Matt TP #16

Today I had my fourth and final meeting with Hamad. He seemed a little tired today, and I personally was totally wiped from finals. While we waited for the caffiene to kick in, we talked about finals and a movie I had seen recently, which got us talking about movies generally. Hamad had mentioned before how much he enjoys movies, and how he learns much of his conversational English from watching them. I wished I'd brought a passage on film for us to read together, but unfortunately all we had was the IELTS test prep book. Hamad still hadn't done any of the reading I'd asked him to, and neither of us really wanting to crack into the IELTS, we deliberated over what we should do for our lesson

Eventually I proposed that we follow the cinema theme and try to find an interesting film-related article online. We went to the computers and found a piece on the making of Inception, one of his favorite movies. (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/anatomy-contender-making-inception-47634) I took the computer next to him so that I could read ahead and come up with some questions. The article was short and fairly uncomplicated, but it was taking Hamad some time. I think this was because the article had an informal tone and a lot of colloquial language he wasn't really used to reading. Hamad had to stop and ask for a lot of definitions, but he seemed more interested than he had been in previous lessons and furthermore understood the gist of the article.

Once he was finished, I checked his comprehension with a couple of questions and had him write a short one paragraph response to the question, "Why do you think Inception was such a difficult film to make?" His writing was solid, especially the content of it, but he had a lot of grammatical errors and in particular struggled with prepositions. I corrected some of them, but we were running out of time, so I told him to review and practice his prepositions before writing for the IELTS. Unfortunately this was our last session, so I won't be able to address it any further, but I did feel that in our short time together we made some progress with Hamad's reading abilities. At the very least, he has a better sense of his strengths and weaknesses, and how to focus his efforts in preparation for the IELTS. I wish him the best of luck.