TP # 3 Caitlin

Rachida and I met on Wednesday afternoon last week and it was a challenge for both of us. We had a hard time planning out our tutoring session because I was talking way too fast and using much more complex sentence structures than Rachida was comfortable with when we were trying to plan our study session. We could not talk on the phone at all until after we talked in person because Rachida couldn’t understand me. I picked her up and took her to Lake Ella to study. She's from Burkina Faso and I look forward to learning about her country and culture. Rachida likes ice cream more than coffee so we went to Big Easy to study and she was a little overwhelmed by all the sno-cone choices although honestly, I’m overwhelmed by the choices too. Haha!

We couldn’t prepare much beforehand because of communication barriers but I liked the idea that Mark had shared of reading out loud together. Rachida had some questions about continuous and simple past tense and she wanted to go over her homework. I wouldn’t help her do her homework but she read me her answers and all I really did was confirm her correct answers after she had read them to me. She did the homework assignment perfectly but wasn’t very confident in her answers until she read through them for me. I had brought some books and the FSU newspaper and Rachida picked a fashion article for us to read so that we could listen to each other and we decided to identify the continuous and simple past verbs in the article. The piece we picked was terribly difficult so we spent a lot of time talking about what was going on but it was good. Rachida practiced her speaking and listening skills and started to understand each other’s pronunciation.

At the end of the tutoring session, Rachida told me what she wants to work on next week (modal verbs) and I drove her home. We were able to talk a lot more on the way home and I think it was because of the reading/listening activity that we did for this first tutoring session. It was a great idea that I'm really glad someone shared in class. It's fun to read together but it’s also an informal assessment of each other and English fluency and I think the activity will make our communication easier in future tutoring sessions.