Today was my first official meeting with Giancarlo. We met at Strozier, over by Starbucks, and reviewed some assignments from his classes. His mistakes and misunderstandings are pretty common for ESL students, especially those who might come from a Spanish speaking background. His vocabulary was sometimes a direct translation from Spanish that did not sound quite the same in English. He definitely had some moments where providing examples was the only way to help him understand and get a better picture. Overall, practice is all Giancarlo needs at this time and being able to work on his usage is the most important part. The more exposure he has, the better he will be able to apply what he knows to his work in class and his GRE practice. It sucks that Giancarlo has to learn all these things so fast for the GRE as his skills are taking time to build and that is a natural part of learning a language.
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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