DJ TP#1

Today I met with one of my tutees, Fares(Fair-rez, not Faw-rez). He is from Kuwait and likes to cook. He wants to focus on his writing and spelling, and prepositions, as well as some grammar and American slang. I was so excited when he said he wanted to practice slang, because I think that shows a genuine interest in communicative learning.

The first thing I did was give him a small diagnostic test that I whipped up. It covered various topics: vocabulary, reading, dictation, error correction and writing. He did very well, only missing two vocab words(theory and recognize, two of the harder ones). He got about 90% of every section. One thing I noticed while he was dictating was that he has a good handle of how to spell things phonetically, which is kind of a double edged sword: sometimes this can help you write in English, but we also have a lot of exceptions to phonetic spelling.

I gave him an assignment for next time: write a 1 page essay explaining how to cook one of your favorite dishes. We then had a small conversation over the words dish and plate. For the essay, he must use 10 prepositions and 10 "weird" words(words that have silent letters). At first I told him to use every letter of the alphabet once, but this idea confused him and I couldn't accurately explain it so I scrapped that idea.

He speaks English very well, and told me that all of the Arab students will speak well, but have poor writing and grammar, whereas the Asian students will be the opposite. I think this is interesting considering most of my tutees are Arab and my conversation partner is Asian(seems he was right). We have decided to meet every Saturday at 4 at Strozier. If Abdullah(the student I am about to meet) agrees to the same thing, I will be able to complete my tutoring requirement, though I will need the 2 extra weeks. I also have a third student who will meet me tomorrow for tutoring, so I should be good on that part, though I am worried about my conversation partner(I only have one and they haven't been able to meet me yet).

Next time, I will go over Fares' essay and show him his errors. I will also try to prepare a preposition quiz of some sort, and will have a lesson on some basic American slang(although this may need to be a different lesson). Overall, this was really fun! Fares was a great guy, and it was cool to try to explain things to him and realize how implicit my understanding of some words is(for instance, I could not explain to him the idea of explicit vs implicit.) Now I am in the library and waiting to meet up with Abdullah. He is waiting for a taxi cab, so I hope he considers are short session worth the fare(I plan on just giving him the diagnostic, though if he brings work I will help him with it.)