TS#2 - Anka

Anka is a CIES student from Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar. He hopes to pass his TOEFL exam with flying colors so that he may study at FSU’s College of Law. Anka is very serious about his studies and even asked that I give him some homework at our next meeting. I started the session off by finding out what type of learner Anka is. I found that he is very similar to me when it comes to learning. He is a visual learner, and like me, learns a great deal of spelling from reading. I thought it might be interesting to take things a step further, since Anka mentioned that he generally read through texts speedily without giving too much thought to content. He seemed more worried about focusing on certain words and their spelling and definition than comprehension of the text. Because of this I decided to make a list of words that were related to Greek myths. I thought that if Anka could learn the story that gave a word it’s meaning (such as the myth of Hercules relating to the word herculean), then he would learn that both words and their context (as well as history) matter. Personally, stories—whether from Greek myths, or the stories attached to the etymology of a word—have always been a fun way for me to remember their meanings. I will ask him to start reading a novel next week so that he may practice his extensive reading. While reading the stories he understood the plot, but continued to stop throughout the text in order to write down and define foreign words, which interrupted the flow of his reading.