And who said vocabulary wasn't important?

Today I had a new student, but another had decided not to take the course, so I had only 4. I think that this will probably be the final number since this is the second week, and this is the advanced class, which is quite demanding for many students. I don't mind the low number though, because each student can get a lot of practice, and I can deal with questions and problems more closely as opposed to a bigger class.

I was unable to start on time because I had to do some extra photocopying for the new student and then the new student had no book along with another student from last week who had forgotten it, so I had to photocopy that for them. However, my book has all the answers written in, so I couldn't. Unfortunately, I did not notice until later that I could have used someone's book which I evidently did. However, this meant I had to leave to photocopy twice, but I did not really have a choice.

We started the academic word list at 11 and I had them repeat after one another. I then went through asking them for part of speech and then for its derivation. I really appreciated that they had all prepared beforehand, which shows that they are making an effort. Once finished I gave them the homework, some fill in the blank exercises and the new list (I will not post these here because you can find them on the academic word list website that I talked about in a previous post). I also gave them 3 newspaper articles from the Nikkei Weekly; this is not mandatory, but a business English newspaper can help with the TOEIC which is itself a business oriented English test.

At 11:50 I gave them 10 minutes to finish 46 questions. For the TOEIC time is important, so they really need to get use to answering quickly. Perhaps 10 minutes was a little too short, but 15 to 20 seconds per question is ideal for this kind of test.

Finally, at 12 we started to correct the questions, but I ran out of time, so I asked them if they would like to answer the questions next week or continue a little later, and they chose to wait until next week. I then took their work, and next week after the next academic word list and homework corrections, we will continue with those unanswered questions.