TS#6 - Sultan

I tried out my Reading Lesson on Sultan to see how effective it would be. I decided that I would have a theme for the lesson so that Sultan could at the very least be prepared for the topic we would be reading about that day. It worked moderately well, though some conditions were not ideal. I think I made the session a bit too difficult for his level of reading by asking him to read a whole NPR article on his own. He was already very tired from a previous tutoring session that same day and had trouble concentrating. Then I remembered what Professor Kim had said about word count when assigning intensive reading, and how advanced readers were generally assigned 1,700 words to read. The article that I had asked Sultan to read had about a thousand words, so I shortened it to about 400 words to make the reading less tedious.

In the end, the theme that I chose for the lesson was peppers. I began the session with a video by famed YouTuber Olan Rogers called “The Bad Apple”, which is a stop motion animation about a childhood memory that the author recounts about a family pepper eating contest. I did this to lower his Affective Filter and to wake him up a bit since he seemed distracted from all that he had done that day. Then I had him read an NPR article about a new type of heatless pepper called the Habanada. I practiced some TOEFL style questions with him afterwards that I made up after reading the article.