Stephanie TS #4

Today I met up with Ahmed again because he is taking the IELTS exam this Saturday and wanted to prepare as much as possible. He asked me last session to come to the next one pretending I was the test proctor and to give him the exam and a score. Before we met I flipped through IELTS material to get familiar with the testing style and decided we would start with a 30 minute listening section provided on the IELTS exam and spend the rest of the 30 minutes going through the entire thing together. Even at his high level of speaking and listening skills, I could tell he was struggling as he was taking it. After he was done I asked him how he felt about it and he said it was very hard. We started back up from question one together and I pointed out each question one by one and explained the things he got wrong and why. Each section became more and more difficult. While the first section was writing down concrete things like times or street names, the last one was very abstract and used extremely low-frequency words. We spent a lot of the time reviewing spelling of certain words like “human companionship, environment, abstract, and motivation.” I let him know that spelling these words even gives native English speakers a hard time. I hope this didn’t discourage him too much, but he seems determined to keep working. We planned to meet up tomorrow again to review the reading section.