Mackenzee TS #3

For my second session with Yuma, we focused a lot on grammar and vocabulary so that I could further see where he was at in those areas and further assess his English skills. I knew he was pretty good with speaking English, even though he told me that’s what he wanted to focus on the most because that was the section he had the lowest score on the TOEFL test. He was good at speaking in general, but I thought he could increase his vocabulary a bit. We did one of my lesson plans I had prepared for class as it was made for a student on his level. The lesson consisted of a list of of words with negative prefixes. I asked him if he knew the meanings of all of the root words on the list and he knew about 80% of them. We went over the ones he didn’t know and I had him write them down on a list with definitions. One nice thing about him being an adult and genuinely wanting to learn was that he was honest about the things he was unsure of, and it was easy to help him. After we went over all of the definitions of the root words he previously didn’t know, I had him pull out words from the original list that had negative prefixes but a positive meaning. We went over the concept of a negative prefix plus a root word with a negative meaning, created a word with a positive meaning (for example, Unbiased).