Skip to main content

Ashley TS #6

My next tutoring session was with Turki where we met at his house again, due to the perks of working in a quiet setting. This time he offered me chocolate chip cookies and Arabic coffee, and of course I couldn't refuse. This was my first time drinking Arabic coffee and I found it to have an interesting taste. I personally think it tastes more like a tea, regardless it was delicious. We picked up from last time, reviewing some of his previous homework assignments talking again about prepositions of place and how to discern the multiple meanings of the same word. After reviewing quickly, he decided he wanted to instead work on writing techniques. His request for help was unique. He said, "I don't want to focus on grammar or vocabulary, I want to focus on organization and how to make my writing powerful." Once again Turki was aiming big and striving for more than the average student. In order to reach his goals, I suggested we start by focusing on the pre-wrting stage. I introduced some different organization techniques that I find useful to my writing and think he got some good use out of them. I also taught him a number of different planning methods, such as different types of diagrams and how to break down the essay into multiple different sections. We worked on the intro and conclusion paragraphs, and next time plan on focusing on the topic paragraphs.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ashley TS #8

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Danielle TS#11

On February 20th, I met with Bao Han at the CIES study rooms to work on writing and some grammar questions she had. I had her write about whatever she wanted to, using the past tense. After she wrote a paragraph or two, I graded it by telling her what was incorrect and allowing her to                   figure it out on her own. Her main mistakes were omitting key transition words or missing articles and making certain objects plural when they needed to be singular. She seemed to struggle most with past perfect continuous so I explained that further and we did examples from her book.
Post a Comment
Read more

Ashley TS #5

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 understa...
Post a Comment
Read more