On Monday afternoon, April 14th, I conducted my third tutoring session with Saoud. For a change of venue, Saoud and I conducted our session at the food court in Governor's Square Mall. The mall was not very crowded for a Monday, so it proved to be a good setting since there were little distractions.
To begin our session, I asked Saoud several questions to check his listening comprehension and speaking ability. Since we were in the mall, most of my questions centered around shopping. Saoud is a good listener, but struggles very much with even simple responses. It is apparent to me that he understands the intent of most questions, but finds that even simple responses are a challenge. In order to encourage a response from him, I shortened the questions and congratulated him for even the most minor responses.
After our warm-up question and answer drill, we moved on to grammar. It has been a while since our last session, so I reviewed pronouns and articles with him. For pronouns, these seemed to refresh quickly with him. However articles, both definite and indefinite, proved to be a challenge for him. Besides being sometimes unable to distinguish between both, Saoud finds it difficult when to employ them, since they are practically non-existent in Arabic language. At this juncture, I encouraged Saoud to "think in English" which is obviously difficult to do. But my bigger point to him was to not think about how language structure is arranged in Arabic and then trying to place this on top of English. Rather the effort should be to abandon Arabic structure and try to immerse yourself in the style of English structure. This often worked for me in the opposite manner when I was a student of a foreign language (Russian).
The grammar session was the final portion of our tutoring session together. This will likely be our last session together as Saoud flies to his home country on Thursday for a much need and well deserved 10-day break, before returning back to the USA to continue his ESL education.
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