Stephanie TS #6

To go over new IELTS reading strategies and to explain each question one-by-one to Ahmed, we added another hour session to our meeting. Because the questions went in order of the passage paragraph by paragraph I advised him to use this to his advantage, and know that the following paragraph would pair up with the following question. Using this strategy, even if the passage didn’t have the same exact words used in the question, he could read the paragraph and understand it was talking about the topic of the question. I also encouraged him to determine if sentences were saying something positive or if they were saying something negative, so even if he couldn’t directly define a word, he could tell from the context if it was conveying a good or bad thing. For example, a sentence said “deleterious effects.” Even though he did not know what deleterious meant, from all the harmful things listed after, he could infer that it was generally a negative word in this context. I showed him my process for about half the questions and had him walk me through the other half to show me he knew how to assess these problems. We stopped frequently to define words that he couldn’t figure out in context. The passage stated that people who are most awake at night instead of the morning have a benign variation in their circadian rhythm. I taught him that if you have a tumor you want it to be a benign tumor instead of a malignant tumor. If it’s a benign tumor, then you’re ok and you might not even need to get it removed. But if it’s a malignant tumor, you might get really sick and it could be cancer. He immediately picked up on this example and was able to accurately answer the question asking if a ‘night person’ can still have a healthy circadian rhythm. Once we made it through all the questions, we agreed on meeting tomorrow to review the writing section of the exam.