Melina TS #4 = Piero Session 2

 Melina TS Blog Post #4 = Piero Session 2

Date/Time: Monday, January 26th, 2026

Location: FSU Campus

Topic/Skill: Rapid-fire speaking activity (Pronunciation, Fluency Focus, with mild Grammar correction)

Feedback provided to the tutee: Much of the lesson revolved around a question and answer activity, focused on speed and fluency when speaking, as it is easy for ESL students to get stuck when worrying about messing up a sentence. During the answering portion, I took notes, and afterward provided pronunciation feedback as well as minimal grammatical corrections (specifically when I noticed a consistent or glaring problem).

Lesson(s) about tutoring and/or the tutee you learned: This lesson taught me how important it is to be comfortable telling tutees when you aren't sure of an answer, as well as admitting when there are difficult areas in language learning/teaching. For example, last lesson, I attempted to explain to Piero the difference between the prepositions "in" and "on", but I admitted I didn't know the rules off of the top of my head. During today's lesson, I included a segment reviewing these words, in addition to the preposition "at", giving him the general rules I found for using each of them. However, during this part of instruction, we came across many exceptions to the rules I had sourced, and I had to be comfortable admitting that the rules didn't cover every single scenario. Indeed, as we have discussed in class, this is true of many grammar "rules"; it seems that learning to be a ESL teacher also means learning to be honest and open about these things, and the strangeness of the English language. 

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