My second tutoring session was with Mohammed, who was from Saudi Arabia. Mohammed simply wanted to review some vocabulary from his class. The parts he was struggling were understandable and common amongst language learners: pronunciation and understanding the subtle differences between words. Mohammed and I were able to come up with lots of example sentences, and I demonstrated a lot of words for him, sometimes pulling up pictures on my computer. Example sentences really helped Mohammed understand, especially when he was able to reproduce them himself. As for pronunciation, he would start by saying the word, and I would correct him if need be and talk about how the pronunciation can vary between regions. As we continued practicing, Mohammed was definitely understanding better and picking up on patterns. It was good to review the things he had learned in class and build off of that with new vocabulary and pronunciation practice.
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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