Jeff Dinert TP11

These are my last two blogs. I was fortunate enough to get to meet with Abdhulrahman during the break from CIES and get to tutor him. We worked these lat two meetings on writing, a choice he made for the tutoring sessions on what he wanted to work on. I took his CIES binder home with me and got a good look at where his writing was on a skill and proficiency, and found out that he is determined by CIES to be at a very basic level of writing, but that his difficulty in writing probably has more to do with vocabulary, and trying to learn new grammar as much as it has anything to do with his lack of understanding of the western essay writing format. So we decided to write a short essay together, and the topic was something simple like what his life has been like since coming to Tallahassee. I use the material he had already worked with in CIES to show him the format, and in addition to brainstorming, i showed him basically how to use the introduction, 3 body paragraph, conclusion format as a basis for an outline to fill in the basic information that would be elaborated on in the writing. We then began to write on the major points he wanted to talk about since coming to Tallahassee, like CIES, the places he has lived and the roommates he has lived with, and his friends. We worked on writing two to four sentences talking about why he came to Tallahassee, what his life has been like and what he would tell us about and why as an introduction. He did well at this as an exercise, but he struggles with, punctuation, and knowing when to end a though and begin a entire new thought. Apparently in Arabic the sentences tend to be run on in nature compared to English, but also very fluid and demonstrative, so what we were working with is getting Abdhul to focus on one idea, develop it, and move to the next, showing how each one leads to the next idea and is connected by the whole of the paper. This sounds complicated and in fact is easier to teach someone how to do than to comprehend it before the do it. The vocabulary he needs and the correction of the grammar for it, can be learned and corrected as he goes but to get a paragraph full of writing, and by giving him options to choose once he has his own ideas about what does he think is the right choice for a tense, or an article, or a conjunction, or what punctuation to use, and does it sound correct this way or the other way, helped him to get more exposure to the writing and all of its components then a simple essay write then i grade type assignment. Admittedly i get the good fortune of being able to spend a lot of time on this with him, but also he needs someone to show him how and what he is doing while he is doing it, and then give him his own choices to make in the writing to see if he understands which choice to make and why. Abduhl usually makes the right choice, or if you ask him what belongs there, is missing, or isn't needed he can usually figure it out on his own and then comes a short explanation from me, and we move on. We ended up finishing an introduction, and a first paragraph, with one main focus sentence and two examples with several details about each describing his homes and roommates. This was cool because he went from writing only three sentences per paragraph to having a dozen sentences with punctuation and proper tense in a paragraph, and model of his own writing to use for his assignment for the next day which was to write the second body paragraph. I t took a little longer than an hour and a half, but was worth the time for Abdul did nearly all the work, i just kept him within the parameters of the essay and the grammar as he wrote.