Stephanie TS #12

Tuesday 2:00-3:00 PM at CIES (Ahmed doesn’t have listening class)

During this session with Ahmed I acted as the proctor for the IELTS speaking session and asked Ahmed sample questions.The questions started off with fairly simple speaking topics like what town/village is he from? What is it like? What are jobs there like? Etc. He did well with these questions and only made some minor mistakes with some article and verb agreement errors. The next section asked him to talk about something he owns which is very important to him. There were more in depth questions like “where did you get it from?” “how long have you had it?” “what do you use it for?” and “why is it important to you?” He did well with this but struggled with the more abstract follow-up questions like “is it valuable in terms of money?” I’m not sure what confused him here, whether it was the “valuable” or the “in terms of” because after I explained both he still didn’t understand what it was asking. It took us a while for him to get the question and required a lot of clarification and I’m afraid they can’t provide that for him on the actual IELTS exam. We had the same issue with the last section, where the questions become even more abstract. Ahmed seemed to know every word in the sentence but didn’t understand what the sentence was asking, so I spent some time going over all the way the vocabulary words could be used. After he was done answering, we went played his recorded responses back and I corrected his grammatical mistakes and wrote them down so he could see the trends.