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 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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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.  
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more