Suzanne-TP 5

Over the two days following our previous session, I had to put in some serious brain energy into what to help Mohammed with for our next and last session together. We did a lot of work on note-taking skills, but had exhausted that area by the previous session, and Mohammed's . Mohammed had mentioned that he felt a little weird sometimes about his speaking skills, so I decided to create a set of activities to mirror real-life interactions with people he might run into in Tallahassee (waitresses, cab drivers (because apparently he takes a lot of cabs?), students on campus) so that he can feel more comfortable and get some feedback from me, since these "real-life" scenarios won't always result in legitimate feedback. He had said that his weakest areas were understanding his own English, as well as seeing if the person he was speaking to understood him. So I wrote up a few scenarios to act out with him - for instance, I played the role of a particularly cold cab driver, to see if Mohammed could pull out some improvised English to get me talking. At first, he seemed a little flustered, but gradually picked up on what I was trying to get him to do, and by the end of that exercise was speaking relatively fluently and "on his feet" with me. We did a few more of these (the waitress one was particularly entertaining for both of us since I kept messing up his order on purpose and we eventually just started laughing) and it seemed like he was having fun, as well as learning. I was able to give him a good amount of feedback on different aspects of his speech - words that didn't necessarily sound like they were meant to, ways to politely ask for clarification on something I said, different phrases to keep conversation going when it stalled, etc - so I think, while the activity was definitely created to fill the void of other tutoring experiences, it was valuable for his learning.

I loved tutoring Mohammed. Having a one-on-one experience with a slightly older man from the Middle East was something I never expected to experience in my life. I'm not sure what he'll put in the response form, but it always seemed like he valued what I had to say and teach him, though we definitely had a little bit of apathy in the beginning for his studies at CIES. I wish I was going to be here in the fall to see him advance further, but I suppose I'll just have to watch his progress via Facebook instead!