Last Wednesday I met with Saif for our fourth lesson. It was a nice day so we met outside by the green, which was a nice change from Saif's let's call it austere apartment. Before Saif's trip to the hospital (he'd cut up his hand punching some dude in the teeth in some sort of martial arts combat, I gathered) we'd planned to do a writing lesson, so I brought the same materials I'd used with Abdulrahman the week before. Saif however had a final in composition the next day, and we both agreed preparing for that would be more helpful.
One of his potential prompts was "What effect do you think watching TV has on people?," and we decided to work through this one together. I hoped that through some intensive guidance we would be able to produce a solid model for his exam. I began by assessing Saif's knowledge of the basic essay structure (intro, thesis, body, etc.). He seemed to have a pretty good grasp of these conceptually, but often had trouble implementing them. So I modeled a thesis and an introduction for him, and then had him reproduce an introduction of his own with guidance. We repeated this modeling-producing process for each successive section of his essay, each time scaling back the amount of support I provided. This approach seemed pretty effective, and by the third body paragraph, Saif was able to write on his own. Saif's organization and meaning were clear, but his writing is still littered with spelling and grammar errors, some major. I wasn't sure exactly how much correction would be helpful for his level, so I just made note of most of the errors in passing and only focused on the truly disruptive mistakes. I was surprised to find that this activity had taken almost our entire time. So, to conclude, we briefly reviewed the different components of the essay and Saif took our materials back home with him to study that night.
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