Sultan is from Kuwait and has been in Tallahassee
for about six months. We met at a Starbucks close to campus and spoke a bit before
venturing into an assessment of his strengths and weaknesses in English. Sultan
has three roommates with whom he gets along with, and plans on moving to Houston,
Texas once he feels that his English is proficient enough. He likes to listen
to music and read, although he stated that reading in English was the most
difficult for him. He would like to expand his English vocabulary and feels
that he learns the best through conversation, which leads me to believe that he
is an auditory learner. I
noticed that he had some difficulty with grammar, and seemed very unsure of
himself and slightly embarrassed when I asked him to write a short paragraph
about his hometown in Kuwait. Quite frankly, for only six months in the US and
having arrived with little to no knowledge of English I was quite impressed with
his level of writing and told him so. I underlined words that he had misspelled
(nine in total) and had him write them out a couple of times to get a sense of
how they were written. I thought that talking about sentence structure on the
first day might be too much too soon, though he did ask some questions like: Why
can I not say “My city is the capital from
Kuwait” and must instead say, “My city is the capital of Kuwait?” We talked about how difficult it can be to learn a
different language, especially when Arabic has a completely different alphabet
from English, and is written from right to left rather than left to right. I
have thought that for our next session I can bring some poems since
they are shorter and hopefully less daunting to read. I also hope that the
rhyme schemes in certain poems that I plan to bring will help him to remember
certain words or at the very least enjoy the session, since he does seem to be
musically inclined.
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