Gabe - TS #2

 For our second session, we met in the same place (Strozier) and same time as before. We were originally supposed to meet on a different day but Masoud had to reschedule. During the last session, I took notes on some of the mistakes he was making. In terms of pronunciation, he had some issues with the "v" sound, as it doesn't exist in Arabic, but his biggest problem area was in vowel sounds. There were very few times that I had trouble understanding him, but all those times always involved a vowel mistake, so I figured it would be a good idea to review some of these sounds for this session. I prepared some minimal pairs involving the sounds he had trouble with and had him read them out loud first, correcting him when he made a mistake. We then reviewed some spelling conventions, so he could better recognize them when he's reading. Another common mistake I had noticed from our first session was that he tended to mix up the third person singular pronouns e.g. he would refer to the same person with both "he" and "she", so I also reviewed them during this session. 

After this, we were going to go over some of his homework which he was supposed to bring to this session. He didn't, and it's possible I wasn't clear enough about this point last session, but I made sure he understood me this time and he agreed that it sounded like a good idea. We also agreed that he would send me a copy of the homework the day before our next session, so that I can prepare a lesson around it. We were then joined by another student from CIES, unexpectedly, and we had a pretty long conversation that spanned a lot of different topics. It ended up being great practice for both of them. After the session was over, Masoud remarked that the vowel and "f vs. v" exercises were really helpful but found that the pronoun review was a little redundant. I agreed that the pronoun review was probably a little too easy for him; it's possible that the mistakes he made last time were simply random errors and not indicative of his normal production. 

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