Celina_TP #7

This week I got to have another tutoring session with Abdulaziz. Abdulaziz's speaking skills are improving more each time we talk, and his grammar skills are really good, but he struggles with reading and writing. Because he wants to be able to study in an American university next year I told him he would need to work a lot more on his reading, listening, and writing because those are the most important for understanding lectures, taking notes, and writing academic papers. He really wants to improve which is a good fueler for him to work harder in his classes at CIES.
This week he brought with him an assignment for his speaking class. The assignment was to formulate five questions about a topic asking things about opinions and comparisons. He was supposed to create these questions and then find four FSU students and four CIES students to ask for responses. We decided that a good topic for him to write about would be the difference between high school life in the U.S. and university life. It took a little while for us to brainstorm some ideas about how to ask questions, but we came up with five questions that asked for comparisons between life in high school and in college, what advice one might give to a high school student, why someone chose to attend FSU/CIES at FSU, a story about when they first came to FSU, and what they think about attending university vs. getting a job. He came up with these questions all on his own! With just a few spelling tips and grammatical tips from me. When we finished writing out the questions, he proceeded to ask them to me and write down my responses. Afterwards we had to find three other FSU students that would be willing to answer them. Since we were together in the library I found a table of three girls that didn't look to busy. Abdulaziz was a bit shy at first to ask them, but after a few questions it was much easier for him to comprehend their answers and they even remarked that his questions were really good! I am quite proud of him!
After he finished the assignment that he will have to present in class this week, I had him work on writing out an introduction to an essay. We had worked on this over the weekend when we met up for coffee, so I wanted to test his skills and see if he remembered the way we had formatted it. He had definitely improved his Introduction writing skills, and with just a few minor errors I told him it looked awesome. Hopefully this breaks his fear of writing for his ILTS exams!