Olumayowa TP-3

Today I met with Aadl again at Goldstein Library. He suggested this destination and I recommend it to everyone for tutoring this summer (except for wednesdays or thursdays, back off! grrrrr!) because it is filled with lots of books in Elementary English and there is absolutely nobody inside the library. We studied for almost 3 hours today and only one other person walked into the library, there are no computers though (for that go to Johnston building across Landis green). Aadl surprised me with books that he bought from a bookstore at the mall during the weekend, this guy is a Level 2 student who really REALLY wants to learn some English. He had a copy of "Charlotte's Web" and a huge textbook that teaches grammar to Intermediate to Advanced students.

He had already begun to work on exercises from the textbook and was getting a lot correct, except the problem was that much of the work was so far from his level that he didn't really know what he was doing the work for. I got to the bottom of why he is trying to rush his English language and found that Aadl has repeated a few classes at CIES and wants to graduate by November so that he can begin his masters degree in Hospitality Management so he is basically trying to jump from elementary to advanced, learning every bit of the English language asap.

A lot of this session was evaluating what he could do and what he could not, giving him lots of feedback about his work. In his class he is actually doing very well but he does not recognize this because he's trying to do so much bigger things. I came towards his way of thinking and we did an exercise in the book on pronouns, which he did very well in but he could not understand the actual explanations from the book so the exercise was great practice but its lesson fell on deaf ears. I concentrated more on trying to get Aadl to read extensively today, explaining to him the reasons why he should try to guess words in context and skim over a paragraph for the main idea before asking for definitions of words.

Today I was so happy because I got to see him have a "moment" when he realized that if he read an entire paragraph and thought about what it means, by the time he returns to find the definition for unknown words that part of the story is already alive in his head and the new vocabulary word will stick better because it has an entire narrative that it is connected to. We tried a system where he would read each paragraph out loud, state the main idea and then ask me about the words that were confusing to him and that worked fine. I would choose a different book though, simply because I'm not enjoying "Charlotte's Web" so far, but the only thing that matters it that it works for him.

Though he is adamant about improving his grammar, Aadl mostly needs help with vocabulary at this point. A lot of it is common vocabulary that can be from reading leisurely and speaking often with native English speakers. I feel like he spends all his time buried in books rather than being immersed by doing stuff around the U.S, which would greatly improve his English skills. With as much time as I can give him, I want to converse with Aadl and take him to places where he can speak confidently with Americans. I have also recruited my friend Elena, who is an advanced Arabic student that isn't doing much this summer, to contact him because they can meet on many days of the week so that he can practice English informally and impromptu rather than on worksheets and textbooks all the time. With our tutoring sessions, he does want to continue reading. I think we'll be reading another chapter of "Charlotte's Web" next session; even though it bores me, I hope his enthusiasm for the story is the same and he reads it until the end because that enthusiasm will definitely follow him to much more reading.