Today I met with my tutee Somaia, who was from Saudi Arabia. She brought her cute little baby, who was relatively calm and did not disturb the meeting. We met at CIES and reviewed her practice essays for the IELTS test, which she plans to take soon. Her mistakes were pretty ones that are pretty common amongst ESL students, such as spelling, usage and grammar. We went through paragraph by paragraph and analyzed all the parts upon which she could improve. Something very common amongst all the tutees I have had is that most often, when they see their mistakes, they are able to recognize them and fix them right away. Articles are always hard as they can seem to have inconsistent patterns as to when we can and cannot use them. Spelling is also hard because there are only so many rules governing pronunciation in relationship to spelling, so it was hard explaining how words in English with different origins can have similar spellings with different pronunciations because the letters in the different languages are pronounced differently.
My third conversation partner meeting was with Josue, my conversation partner from Paris, France. He suggested that we go to a restaurant for this meeting, and recommended the Colombian restaurant on Tennessee St. called "Super Perros". I had never been to this restaurant before, so it was interesting to not only converse with someone from outside of my culture but also at a cultural restaurant with an atmosphere and menu different than what I am used to. Most of the menu was in Spanish, so we were able to bond over trying to figure out what the menu was saying, and ended up sharing a lot of laughs over it. During our meeting, we caught up on how he was doing at CIES, what he's involved in in Tallahasee, and discussed deeper topics such as the current political affairs going on in France. This led to a grander discussion about American politics, and it turned out we had similar views. It was interesting to connect our ideas across border lines, realizing we all want the ...
Comments
Post a Comment