to explain some things and she did really good on everything anyways.

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