Sixth Session April 4, 2011

During this session, Tom asked me to revise a research paper he was working on. Overall, he did a really good job at writing it. His only weak area is with the prepositions. However, I noticed much improvement in his writing since the first session. He is making less spelling errors and his sentence structure has evolved to be grammatically correct. In other words, his sentences flow, make sense, and are complete sentences. With prepositions, he gets confused with ‘of’ and ‘from, as well as with ‘in’ and ‘on’. Whenever I noticed an error in his writing, I would ask him to reread that sentence and see if he can figure out what was wrong with it. I was very glad to notice that he did pick up on his errors and was able to correct them, most of the time. With some, it was good enough that he noticed something was not right in the sentence, even if he did not know how to correct it. That was when I stepped in and explained to him how to correct it and why that is the proper way to do it. Also, during this session, I made a shocking discovery. I noticed he was using the articles ‘a’ and ‘an’ randomly. For example, he would write, “a emergency medical technician…” or, “an paramedic…” I know he is familiar with the articles, nevertheless, he does not know when to apply each one of these specific articles. My explanation to him was that the difference is that you use ‘a’ when the following word begins with a consonant and ‘an’ when the next word begins with a vowel. He look absolutely puzzled, and then asked me, “What is a vowel?” I was in total awe! I did not even know how to react to that. I tried hard to make him feel inferior, and so, I just proceeded to differentiate between consonants and vowels for him. Tom expressed to me that when speaking he knows which one to use because depending on what you say, it sounds better. Hence, he knows how to apply these articles when communicating verbally. But in writing, he is unable to choose the appropriate article to use. I explained in much detail, and he seemed to be clear on the distinction of these two.