First Session

Today, I sat with BJ, a man from South Korea who is a visiting scholar here at FSU. We spent most of the session talking about his family, where he lives in Tallahassee, what he does at the university and other getting to know you questions. He is so friendly and so talkative although he struggles with his pronunciation and listening skills. When talking about goals he made clear that he needs practice communicating with others, especially those in his department.
The challenge with BJ for me is that his vocabulary and grammar knowledge is so advanced and as I said he is very friendly and willing to speak, but he frequently makes syntactical and pronunciation errors. He isn't used to speaking in English! We are going to spend a lot of time talking and listening to each other and we have an agreement to stop the other if I speak too fast (oy!) or if he makes mistakes. By listening to him I hope to notice a pattern of mistakes and address them in later sessions.


For our next meeting, I will prepare a small lesson on prepositions. He already has grammar knowledge but there needs to be reinforcement with this topic.
Another issue is dealing with the phonetic mistakes that he makes common with folks from Korea. They really do muddle his speech even when he is making accurate word choices.

I enjoyed meeting with him and my follow up time with Karen Gotti. I spoke with her about my frustrations and she gave good insight on how to prepare for my next sessions.

I'm out.