Olumayowa TP-2

I was eating lunch in the Tea Time lounge last Thursday when I noticed that one student was walking in and walking out really often, like he was looking for someone and did not know what to do. I asked him if he was waiting for his Conversation or Tutoring partner and he said that he is a beginning English speaker who actually registered at CIES late and does not have either partner. As a new student who is eager to learn, he was very straightforward about asking me to tutor him and with how often he wants to meet. He is Aadl from Saudi Arabia and he is older than most students so I guess he might have very important reasons to improve his English Language. He jumped right into the tutoring session, pulling out a book called "High Tide in Hawaii" that he had borrowed from the CIES Library and was trying very hard to decode for his own reasons. Aadl is very used to reading intensively, he reads slowly and stops at every word he doesn't understand to ask me for the meaning or consult a dictionary. Though I could translate a lot for him by drawing pictures, we lost a lot of time in this activity because we could not read a whole paragraph without a million explanations. Also, he stops mid sentence often to ask about the grammar concerning random words. This is very jarring for his reading fluency and for my sanity because he knows so much more grammar than I do. At the end of our 1 hour session, he had command over a few new vocabulary words, but we could not get a main idea out of what we'd read. Aadl and I have a lot of work to do; helping him will be great practice for me to learn how to teach extensive reading to students, now I'm starting to see that we're tutoring "partners" because we're helping each other rather than me lecturing him.