TP #11 Mark G

On Tuesday afternoon I met up with Gilles for a tutoring session. He had told me earlier that week that he wanted to get together to study for the TOEFL which he planned on taking in two weeks. He wanted to work specifically on listening and speaking because he felt those were his weakest points. We started by reading some tips for how to approach the listening section. We then went through some sample questions. He did relatively well with the exercises, although vocabulary sometimes posed a problem. Despite this Gilles was able to answer all the multiple choice questions pretty easily. We moved on to the speaking section which is really his issue. As with the listening section, we first went through the instructions and types of questions he would encounter. The speaking part of the test is broken up into three different types of questions and requires him to speak into a microphone (which I thought was a little weird). We went through some exercises that had him speak about something personal to him. These were one group of questions. One of the questions for example was, "if you had 10 million dollars, what would you do?". He had to respond using the same structures that related to the question. Gilles did fairly well, however he had some issues with word choice and preposition use. After helping him with identifying what exactly the question is asking, and how to answer it, I think he had a better grip and felt more prepared. I told him to go home and do a practice test and sample exercises (he hadn't really done any!)..When I meet with him next we will review the practice test, and any other last minute preparations before the test!