NICOLE: TP1-(CIES)

        All weekend I had been looking forward to meeting my CIES tutoring partners. I will admit that I was slightly anxious taking on three students at the foundations level. I agreed to met up with my tutees outside the Eppes building at 5pm. The first to arrive was Adbulrahman who is extremely profficient in English, letting me knowright off the bat that he was very familiar with the study of grammar and that my time with him would be most beneficial to him if used for speaking practice. His goal over the next six weeks is to become more conversational, he also informed me that his two peers would be more of a challenge to communicate with and he would help by translating. Ahmed is sweet and shy, but is starting at zero with his English language studies experiance. He had a phone call from his English speaking housing office,  Adbulrahman answered and translated into Arabic, he then translated to English and asked me to correct his grammar. Ahmed informed me that he can understand things better then express them. Sultan was late due to some bus scheduling but alas found us around 5:30,  we then went to Strozier library where we decided that we would have weekly meetings every Monday at 5pm.  

     Today was my time to assess my tutees capablities and do some diagnostics. I wanted to see my new friends speaking abilities and comfortablity so we grabbed a coffee from Starbucks. My tutees enthusiasm for language learning was extremely apparent through their efforts to order on their own, they did a great job but it was apparent that we will be working with vocabulary, grammar, and listening skills. Once we grabbed a table I started by attempting basic conversation.  I gave them each a notecard asking for name, address, country of origin, time spent in the U.S. and favorite sport to watch/participate in. This was a challenging exercise for two of my tutees Ahmed and Sultan,  they are very new to the english language having only been in the states for a little over a month. But this was a great activity for they have a quiz on exactly this topic on Wednesday. Adbulrahman went first, I only corrected some minor grammatical mistakes. I helped other two work through this activity and by the end of our session Ahmed and Sultan were able to tell me(in complete sentences) their addresses in Campus Circle,  their first and last names, how long they have been in the U.S. and their favorite sport. (Ahmed and Adbulrahman both like swimming and Sultan LOVES soccer.) Before leaving I saw in one of their agendas that they would all have an "Alphabet Sentences" quizz on Thursday, so I asked them to write 24 sentences using each letter as the beggining letter for the subject of their sentence.( Ex: A- The apple was crunchy.) We will meet again on Wednesday so I can look them over for content and grammar, hopefully this can help them prepare for the upcoming quiz. 

~nicole