On Tuesday, March 18, I had my first tutoring session with Nawaf and Mohammed. This was also my first session with group tutoring. These CIES students have been studying English at CIES for the past three months and have had a limited amount of English language training in their home country prior to coming to Florida State.
Before conducting any warm-up exercise with them, I asked them to tell me about themselves in order to gauge their level of English comprehension and language skills. Both students could speak in a clear but limited manner. It seemed to me they could understand more than they could speak which in my experience is a common early occurrence with people first learning/studying a foreign language.
For our warm-up, we ran through vowel pronunciation drills, both long and short vowels - pronouncing the vowels out loud and then applying the respective vowels to words which best demonstrate their pronunciation. The short vowels have consistently proved to be more difficult to pronounce than the long vowels for beginner students.
After warm-up, I first worked with both students on reading comprehension; reading passages aloud and then going through the sentences word by word when necessary. Nawaf expressed his desire to work more on adjectives, for instance how they are formed and where to apply them. We covered this grammar lesson briefly and will return to it in the next session. For Mohammed, pronouns proved to be a challenge for him, so we went through all pronouns in nominative form, first through third person, singular and plural. Again, this grammar exercise will be continued in the next lesson.
In summary, working with a group was easier than I expected. It also helps that the students work well together. For our next session, I plan to conduct spelling drills as well as more reading comprehension, in addition to the grammar exercises we touched on in this lesson.
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