Skip to main content

Ashley TS #12

This tutoring session was spent with Manal at CIES. We spent some time talking about how she spent her week off without having classes and how she was doing adjusting back to the busy school week. She seemed very tired and vented to me about her frustration of feeling like she was plateauing in her English. She said she wishes she had more opportunities to practice speaking with native speakers, for she said she thinks that's the only way she's ever going to improve. I told her about the Arabic Student Union on campus and hope that she will make more of an effort to go to their meetings and maybe get more of a chance to practice her English with them. We then worked on a composition homework assignment together until it was time for her to return to her classes again.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ashley CP #3

My third conversation partner meeting was with Josue, my conversation partner from Paris, France. He suggested that we go to a restaurant for this meeting, and recommended the Colombian restaurant on Tennessee St. called "Super Perros". I had never been to this restaurant before, so it was interesting to not only converse with someone from outside of my culture but also at a cultural restaurant with an atmosphere and menu different than what I am used to. Most of the menu was in Spanish, so we were able to bond over trying to figure out what the menu was saying, and ended up sharing a lot of laughs over it. During our meeting, we caught up on how he was doing at CIES, what he's involved in in Tallahasee, and discussed deeper topics such as the current political affairs going on in France. This led to a grander discussion about American politics, and it turned out we had similar views. It was interesting to connect our ideas across border lines, realizing we all want the ...

Angelena TS #14

On Monday, February 18 th , I met with Yahyia at CIES at 12:00.   He wanted to go over a reading passage that he needed to write a summary about.   He understood all of the main points of the passage, but just needed some help with certain vocabulary words.   Words included in the passage attuned, fraught, fixated, and obsessed.   I helped him figure out what the words could mean by using context clues from the sentence, which helped him.   Afterwards, I gave him synonyms for each word and would use the words in a sentence so that he could get an even better understanding.   Afterwards, I helped him write a short summary, but he seemed to have a good understanding of what to do for this and did not really need that much help.   When we were done, I told him to come up with at least two or three sentences for each vocabulary word so that he could get extra practice.  

Savannah TS #7

Today I worked with Anibal on his speaking skills. Anibal is a post-grad student who wishes to take the TOEFL in order to apply for graduate school in the US. I would categorize him in the advanced level in speaking and listening. He has been in the US for about a year but has studied English as a foreign language in his home country. For speaking practice, I found some sample TOEFL questions online and asked Anibal the questions in the TOEFL format: I asked the question, gave him 15 seconds to think about the question, then gave him 45 seconds to answer the question. I thought it would be productive for Anibal and I to both listen to his responses so he could try to find his errors. We played back his recording and we both wrote down grammar, pronunciation, and structural errors we found. Surprisingly enough, I had Anibal describe to me the errors he found first, and he had written down all of the errors I had. With the exception of a few, he had noticed all of his mistakes. This show...