On Jan. 18th, my conversation partner, Sulaiman, and I met for the first time at the Paper Fox Café on Pensacola. Sulaiman is from Saudi Arabia, and while his English was not bad, there were a few times when we were not quite able to understand one another and had to take out Google Translate, and even then we would still get confused. We talked about pop culture, food, historical celebrities in our countries, such as the USA’s most famous presidents and Saudi Arabia’s most famous royal leaders, and hobbies. There was more than one moment where we were each talking about something while the other thought it was about something else, but we were able to understand one another in the end. So far, Sulaiman likes his classes and Tallahassee, and plans to be in town for a while. I am excited to see how he will grow and his English skills will improve!
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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