For my next tutoring session with Woo-joo, we focused on vocabulary, in preparation for a test of his. As I stated before, he was quite fluent in speaking and listening, but that doesn't always translate (no pun intended) with academic content. While he could be articulate in a normal speaking setting, when I quizzed him on his school concepts, he strained mightily.
The main point of difficulty wasn't that Woo-joo couldn't comprehend the material, but that he struggled with expressing/describing the concept. Without this ability, he truly did not understand what he was learning. Rote-memorization is fine for lower-level comprehension, but it's inadequate when a student faces higher-level questions.
To aid him in his struggle, I invented a process in which he would learn English vocabulary. To begin, Woo-joo would read the term and then write down its definition in full. He would then write the vocab in a example sentence to provide context. Lastly, he would write two descriptive sentences of the word/phrase. To complete the process, he had to describe the term in full to me, the tutor. By doing this, I noticed a significant boost in his comprehension, compared to the beginning of the lesson.
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