Working off our previous session about vocabulary, I decided to tutor Woo-joo in reading comprehension. To properly gauge it, I first asked him to interpret the text from a book he was reading for leisure. This activity proved to give him little difficulty. He could properly assess what had happened in the story and orally summarize it for me.
Changing it up, I asked Woo-joo to examine paragraphs from his science textbook. In anticipation of the session, I had read an article that ESL learners take longer to comprehend academic material. This proved true for him, as he struggled greatly to express even one fact from the passage.
Like learning vocabulary, Woo-joo depended on his ability to rote-memorize facts, with the hope that the test would assess at the low-level of recall. But I am a tutor with higher standards. On the fly, I would construct comprehension questions about the content. If he could not correctly answer them, then we would re-read the material. I also gave him the framework for taking notes, which should prove highly beneficial for his at-home studies.
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