Danielle TS#10

On 9/29, I met with Maritza for our next tutoring session. We were going to work on TOEFL prep materials, but instead she wanted me to help her with the conditional and subjunctive tenses because she missed that grammar lesson. We spent the entire session on this subject, and she did a great job overall and seemed to grasp the concept fairly quickly. I coached her through the activities in her workbook, but she did struggle a little bit with writing sentences. It took her a while before she was able to easily produce grammatically correct sentences. Something I noticed was that she would try to use verbs interchangably when really they couldn't be. For example, she would try to use vital or critical instead of recommend or suggest, and I had to take some time to explain to her that verbs like vital and critical are used when something is mandatory or more important while verbs like suggest or recommenda are more lighthearted and are used in situations where it is not essential that a certain action take place. She understood the difference, but had a bit of trouble applying the concept at the beginning. Maritza is a fast learner and she will be/already is very successful in her English studies overall.