Paige TS #1

Today I met with my tutee for the first time. Upon meeting up, when we introduced ourselves to one another, I noted that he was at a high speaking and listening level. As we sat down, my goal for this first session was to get to know him and his main concerns. So, I asked him a series of questions about himself and his academic level.  He told me that he was from Saudi Arabia and Arabic was his first language. He has one roommate at home and they do speak English with each other. Outside of school, he enjoys watching movies and playing video games. Academic wise, he is studying English as a requirement to go to University. He feels as if Tallahassee is small and boring, but hopes to go to law school  at FSU. Upon inquiring about what he wants to gain from tutoring, he said that he wants to mainly focus on his speaking. He then told me that speaking was his favorite subject when it came to English classes and Reading as his least favorite due to having to summarize afterwards. He told me that reading comprehension was his worst subject. This made me want to mainly focus on aiding this skill, but for the first few sessions I will keep it more student-led before introducing the possibility of working on it. Especially because he said his best way of interacting was talking to others.
So, after learning all this, I decided to focus the rest of the lesson on getting to know each other beyond the tutoring guideline I was given. We discussed an array of topics, like video games, favorite foods, future plans, and differences in culture. As he spoke, I noticed his main issue would be verb conjugations and using a lot of terminology in the simple past tense as well as not using complete sentences. For example, one thing he said was " I first come to Tallahassee 2 years." I did start to repeat myself to have him correct himself, because I do feel some anxiety about correcting him in a straightforward manner. However, he picked up on my hesitancy and assured me it was okay to correct him in that manner. So, I finished the rest of our session doing a mix of correcting and questioning to get him to clarify his sentences. For our future meeting, I want to work on having him complete certain tasks, like giving directions.