Jennifer_TP8

Today I met with Sumayah, my tutee from Saudi Arabia! At our last session, she practiced a presentation she had to do for class, and I asked her how it went. She said she got very nervous and wasn't able to speak as fluently like she did when she practiced on me, but overall it went well. When we first met, Sumayah said she wanted to improve speaking and writing under pressure, so I decided to give her a timed writing with a prompt from a sample TOEFL. I did a step-by-step brainstorm with her for 15 minutes before the actual "timed" part. Sumayah is near fluent, but has a hard time getting her thoughts together at first. So we looked at the prompt together, and I had her plan out her main points in her three body paragraphs and her intro and conclusion. This seemed to help her a lot. The prompt was rather difficult since it was from the TOEFL, but she will be taking the TOEFL pretty soon, so it was good practice! I then had Sumayah use her brainstorm and take 30 minutes to write the essay without help from me to see how she worked through writing on her own. While she was doing the timed writing, I actually ended up helping my conversation partner Joyce, who happened to be in the room, with a paper! (I made sure this was okay with Sumayah first though since she was doing the essay on her own without help from me). Sumayah seemed nervous at the end, but I told her this was for just for practice and her brainstorm was very good. She explained how writing was difficult for her even in her first language, so it is even more challenging in English. I think Sumayah is near fluent, however, and she needs to give herself more credit! Overall I think it was a good session - one that made her think about her skills and the TOEFL in a realistic way. :)