TS #13 Madison Elford

08/04/21

9:00am - 10:00am

Paperfox Coffee Cafe

We reviewed a lot of reading comprehension questions today as Hengwei prepares for an English exam. These questions were difficult, and I would argue needlessly confusing. As a native English speaker, I would have even been confused on some of the ones Hengwei got wrong in the practice questions. I even noted that some of the questions simply didn't make sense. Beyond that issue, I did my best to explain why he got some of the questions wrong. It was not easy. A lot of the questions had fill-in-the-blank that could only be answered through deep inference of the English sentence leading up to it. I had him do a few more practice questions so that we could work together to find the correct answer. In this, I showed him a few extra steps to take when trying to find the correct answer. We would read the sentence together, and then decipher what it could mean if we ignored the blanks altogether. Then by taking our possible meaning, we would compare it to the words from the word bank provided, and find the closest to our "possible" meaning. Then Hengwei would read the sentence again, and see if it still made sense based on the words we used to fill in the blank. If it did, those were the words we chose. This wasn't a full proof method because many of the questions felt flawed or even had grammar issues in the question, but most of the time this worked.