Matt TP #3

Last Monday I met with my tutee Saif for the first time – Abdulrahman didn't show. Saif too is from Kuwait and this is his third term studying English at CIES.

I had agreed to meet Saif at his apartment but when I got there he wasn't home. His roommate (I think?) led me into his furniture-less, cigarette-strewn living room where I waited for maybe 30 minutes for Saif to return. Anyway he came back, apologized, and I tried to put aside my irritation for our lesson. Actually things went pretty well. Saif is currently studying for the IELTS test and wants to study chemical engineering at FSU. He's a clever kid with good English skills, though he is weak in reading and writing. Because he had many of his IELTS materials with him, I figured we could just go over a passage from his workbook. We read over a passage about migratory birds, which was dense with scientific terminology and biological concepts. Fortunately Saif's background in science provided him a robust schema with which to tackle this piece – passages on history and culture prove more difficult. We went through line by line, with Saif reading aloud and me clarifying the more opaque parts. Saif found this guided reading activity very helpful, and it gave me a good sense of where he is strong (speed) and where he needs improvement (vocabulary). Though I intervened frequently in this lesson, in the future I plan to let Saif complete these passages with techniques such as context clues, scanning, and affixes. This scaffolded approach will eventually allow Saif to tackle these passages independently, in preparation for the IELTS.