On Thursday afternoon, April 3rd, I had my first tutoring session with Mohammed. Since this was my first tutoring session with Mohammed, I began with simple conversation to gauge his level of English comprehension and skill. After our introductory discussion, it turns out that Mohammed is stronger at listening and reading comprehension than speaking and writing. This tells me that his receptive skills are stronger than his productive ones.
As a consequence, I decided to first work with Mohammed's speaking skills by having him participate in several dialogue exchanges. I prepared the dialogues ahead of time and we took turns reading each role player's part in the exchanges. Through this exercise I was able to identify what words and letter combinations were difficult for Mohammed to understand and pronounce. In the prepared dialogues I attempted to inject several well known American expressions in order to help build his knowledge of colloquial phrases. For example, I introduced him to: raining cats and dogs, grab a bite to eat and lend me a hand. Mohammed was able to grasp most of these meanings from the context of the dialogue which is a good sign of his ability to analyze an overall passage.
Overall, I really enjoyed this tutoring session with Mohammed. He is an extremely motivated learner and I as the tutor, fair much better as an instructor when I come to a session prepared, thus enabling me to better direct my efforts to a student's needs.
No comments:
Post a Comment