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Ashley TS #9

For this session, I once again met up with Turki. Most of my tutoring hours went into helping him for he is such a determined student and wanted all the help that he could get. We met at the Argo Tea on campus and started with a chat about life. I actually asked him if he'd be willing to help me with a class project I have for my visual rhetoric class. I have to make a short documentary and want to focus on the differences between how lot of Americans depict Saudi Arabian culture and people to be versus what it really is and how they are really just people similar to me and you. I found becoming friends with students from the Middle East to be one of my favorite parts of the TEFL experience and look forward to creating this mini film with his and other CIES student's help. When it came to tutoring, he asked if we could focus on the speaking portion of the IELTS exam. Since he has stopped taking courses at CIES, he wants to focus heavily on this specific exam and all of its components. We went through the different portions of the speaking part of the exam and used practice examples that we found online. His biggest problems stemmed from properly organizing his thoughts under the pressure of time. When I gave him a long period of time to gather his thoughts and prepare his speech, he did great. However, when under the pressure of the ticking clock, he would panic. I once again taught him some organizational skills and plan on practicing this skill more with him next session.

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