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Jack TS #7


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.

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