This tutoring session was with Manal. She had been feeling unmotivated last time we met, but seemed to be feeling more positive this time. She is in her second session of classes at CIES and said the composition class is harder this time than it was last time. She said she does okay when writing paragraphs, but has been having problems when it comes to writing essays overall. She showed me a homework assignment that had been graded and asked for help with revision. We walked through the composition assignment together line by line and I asked her what she thinks would be the correct revision before fixing it directly for her. She usually picked up on her mistakes pretty quickly, but sometimes I would have to just tell her the answer. I found this tutoring session to be challenging for me because a lot of her mistakes were not simple errors, they were rather "advanced level" errors that even native speakers mess up on. I found this to be good practice in explaining english grammar rules; however, I wish I could have given her better responses than I did.
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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