Karen Hand TS #1

Karen Hand TS #1 (Adult Tutee)

Date/Time: 10/20/15, 1:15 – 2:15

Location: LeRoy Collins Public Library

Topic Discussed: Getting to Know Each Other, Diagnostic of Grammar Issues to Work On

Feedback provided to tutee: I am tutoring a 43-year old adult from Pakistan, who has lived in the U.S. for 15-20 years. She has 4 children – a daughter in 12th grade, boys in 11th and 9th grade, and a girl in 4th grade. Most of her friends are Pakistani, so they speak Urdu with each other. She speaks English with her children. She works at the FSU Testing Center part-time, but is applying for full-time jobs. Her goal is to improve her English fluency. I notice that when she doesn’t think too hard before speaking, she can communicate quite well. She makes some grammatical errors (such as with verb tenses), but she can be easily understood. However, if she starts worrying about her errors and thinks too hard before speaking, then she speaks very tentatively and quietly and does say as much. For this reason, I tried not to interrupt her when she is speaking. If I have corrections to make to her English, I wait until a break in the conversation, and then bring up one or two corrections to what she has said.