Gabe - TS #6

     For this lesson, I decided I'd teach him the use of the word "would" to indicate the habitual aspect and how its use is similar and different to the phrase "used to." It ended up being a little more difficult than I thought it would be to explain it, as the definitions I fished from the internet didn't explain them adequately enough for Masoud. I eventually realized that he was hung up on the word "would" in the expression "I'd like...": he thought that this verb was exclusively used to express wants or desires. I realized this when I gave an example sentence "When I was a kid, my friend and I would ride out bikes everyday." and he asked if this could be rephrased as "When I was a kid, my friend and I liked to ride our bikes everyday." After some confusion, he was able to understand the meaning of "would" in this context because he already knew the phrase "used to." I was originally going to also explain how "would" in this context can always be replaced with "used to" but "used to" can't always be replaced with "would," but I decided to save this for another day, as the habitual would proved to be a completely new concept for him, so I didn't want to confuse him further. 

    In the middle of the lesson, Aziz walked by and we ended up having a fairly long conversation between the three of us. We talked about southern accents in particular and how, while Aziz was basically fluent in English and could understand everyone at CIES perfectly, he had difficulties understanding English in the "real world" because they speak so much faster than what he's used to. After the lesson, Masoud and I talked a little more about accents. I found out that he finds accents very interesting, in both English and Arabic, and that he likes to listen to one of his friends at CIES talk because he likes their accent so much. He also thinks stereotypical southern U.S. accents are really funny, as do I. One of the other things we talked about was how he sometimes couldn't understand a specific word when native English speakers say it despite him already knowing the word, so I talked about some common reductions in pronunciation that English speakers do. 

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