On Tuesday afternoon, March 11, I conducted my second tutoring session with Esraa. At the outset of our session, Esraa explained to me that she is interested in improving her grammar, listening and writing skills in English in order to be accepted into a major university here in the USA.
We began our session with a warm-up exercise which consisted of reading simple sentences out loud, in a repeat-after-me fashion. Overall, Esraa has very good pronunciation for her level of English, but I discovered that words which often contain three, four or five syllables are challenging to her. In addition, locating the stressed syllable of a word for proper pronunciation can also be a challenge to her at times.
After this warm-up exercise, Esraa asked for a lesson on pronouns, their meaning and how to use them in sentences. In my experience, pronouns are best broken down and explained when conjugating a verb, however it does not end there. So we ventured into pronoun land for as far as I thought possible for this first session together.
Following the grammar portion, we finished up the lesson with some writing exercises. I read several sentences out loud and then Esraa wrote down each one. Since we just conducted a grammar exercise on pronouns, I used sentences containing as many pronouns as possible. This exercise gave him me excellent insight into her writing, spelling, and listening abilities.
Esraa is a motivated student who is eager to improve her English language ability. However one thing she used in class which I am not accustomed to was an electronic dictionary. I do not object to her using this device as long as it helps her and does not distract from the tutoring session. I do not think it does. Thoughts from my peers are welcome on this last point.
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