Last Thursday I met with my adult tutee Simge. We began our session with a few questions she had for me. She was a bit confused about when to use "would" when talking in the future tense. I gave her some examples and explained when she might use it. I told her that I would bring some practice exercises to our next meeting so we could get more in-depth.
Next, she wanted me to help her with a writing assignment she had for homework. She was to write a short essay on one of the best trips she had ever been on. First I asked her to explain to me what her essay was about so I had some background knowledge. We then read her rough draft together. I read what she had out loud that way she could hear how it sounded with a native speaker reading it. She immediately caught her grammar errors. I think she did this more by hearing how the mistakes sounded rather than knowing the rules for usage. I took this opportunity to review some grammar rules with her. She sometimes has trouble with prepositions, so we focused mainly on those. She had 2 of her 3 paragraphs written and I thought she was off to a good start. She did a lot of self editing as we read through and I think by the end of it, she had a really solid essay.
We then did an exercise I had brought in which she had to read a sentence that was in the present perfect tense. There is one extra word in each sentence and she has to decide what word does not belong. This activity gave her a little bit of trouble because a lot of the mistakes in the sentences were ones she was currently making. I helped her through the task and by the end of it, she seemed to be getting the hang of it. We then did another editing exercise in which the sentence had one grammatical mistake and she had to find it and correct it. I though this was a great way of reinforcing the self-editing that we had started our session with. She must have been warmed up by this point because she did awesome!
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