Stephanie TS #5

Today I met up with Ahmed to review the IELTS reading section. We used the beginning part of our session to take a timed test of part of the reading section. He left many answers blank and the ones he did answer he got all wrong. This surprised me a lot because when we speak he understands absolutely everything I say and responds extremely easily and well. This lead me to believe that he is having difficulties with the format of the test and some reading comprehension skills. The passage reminded me a lot of an SAT passage I had in high school. These passages are extremely cumbersome loaded with a lot of low-frequency and scientific words. I could see how this intimidated him. When I asked him his strategies, he said he looked in the passage for specific phrases used in the questions, and we found out that this is the main source of his problems. For example, one question asked about sea creature behavior, but in the passage, it never directly says “sea.” Instead it says “marine,” or “tidal,” which are words relating to the sea, so he would skip over this part entirely, causing problems. Additionally, there was one part about what scientists recommend to “lose weight” in the question; however, in the passage, it never directly says “lose weight,” it says “shed some pounds.” We then went over these synonymous  phrasings that were giving him problems and I encouraged him to consider the meaning of an entire section instead of just matching up the words as we went through it together.