First Session February 21, 2011

Today I met with Tom Sulimany for the first time to begin our tutoring sessions. I first gather some pertinent information about the student, Tom, to understand him better and be able to help him more effectively. Tom is from Israel and has resided in the USA for three years now. This is his first semester at Montclair State University as a full-time student and also works full-time at Newark Airport. His native language is Hebrew. Nevertheless, he stated that he had English language instruction in high school in Israel, so he had basic knowledge of the language upon arrival to the USA. I inquired about what he considered his trouble areas to be and what he needs help with to see if he was able to point out these weak areas. He explicitly stated that he needs a lot of help with his written assignments. I asked for more details, and he went to explain that he does not know how to construct “sentences that make sense”. I interpreted this as that he does not know how to put his thoughts on paper in grammatically correct sentence form. On this first session, I proceeded to help him with his homework assignment, which was to read a New York Times article and summarize it in his own words. I noticed that he was not comprehending at all what he was reading. I suggested that he takes one paragraph at a time, as he reads, and analyze it. Also, to make notes as he reads regarding important information, vocabulary words he does not know, or statements that are unclear. To demonstrate this strategy, we read the article together, and after each paragraph I asked him to synthesize what he just read. He was not able to do so. One of the reasons, he did not understand the vocabulary, so I had to define the terms for him. Also, the sentence structure and wording was a bit complex, which made it difficult for him to get the meaning of the sentence. He would not tell me that he did not know certain words, and so, I pointed out tier three words and asked him if he knew what they meant. This is how I found out that the vocabulary was causing a barrier for his comprehension. One specific example was with the word ‘unanimous’. I asked him if he knew what he meant, and he said yes, so I asked him to tell me. He hesitated for a while, trying to get the words together to tell me. Eventually, he said it means when you change your name and people do not know you. I was baffled with his definition, but then realized that he was defining the word ‘anonymous’. Because of the pronunciation, he got the words mixed up. This shows that his mispronunciation of certain words contributes to his poor vocabulary and spelling.