Devon TS #7

 Hang-ah Kim

7/15/21

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

The center of today's session was idioms. While teaching past sessions with Hang-ah, I had come across the issue that she does not understand many idioms or references. For example, she did not understand, "your guess is as good as mine", "off the hook", or "We will cross that bridge when we get to it". She told me one story in particular where she had heard coworkers say, "your guess is is good as mine", multiple times, but had come to think that that they were saying that they indeed knew the answer to her question, but where choosing to not answer. This was just one example of why it is important to learn the slangs and idioms of English, so as to not misunderstand down the road. 

I found a list of common idioms, as well as their meanings, and presented it as a worksheet for Hang-ah. We then went over the meanings of each one that she did not recognize, and them put them in a sample sentence. After reviewing the idioms, I gave her a passage with an over abundance of idioms, such as "cough up a lung", "break a leg", "cutting corners", etc. and left their spaces as blanks. Hang-ah and I read the passage together, and she then had to fill in the correct idioms to the proper situation. Some of the more straight forward idioms she could figure out through context, but she had to refer to the handout for some of the more obscure ones.