Chris H.- TP1

On Tuesday, March 29th, I met with Sammi, Abdul, and Alaa, my new tutoring partners to be met weekly. All three come from different cities in Saudi Arabia, and have each only been in the United States for a few months. Most are business oriented in terms of the focus of their education beyond English studies; however, Abdul expressed a lot of interest towards chemistry and other sciences, which was a matter of some discussion during our introduction. During this first tutoring session, I directed my main efforts towards getting to know the three of them, and in turn, telling them about myself. They had many questions - my major, my reasons for wanting to teach, how university systems work - and I answered most to the best I could, however insisted on returning a questions back towards them upon inquiry, encouraging group discussion and participation. While Alaa seemed the most confident and able to communicate, the others were certainly motivated by his will to converse, which was a factor I noted down as quite compelling, as in the group setting it propelled the others from silence quite often. The underlying difficulty with all three of them, besides grammatical errors, is pronunciation, and I focused our conversation to a slow meter, in order to highly enunciate the intonation of my own flow of speech.

I started our lesson by inquiring with them if they needed help on anything. Sammi expressed interest toward grammatical flow, citing he found it difficult to connect various subjects of thought. I began by teaching a short bit about the functionality of the conjunction within English grammar, paying particular mind to "either...or", "neither.... nor" examples. The group found it difficult to say the answers from their seats, so I had each in turn stand up and fill in the sentences that I had left blank, deciding from a list of possible conjunctions. Abdul and Alaa found this exercise a bit tedious in post-discussion, stating that it was a bit much after a full day of grammatical study. I agreed to make the exercises that I intended to help them with less arduous, and more fun, in the future. This was my first experience with tutoring and I wanted to try the waters and see exactly what type of medium worked best with all three of them. I could now cross off on-the-board examples.

Teaching, and tutoring, students at diverse levels of comprehension, speaking, and listening is difficult, and my tutored group has shed some light on the various advantages and disadvantages to collective exercise. I didn't realize that it would be so trying to motivate all three (just three!) towards a simple grammar lesson, but I do have empathy toward thteir own fatigue after a long day of work. For my next meeting with them, I planned to reconvene in Strozier Library for a more interactive experience, and one intended to engage all three of them collectively towards out-of-classroom thinking about English.