Stephanie TS #2

Today I tutored my second tutee, Ahmed, from Saudi Arabia. Before we met for tutoring we had met doing a fun activity in Andrew Wilson’s grammar class! I noticed from the beginning that he spoke English well and he could express what he’s trying to communicate with little issue. We had few problems while speaking, the majority being pronunciation issues. I first went through the tutoring guideline questions provided by Professor Kim and he answered almost every question with great clarity. It turns out he is here with his wife and son, and he laughed when he told me that his 4 year old son speaks better English than he does. I learned during this session that he plans on taking the ILETS test soon and wants me to focus on his spelling and vocabulary. When I read some of his assignments, he made common mistakes with countable and uncountable nouns, articles, and tense errors which can all be fixed with practice. He showed me a composition he’s working on about restaurants. I told him I read that “restaurant” is the most commonly misspelled word by native English speakers, so I assured him not to feel bad about getting the spelling wrong at first. I’m glad in our TEFL class we just went over how to assess ESL compositions because it helped me to feel confident while providing feedback for Ahmed. We plan on meeting next Monday to work on one of his reading assignments for class. I’m going to read Apollo 13 (what he picked to read for class) and create a short worksheet with new vocabulary words in the book to help him to acquire these new words.

Ahmed thanked me several times and hoped that this work wasn't taking to much of my time. I assured him that it was my pleasure, but he still insisted on thanking me. He said because I'm a guest he should have brought me coffee, which I found funny because we were in the CIES lounge with full pots of coffee everywhere. These kind gestures showed me a lot about his hospitable culture!