My next tutoring session was with Manal. Manal is from Saudi Arabia and is very serious about CIES (a common trait I found amongst my tutees from Saudi Arabia). She has two daughters, a husband, and is working towards getting her PhD. Manal is very smart and does well with reading and speaking, her biggest issues lie in the realms of grammar and listening. I always find tutoring Manal to be a challenge, for she asks intelligent questions that always put my English grammar knowledge to the test. During this tutoring session we went over a couple of homework assignments that she had gotten back for a grade. She did well on the assignments over all; however, when there was a section of the homework she didn't understand, she got the entire section wrong. There were clear gaps in her grammar knowledge, which allowed me to specifically focus on certain topics versus going over grammar more broadly as a whole. One of the topics she struggled with was personal pronouns. She could understand them at face value, but didn't do well when it came to using them in sentences. We did a couple of practice examples together, where I emphasized the importance of using context clues when trying to figure out which pronoun to use. She said the lesson was helpful and we rescheduled another tutoring session for later that week.
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 ...
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