Kunga
and I began our tutoring session with me introducing myself. After which he introduced
himself. I began with asking if he was nervous, which he was, and I told him
that it was ok and he should take a deep breath and relax. After he had calmed
down a bit, I told him I would like to read through his essay aloud and if I could
use a pencil to mark up the areas we need to fix. He was fine with me doing
this.
I read
his essay aloud and found that it was well written, and could only find
grammatical, punctuation and spelling errors. But I could also see that the
essay he had written would easily pass the CATW. All of his ideas were comprehendible.
I quickly went through the checklist (mentally) of what the CATW requires to
give a passing grade. He had introduced the article’s name and author’s name right
in the beginning. He summarized the most important ideas of the author. He developed
the idea and explained its significance. He included a personal experience. And
finally he gave a brief conclusion to his essay.
After
reading through his essay, I told him it was well written and organized. I told
him we needed to focus on some of his grammatical, punctuation and spelling
errors. After which I asked him to read out loud his essay in front of me, and
when he did he seemed to recognize some of his own mistakes. Out of his entire
essay about two or three sentences were confusing (they were not getting his
message across appropriately), which he realized when he read them out loud. I asked
him what he was trying to say in those sentences, and had him write it down. He
did not recognize the spelling errors and I told him the spellings for those
words.
At one point in the
essay he had used the word “loading board”, which in his country means “billboards”.
And at first I could not understand what a loading board was, and I asked him
to explain a little, which he did. I then understood that he was talking about
a billboard, and I explained to him that in the United States we call the big board’s
with advertisements on them, billboards.
He was also switching back
and forth from past to present tense, and I explained to him that when an essay
it is best to stick to one tense throughout the entire essay, preferable
present. And he choose to keep the tense present. We had about fifteen minutes
left in the session being over and we began conversing about if he knew when
the exam was? And he did not. He also told me he was not concerned if he passed
or failed because he had other exams to worry about. He eventually asked me if I
thought his essay would pass the CATW, and I said I believed it would pass.
After looking back at
the session, I would have made him start writing his paper on a new page, so
that it could be submitted to his teacher with the corrections he made.
