Katie- TP 8

I met with a new tutee for the first time yesterday and met up with her again today. Her name is JiYeon and she's a Korean woman currently on break from CIES, much like my other tutee, Jia. JiYeon is possibly my lowest level tutee, but she still communicates pretty well and often corrects herself while speaking without me needing to help her. When asked she told me she would most like to work on her listening and speaking, so when we meet we simply have conversations about various things in English. From our conversations I learned she is married and has two children, an 8-year-old daughter and a 2-year-old son. She majored in Chinese, so she forgot a lot of her English after she graduated high school in favor of concentrating on Chinese. JiYeon has lived in China, where she sent her daughter to a Canadian kindergarten, and has been in the US for about a year. Her daughter goes to an elementary school nearby where they live, so her English is much better than her Korean. JiYeon told me that sometimes her daughter gets tongue tied and pauses a lot when she tries to tell her mother things in great detail because her Korean vocabulary isn't high enough to tell her mother everything she wants to say. JiYeon want to be able to build good relations with her daughter's friends' parents, to make things easier for her daughter in school. I suggested she try to engage in simple conversation at first and eventually invite her daughter's friends over for play dates to express her good intentions. We also talked about the issue of Korean and Chinese parents putting a lot of pressure on their children to do well in school, especially English. She doesn't want to put so much pressure on her daughter, but when they return to Korea she is worried her daughter will feel isolated if she cannot do things as well as the other students because she wasn't pressure as much to learn things quickly and well. JiYeon also goes to the classes held at the public library to study English, but because she has a 2-year-old son she doesn't have much time at home to study English otherwise. She expressed the desire to try to read English books and watch English shows, but told me that she just doesn't have time. Due to her husband's company, JiYeon will move back to Korea for two years after June of next year, and then will move to China for a couple of years. I think it will be a little difficult for her children, but she seems to be coping with it well and plans to send her children to American or Canadian schools in China. We will meet again this weekend.