Zachary Backes - TP1

So to recap; I've just spent the last 30 minutes talking to an unnamed tutee I have been assuming is my new partner, Talal. We shook hands and I wished him luck on his epic Osaka adventure, only to be staring quite confusedly at the real Talal not 15 minutes later.

Biting back a serious "WTF" reaction, I stood and tried my best to act like I hadn't just mistaken a complete stranger for an entire conversation. Knowing my confusion would just confound the already convoluted (a thesaurus, I bought one). Luckily I had just enough faculties still running to recall one the first words I learned in Arabic, Tshrafna, which equates to "Nice to meet you". I pull that spanky little linguistics gem out and hoped for the best. He laughed and we introduced ourselves in Arabic, breaking my personal score for longest conversation held in another language (not counting the ones I make up).

When we finished getting a little background on each other I asked him what he wanted to work on during our meetings and he said he was having difficulty with reading. Well nifty beans, I'm thinking. Considering I just read a chapter on that very subject the night before. So cracking my mental knuckles I pull out some paper. I asked him what kind of issues he was having with reading and where he was noticing them. He told me that he felt he reads at a much slower pace than he speaks. Saying that certain words would cause him to get "stuck" and he never knew how to respond to questions.

Thinking back to the dreary days of FCAT prompts and comprehension questions so stale you could break a tooth on them, I started to sympathize. After finishing jotting down what he had said I thought some basic test taking strategies would be useful before we broke into everything the book covered. We started off by talking about the importance of guessing, a true paragon of scholastic skills. I told him that prediction is just another form of guessing but one that you do after you get some information behind it. The title can tell a lot about a piece, I told him its always a good idea to read the title before anything else and make an initial guess at the subject of the story. "You've got to look for the clues to help you fill in the gaps of your knowledge." I told him.

I took a couple second to get across the concept of  a "clue" but once he latched onto it he seemed to really like the idea. We talked about reading the questions before the main text to help give an idea of what he's reading for. And if there is a word he doesn't recognize how to try and guess its meaning from the words around it, or look and see if it appears again further down in another sentence.

After that we started on the Intensive and Extensive reading styles. I ended up basing a lot of my Lesson plan off our meeting. We had to jump around a couple more concepts so we could understand each other but having a knowledge of some Arabic grammar made it a lot easier to come up with examples are relate it to something he understood.

Talal seems to really want to learn how people "speak" more than writing and reading, which I can understand. But we talked about needing all the parts of language in order to really  function with it. He resolved to "kickass" on the next quiz (who teaches these guys curse words? Talal's been here a month people).