Raymond Vickers TS Blog #13, #14, and #15

 Date: October 29th and November 5th. (Two sessions combined in this blog, last two meetings with Luis, both were 1.5 hours, so I made it a three-in-1 blog). 

Location: Zoom

Lesson: Listening, dicussing videos. 

October 29th: 

Today I met with Luis over zoom. We started the pre-listening activity with a pre-pre-listening activity by talking about the topics from last session. He remembered the topic of football and that gave me a pretty good idea that has comprehension was solid. Sure, there were some holes, but this check-in at the beginning of the session gave me a great idea of where he was at for listening. I think the biggest part of listening is teaching it over a long period of time. Similar to speaking, or anything I could tutor ESL students in, the overarching progress is better to check than progress during the session. Anyways, we continued this lesson by starting with a pre-listening schema activity. I was nervous about this lesson because I did not choose a specific topic, but I thought if I included a range of topics I could better advance his listening skills. I started by talking with Luis about the FBI, because the video we would be listening to would be surrounding an undercover FBI agent's story about going undercover in a biker gang. While listening to this video, I took a break every three minutes to have a discussion with Luis about what just happened. I still had some frustrations about teaching listening because I could not tell how much he was hearing. I could not measure his progress on a bar or on a graph. I just had to measure it from how we were communicating. And I think that went well. Everytime we paused the video we had a lengthy conversation about what we just witnessed. Sure I "quizzed" him a little bit by asking specific questions about the story, but it was still an organic conversation where I witnessed progressing comprehension in listening skills of an ESL learner. We finished October 29th by starting a video on explaining simplified aspects of life, such as WiFi or airplanes. 

November 5th: 

This was the last lesson with Luis. Although I started these sessions with some doubt on how well I could teach listening, I could tell that he was getting better with each session. We started this lesson by resuming the video from last time. After we finished the video, we talked about each of the aspects of the video. He liked the dreams part the best, and we both agreed that the airplane one was hard to understand even when it was simplified. We then watched a video which I was really proud of. It was a Ted Talk from the creator of Duolingo. This topic was perfect in my opinion because we both have duolingo, it was about linguistics/learning a new language, and the speaker had a hispanic accent (which made it easier for him to listen in English). We both talked about Duolingo, and I could tell he could understand this video the most. Also, being a Ted Talk, it was academic - so that was a plus. I had a great time tutoring Luis, and I hope his listening gets to where he wants it to be by the end of the year.