Danielle TS#16

On 10/14, I met with Maritza for our last tutoring session. We focused primarily on pronunciation and speaking practice in order to better prepare her for the TOEFL test.  She has definitely improved throughout our time together, and I think she will do amazing on TOEFL.  Even though her speaking and conversation skills are fantastic, she gets nervous easily and thus panics when doing timed speaking practice, although it is just me there and she is not actually being graded. I have been trying to get her to relax, and although she has, she is still a little panicky.  However, I am not sure if it is possible to over come that, as it is human nature to get nervous when we know we are being judged or tested.  She mainly struggled with certain vowel sounds (for example, not being able to phonetically separate luck, lock, and lack), but has certainly improved and she is becoming increasingly aware of her habits.  We also recorded her speaking as a voice memo and listened back to it together so she could correct her own errors, which she successfully did. She was able to easily pick out grammar and pronunciation mistakes on her own and tell me the correct way to say it.