Stephanie TS #1

Today I had my first tutoring session with Abdulhadi. When we were texting to set up a time and location for tutoring he seemed like he was at an intermediate level, but when we met in person, I was surprised to find out that his speaking and listening skills were at a elementary level. He could answer some very simple questions like “do you speak Arabic?” “what country are you from?”, but when I got to the more academic questions like “what do you enjoy about learning English?” we had a lot of communication issues. We had to rely heavily on google translate to get through the questions. I thought he was in all English classes, but it turns out that he is in all Arabic classes throughout the week and only on Friday learns English. Abdulhadi did however have a great basis of grammar and writing simple sentences in English. Because speaking gave us the most trouble, I assessed his knowledge of grammar by writing down “nouns:” and wrote examples like “book, table, chair” and I then I gave him the pen to list more nouns. I then did this with verbs. I wrote “Verbs: walk, run, dance” and gave him the pen and he wrote “cook, talk, play.” I went on to do this with pronouns, and articles as well, and he caught on very easily. I then showed him examples of sentences using simple present and simple past tense and had him write his own using the verbs, nouns, pronouns etc that we came up with. Because he had the most trouble with speaking and listening, I think next session we will role play real life English speaking situations. I plan on giving him a vocabulary sheet of questions and words you would use in a restaurant and then help guide him to order food, ask about prices, ask for the check and other useful things.