David Sutton TP #9

On a very rainy Monday afternoon, April 7th, I conducted my third tutoring session with Esraa.  To start our lesson, we began with a warm-up drill which turned into an extended speaking, listening and pronunciation exercise.  This was not really a problem for us, just a little unexpected.

The warm-up drill consisted of a series of word pairings.  First, we went through each pair of words, paying careful attention to the slight variations in pronunciation.  After this, Esraa went through each pair in the list saying them once more out loud.  Finally, Esraa went to the white board and I would say a word from the list and she attempted to properly identify it and write it on the board.  She really took to this last part of the exercise and seemed to enjoy it very much.

After this exercise, we transitioned to a reading dialogue where I introduced Esraa to some common expressions and phrases used in typical social interaction between Americans.  Esraa appears to be a visual learner and does much better when the dialogue is written down in front of her, as opposed to only hearing it from my voice or a recording.  To work on this, I utilized several methods to improve her listening abilities.  For example, we read through some dialogues together with greater deliberation than normal.  After this, I removed the dialogue from in front of her and re-read them aloud and then asked her to either re-state what I said or write it down on paper.  We did this until the end of our lesson.

When conducting listening exercises, Esraa seems to become rattled or confused if she does not understand every single word during a verbal exchange.  I am trying to encourage her to embrace a certain level of ambiguity when listening and then analytically try to figure out the rest of the speech through context.  It's possible that I should back up and do more schema building with her before launching into any discussion.