I met with Abdul in the downtown library. We expected Fawaz to arrive any minute. I asked Abdul "Do you know where Fawaz lives?" and "Do you live close to Fawaz?" He did not understand either spoken question. However, he understood them (somewhat) written. This is good information on Fawaz's relative strengths and weaknesses.
Abdul brought his Oxford Picture Dictionary and we worked on 'daily routines'. I first went over each picture in the page, and we worked out between us what is happening in them. After struggling through the vocabulary and describing orally what is happening in them, we started again from the beginning, this time using reading, listening, writing, and speaking. Further, we used both the simple present tense and the present progressive tenses for each action that was depicted.
On the second pass, we first orally worked through what was happening in the simple present, then Abdul wrote a complete and correct sentence in that tense with my guiding him in proper construction. Last, Abdul wrote a complete and correct sentence in the present progressive. He was already familiar with the grammatical construction.
His greatest difficulty was with spelling in general, and with spelling gerunds in particular. He was uncertain about when to double the consonant before adding '-ing'. I judged that an explanation of the rule was a little too involved and distracting for what we were trying to accomplish, so I just corrected his spelling as he wrote.
When Abdul made a mistake that I had corrected before, I informed him that there was a mistake and asked him to find it. That was a successful exercise, as I saw a little light go off in his eyes and his interest escalate. Again, knowing that he is motivated to correct himself is useful information for the future.
Your sessions are very structured and concise! I really like the way that you made Abdul correct his own mistakes after it was initially corrected instead of correcting it again.
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