Mageda TS #2

During this tutoring session, I wanted to focus on Dave's level in grammar. I had a lesson planned on the verb tenses and was prepared to make it more difficult if his level was higher than I thought. And to my surprise, Dave could name almost all 12 verb tenses! That's something that us TEFL students struggled to do on the first day of class. I showed him a fun graphic that I had found that illustrated all the verb tenses and we discussed the patterns of them all. However, the next part of my lesson plan was to introduce a writing assignment to see how well he writes. I showed him an outline for a persuasive essay and asked what he would like his answer to the question "what would you improve at your school?" It took him some time to come up with a suitable topic (because he's such a sweet kid he didn't want to talk bad about his school) but once we did I challenged him to brain storm some potential supporting reasons for why his recess time should be longer. It was here I realized his grammar in use skills were not at the same level as his overall grammar knowledge. I told him that next time we met I'd like to see his writing but not to feel too much pressure about it!