Ning TP #1

On Friday, I met my tutee, Ooki, in the CIES building. The plan of the day was to improve his writing. To get a better idea of how to help him, I asked to see his portfolio of works he's written since his arrival to CIES. I found out that just looking at a portfolio does not do justice in a quick evaluation of skills. What I mean by this is that looking at the portfolio does not include the time frame in which the work was finished. At first, it seemed that his writing (a simple five paragraph expository essay) was rather impressive for a second language speaker. However, he soon told me that the paper was done in multiple class sessions of 50 minutes. After understanding roughly what kind of level his English writing skills was at, I looked at his current paper (focusing on the last 3 paragraphs as those are the only ones that have not been corrected by a CIES professor).

His topic was about the similarities and differences between the cities Hiroshima and Kure. It seems that he had a general idea of how to write the essay. However, his transitions between each paragraph was lacking. Also, the way he phrased some terms also changed the entire meaning. For example, in one paragraph, he was discussing about the differences between the major industries of the two cities, where Hiroshima has an automobile-based industry and Kure has a shipbuilding industry. When he began talking about Hiroshima's automobile industry, he started with something similar to "In Hiroshima, there is a large car company, Mazda. There are many companies that are related to Mazda. These companies are parts supplier companies." As opposed to saying "Hiroshima has a very large automobile industry. Mazda, one of the largest car companies in Japan, and many smaller parts supplying companies are (located) in Hiroshima." Perhaps this argument that his sentences did not carry the correct meaning is invalid, but I thought that these two messages had different meanings to them.

Also, he seemed to have difficulty distinguishing his definite and indefinite articles. He seems to understand that "the" is used for specifying, and "a" and "an" are used for generalizing. However, the issue with articles arose at least twice per paragraph. For example, he introduced the warship Yamato in one paragraph. Then in another paragraph, he wanted to say that due to the geography around Kure, it was the most ideal place to build the Yamato.  Instead, he wrote "...it was the most ideal place to build a warship." I understand that this error arose from the lack of articles in the Japanese language.

After about an hour and a quarter had passed, I had to head out to meet my next tutees. We agreed to meet every Monday and Friday.