TP #2-Mark G

Earlier this afternoon I picked up Nasser for our first tutoring session (we had already met before as conversation partners). I tried to get him to meet me at the library or something but he has a little bit of an issue getting around, and what more is that he is hesitant to walking as a means of transportation. Given he does live kinda of far from the library (I guess Chapel and Call is far?) and its hot as hell outside, I understand where he is coming from. I will have to figure out something to get him more mobile..

We went to Atomic Coffee, I thought it would be good to show him some places besides the library to study. As I did before I basically ordered his coffee for him because he seemed slightly timid. I think next time I should ask him to do it. Its harder most certainly because service people do speak quite fast, but ultimately its good practice is in a pretty controlled setting..

My main goal during our first session was to do some general diagnostics and begin working a little bit on his target areas of need. Beyond this I had no real structure in place. Since I had obviously already talked to Nasser before I knew that he was at maybe a intermediate/high beginner level. I looked over his CIES binder and the different sections pertaining to listening, composition etc. With a cursory glance I found one of his compositions. It consisted of basic sentences describing a persons morning in the simple past tense. It was for the most part grammatically correct but stylistically not very polished. I went over it with him and showed him some ways in which to make it sound less awkward, as well as how to connect sentences to make them flow more naturally. After that he told me that he wanted to focus on speaking and listening. He said its one of his biggest issues is understanding and communicating with other people orally, especially outside of CIES. 

I found another exercise that was like his composition, in that it showed the progression of someone's day and their usual routine. I asked him to tell me what each person was doing. He did this pretty well for the most part. It was basic; "he wakes up, he brushes his teeth" etc. I added another component to the exercise for a challenge and to add some vocabulary. I started asking him to name all the objects in the room. This part of the exercise proved to be a little more difficult, which is good because we got to go over some basic vocabulary of everyday objects! For example, in addition to "he is making lunch", he learned the nuance between oven and stove, the family of utensils etc. Before I knew it our time was up and we had been over 10 scenarios and he had added a lot of vocabulary to his running list in his notebook. When we meet next time, I think I will try to find more of these controlled exercises now and maybe have a topic for the day. What he needs most seems to be vocabulary. The basic structures are there, he just needs to build them up.