Maria TS #2

Date/Time: September 9th, 3:00 pm

Location: Starbucks

Topic/Skill: Introduction & Needs Assessment

Feedback provided to tutee: He had brought a writing assignment from his class and wanted some help with certain sentences. The writing was very good and his points came across. We talked about how we could create more complex sentences since he tried that but had some issues with connecting clauses and phrases. We then talked about the use of relative pronouns since his sentences would connect better with those. Furthermore, there were a few basic conjugation mistakes that he perfectly well knew were wrong when I pointed them out. Because he immediately knew the mistake, I told him to pay more attention to this when writing. 


Lesson(s) about tutoring and/or the tutee you learned: 
He is from Saudi-Arabia. He wants to learn English as a personal goal. He was very expressive about how motivated he is to learning new things. He also wants to learn English for educational purposes but it is mostly the intrinsic motivation that drives him. When he's not in CIES classes he is trying to be as social and interactive as possible. He feel like media (Movies/TV) has helped him a lot in learning English since he did not feel like his previous school experience with English has helped him much in actually learning the language.

This was my very first tutoring lesson where I actually worked with the students writing/correcting grammar and form. I really got to experience the difficulty of being able to answer questions in the best possible way so that the student would understand the concept. I also found out how rewarding it felt to explain something and to have the student understand the concept after your explanation.

I also learnt how important it is to find a location with a quiet setting. In this session we sat outside close to the road and the traffic made it difficult to hear the students speech so I will definitely think more about the location next time.