Today I met with Giancarlo for one more essay review session before the GRE. His mistakes come from the fact that he is trying a little too hard to transfer vocabulary and usage from Spanish over to English: he pluralizes adjectives, uses direct translations and sometimes just writes the Spanish word. Another thing that is a little harder for him is article use, as those are also used differently in Spanish. Sometimes he will put ‘a/an’ or ‘the’ in a place where they are not needed, or leave one out where it would help make the sentence a little more specific. Also, demonstratives (this/that) versus articles (the vs. a/an) can sometimes be a bit troubling. That aside, his spelling is pretty great and he is usually pretty good at fixing his own mistakes. The only issue is that he is only going to have thirty minutes to write the essay, and that is a challenge for any level of English speaker. If he keeps practicing, though, he should do really well.
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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