Monday I met with Hamad for our third session. Before we started, Hamad and I got some coffee and he told me that he was very happy today because he had taken an IELTS practice test and had gotten a score that was above the score he needed to pass. I congratulated him on his success, but as he pointed out, there can be a big difference between practice and the real thing. Furthermore, the practice exam couldn't test speaking or writing skills, both of which are critical on the real thing. Regardless it was good to see that Hamad was prepared and confident, and I asked him to bring the test materials for us to review next time.
I gave Hamad the option of either going over a passage from his IELTS prep book or reviewing one of the short stories I had assigned him. Hamad said he had not yet finished any of the fiction so we decided to just do some problems from his workbook. We chose a passage about the effects of air pollution on the environment, so as a schema-building activity Hamad and I discussed environmentalism and our thoughts on global warming. We found that we shared a lot of common ground on this topic, and despite having to explain specific concepts like greenhouse gases, Hamad was pretty well versed on the subject. Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised, but even in a petrostate like Kuwait, where nearly half of all GDP comes from oil revenue, climate change and alternative energy are important issues - especially among younger generations.
Before letting Hamad attack the passage himself, I modeled how might approach the same article if I was being tested. I employed some basic strategies like highlighting and predicting that would help Hamad parse the text more efficiently. Hamad I think already practices some of these strategies intuitively, but I felt that explicitly outlining them would help him in the long run. Hamad then ran through the article, underlining important points and predicting questions he thought might appear. When we got to the reading comp stuff, not only did he correctly predict 3, but he only missed one on the entire section.
Because we still had plenty of time left, Hamad and I applied the same approach to a second article, this one about productivity in the workplace. He had a little less success here, but he still did well and was able to use multiple strategies to quickly dissect the passage.
Though effective, this IELTS prep can be kind of dry. Next time I am hoping to cover one of the short stories I lent to Hamad
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