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.
My next tutoring session was with Turki. We met at the Starbucks on Tennessee Street, the usual spot, and started the session with a causal conversation about life and his short term English goals. Turki decided he didn't want to continue with the second session of CIES classes, and that he wanted to rather focus solely on passing the IELTS exam. He said he found the CIES classes to be helpful, but also distracting. He said he thinks he's gotten the most out of his classes and that it would be more productive for him to study on his own. Where I don't completely agree with his logic, it is his life and I trust his decision making. For this session he brought his own material that he wanted to focus on. This time it was a reading passage that I even found to be quite difficult, and I was once again impressed by his far reach in practice and ability. The reading passage was accompanied by a set of numerous comprehension questions that we reviewed and answered together. The qu...
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