Will Stone - TP 3

 

I met up with Shaykhah again in an empty room in CIES. We had previously agreed that this, our next meeting, we would work on her reading and vocabulary by going through newspaper articles; she reads through and finds words that she doesn’t recognize/understand and I help her understand the words by giving her a working definition and context in which to understand. The first article we read through concerned money gained through a conference, balancing out the deficit of the athletics department. The first word she asked me to explain was ‘deficit,’ which took some verbal maneuvering to put into an understandable context. I encountered a similar problem explaining the word ‘allocations.’ For as long as it took me to spit out the definition, she seemed to understand quickly. I asked her casually and she was able to respond with her understanding of the word. I also noticed at this point, that she was keeping a word log where she wrote down each new word with a sentence that demonstrated the words definition and function. The next article had some much harder words to define, as it dealt with local elections. I have never had to explain what an ‘incumbent’ was to someone before. I myself learned the word through context. That proved to be the most difficult aspect of our tutoring session: explaining words that I had internalized in a way that she could understand. I was surprised with how quickly she read through the newspaper articles, though when I asked her to explain what she had just read she initially evaded the question, answering in simple terms. Shaykhah’s conversational English was limited, but what she skills she possessed she seemed quite proficient with. She carefully pronounced all of her words so as to minimize the effect her accent might have on her speech. Or so I thought. Either way, I found conversing with her to be quite easy, though at times I had the feeling that she wasn’t quite fully grasping some of my longer explanations. Most of her responses were short, mostly consisting of her saying ‘yes, I understand.’ We worked through three pages of the newspaper and half of a page in her word log, before she asked that we conclude our lesson (she said that her husband was picking her up from classes and that he was waiting outside). As she was packing her school materials into her bag, she asked me if I would be able to meet up with her brother, Mohammad. I agreed to tutor him and told her she was welcome to give him my contact information. I also took his number from her, agreeing to get in touch with him to try to arrange a meeting in the next day or so.