Today was my second tutoring session! My tutee is
Sumayah, a grown woman from Saudi Arabia. She lives in America with her husband
and three daughters (who are really cute!). She completed her Bachelor’s and
Master’s in English and wants to pursue a PhD in Mathematics at Florida State
University or some other American university. She has been in America for seven
months, and this is her 3rd session at FSU. She is currently in
Group 4. I started off the tutoring session showing pictures of my life and
family. She showed me pictures of her life and talked about herself as well. I
gave her a Language Comfort Survey like I did with Yuki, and discovered that
while she is an excellent speaker, it is difficult for her to respond when she
speaks on the telephone or with native speakers. She can understand what they
are saying and asking her, but she cannot explain her ideas as effectively as
she’d like because she gets nervous. I asked her about her strengths and
weaknesses, and she stated she wanted to work on writing and composition as
well as listening and responding. We then worked on some listening homework she
brought. Sumayah is very good at listening, but it is difficult for her to summarize
because she is very detailed. I suggested using bullet points to help her focus
on the main parts of the listening example and then turn those points into
shorter sentences with not too much detail. She was able to effectively use
this method and it helped her realize she does not need to write every detail
down. I asked her what interests her so I could bring English materials related
to that, and she stated she likes science and mathematics, and wants to learn
about social life. I plan on bringing some math and science articles for her to
try to read and summarize. At the end of the session, I gave her an article
from the New York Times and asked her to summarize it. While we did run out of
time, she was able to write bullet points about the article and explain its
general meaning. She stated that the article was a good read for her as it was
not very difficult but not easy either. Overall, working with Sumayah was enjoyable
and I look forward to working with her again next week!
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