Fourth Session March 21, 2011

This session was different than the others. Instead of helping Tom write a paper, he had a paper that his ESL professor had corrected for him. The professor indicated whether his errors were with prepositions, verb formations, pronoun agreements, articles, or spelling. I noted that most of mistakes were with wrong preposition usage, pronoun agreement, missing articles, verb tense, and verb formation. He had to figure out what changes to make to his paper based on the notes the professor made. I felt this to be a great exercise for him. He expected me to just tell him what word to use (yet again!), but I did not. My response was to read it out loud and try to think of what word to use that would make it correct. Tom was having a very hard time with the prepositions. At first, I thought he was not sure which one to pick. Furthermore, upon asking him to name all the prepositions he knew and insert them in to see which one fits, he was stumped. This is when I realized he was unable to categorize prepositions, articles, and pronouns. I went on to explain the difference and list them for him. Not only did I explicitly outline each one, but I explained in much detail why that is the word to use and provided examples using the word, whether it was a preposition or pronouns. Along with the pronoun agreement, his main problem was with plurality. One of his sentences read, “people do not understand me and then he ask me to repeat what I said.” He used the noun ‘people’ and then used the singular pronoun ‘he’ to refer back to the plural noun. Verb formations also were among most of his mistakes. He kept on writing things like “my roommates are get annoying from this”. He meant to say “my roommates are getting annoyed by this.” Before beginning to make the corrections, I looked over his paper, noted his major trouble areas, and explained what each one of those meant and why they were marked wrong, without revealing the correction. He proceeded to correct the paper on his own, while I provided feedback and scaffolding.