On Thursday evening, April 3rd, I had my second conversation partner session with Ahmed. We have settled on going to a local Starbucks as our venue for conversing.
During this second session, Ahmed devoted much of his conversation efforts to his recent travels through America. In my assessment, this is an excellent opportunity for him to build his vocabulary. As a beginner ESL student, his stories inevitably hit word roadblocks, thus leaving him grasping for the right word to describe his adventure. I made sure to let him fully exhaust his efforts before helping him with the accurate word or phrase. Other conversation partners may disagree with my method of coaching assistance, but based on my observations, Ahmed remains confident in his speaking/story telling abilities despite his limitations and seems to grasp the fact that he is a beginner and stumbling blocks are part of his language learning journey.
Finally, there were times when Ahmed sought my assistance with homework projects, e.g. building an outline for a story to be written later. Although I was able to steer our conversation back to current events or simply back to our discussion at hand, I confess to helping with some aspects of the project. I will try to avoid more of this in the future.
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