Gabe - TS #5

     For this session, we went over the remaining past tenses, past continuous and past perfect continuous, and also reviewed the other two. We began by reviewing the simple past and past perfect. Masoud had forgotten a little bit about the past perfect so the review was helpful for bringing him up to speed. Once we had gone over it, he picked it up again quite quickly. After this, we started with the past continuous, which he already knew and understood well. I did manage to teach him something new, however, which was that you use "when" to join the past continuous with the simple past and "while" to join the past continuous with another past continuous verb. He had thought that these conjunctions were completely synonymous. He had a little more trouble with the past perfect continuous and I had some difficulty explaining it well but I had the idea to draw a diagram in the form of a timeline for each tense, to visually explain the differences, and this helped him understand it better. For practice, I had him write a sentence for each of the tenses, which he was mostly able to do, albeit with the occasional grammatical and spelling error. After this, I had him verbally explain the differences between each of the tenses and did was able to do this pretty well, so I know that he is comprehending and retaining this information.

    Something I've noticed is that he tends to struggle with reading and writing a lot more than speaking. When we talk, he's fairly conversational, and rarely am I not able to understand him. On the occasions that I can't understand him, it's usually due to the pronunciation of one word which I can help him pronounce better after we've figured out what he's trying to say. He's quick to pick up on his pronunciation errors and is really good at retaining this information as well, so he doesn't usually make the same mistake more than a couple of times. I suspect that his issues with spelling and reading have to do with the English alphabet being completely different from the Arabic one. We agreed to go over more verb tenses for the next session, but I think I'll try to include some sort of writing practice as well.

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