Alexandra TP 9

TUTORING PARTNER 9 – Ahmed, Meeting 1

Although I’ve already had a few conversations with Ahmed, a young man from Egypt, today was the first day that I tutored him formally. He had requested my help with his reading skills earlier today, claiming that he had a gotten a low score on the practice exam. I was surprised by this given his relative ease with conversational English. Since the meeting was rather spontaneous, I didn’t have materials already in hand, so we used national Geographic website as a source. I asked Ahmed to do a cold read of a travel blog for me for diagnostic purposes, and after a few paragraphs and questioning him. He seems to understand the general concept well, but upon cold reading, does not get the finer details. Given a few minutes, he understands nearly 80% of fairly complex material. The most important giveaway to me was the choppiness with which he was enunciating, which presumably is hindering the aural recreation of a sentence in his head. I then showed him techniques designed to help him slow down and break the text down by reading sentences with an emphasis on slow evenness, syllable by syllable, and then rereading it. This enhances his audiation of the sentences, and he reported being able to understand the sentences with greater ease. I think the strategy from here will be to work on phonetics independent of the meaning of words and slowly increasing vocabulary.