Jackie Sirianni - TS #12

Café Sheisha
October 11, 6-8 pm
Topic/Skill: Suoltan and I met to smoke hookah and work on an essay he had for his class. We briefly went over how to plan for his essay, coming up with three main ideas, his thesis, and his introduction. We also discussed modals, present and past perfect tenses, and new “academic” vocabulary. He says he’ll be starting his last session of CIES and will then be going to school in California, so he wants to work on his English regardless of school.
Feedback: I gave Suoltan feedback on his most commonly used beautiful mistake, which is adding “to” between an auxiliary and action verb, e.g. “I should to go,” “I should to think,” etc. I hadn’t given him feedback on this before because we were conversation partners, and I didn’t want to overcorrect him. After going over why this was wrong, I spent the remainder of the two hours stopping and asking, “you should what?” every time he said it, which he found to be entertaining and helpful because he realized how often he said it!

Lessons learned: Although I hadn’t tutored Suoltan formally yet, it was relatively easy and enjoyable because he was really receptive to it and understood things rather quickly, only needing a reminder every once in a while. I also figured out how to use the “what” approach in feedback without fear of sounding rude or condescending. 

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