Today I met with one of my tutees, Fatema. Fatema is from the United Arab Emirates and will be studying at the CIES for a year before she enters a PhD program for Food Science. We met up outside CIES and walked to Strozier (she hadn't been there yet). She told me about herself - she just finished a Master's program in Australia, so her English is fairly good.
We talked about what she needs help on. Fatema thinks she needs to work on grammar, and started asking me fairly complicated questions about which kinds of clauses were which. I suggested that she show me an example of the type of sentence that confuses her. She hadn't brought any of her writing, and so I was stumped on what to do. I grabbed a magazine off a shelf near us and asked her to point out sentences that she would like an explanation of. Her problem seems to be that she has a hard time knowing which phrases modify what. I tried to explain ways of knowing or guessing what modifies what. While this was better than nothing, we agreed that it would be better to wait until she had some of her own writing with her to go over grammar points. (And I think I may have to look over a few grammatical concepts myself in order to better explain things.)
We spent the rest of the time talking about how we could best spend our time in the future. She thinks grammar and reading comprehension are her weak points. I asked what aspects of reading comprehension were difficult for her. Surprisingly, she said that she has no trouble with inference questions, but has trouble with factual questions. We agreed that I would find and print out TEOFL passages for our next meeting, and she would bring in some of her writing for us to talk about.
We talked about what she needs help on. Fatema thinks she needs to work on grammar, and started asking me fairly complicated questions about which kinds of clauses were which. I suggested that she show me an example of the type of sentence that confuses her. She hadn't brought any of her writing, and so I was stumped on what to do. I grabbed a magazine off a shelf near us and asked her to point out sentences that she would like an explanation of. Her problem seems to be that she has a hard time knowing which phrases modify what. I tried to explain ways of knowing or guessing what modifies what. While this was better than nothing, we agreed that it would be better to wait until she had some of her own writing with her to go over grammar points. (And I think I may have to look over a few grammatical concepts myself in order to better explain things.)
We spent the rest of the time talking about how we could best spend our time in the future. She thinks grammar and reading comprehension are her weak points. I asked what aspects of reading comprehension were difficult for her. Surprisingly, she said that she has no trouble with inference questions, but has trouble with factual questions. We agreed that I would find and print out TEOFL passages for our next meeting, and she would bring in some of her writing for us to talk about.
The magazine was definitely better than nothing. Maybe have your partner email you what concepts she has problems with or a paper she has written. This way you can better prepare yourself.
ReplyDeleteYea, I may do that. She did a good job of describing what she needs help with, though, and I think I'll be able to help on the spot. Essentially she is very fluent in speech and writing, but because she doesn't understand the differences between types of clauses and modifiers, her word order is off. We'll see!
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