8-9 Tutoring Zola

     Yesterday, I met with Moussa in the basement of the Hecht House. In anticipation of the fall semester starting in a little while, we did some review of tenses to begin. This gave me some good practice at explaining the past perfect and past perfect continuous tenses. I am still not sure if he completely gets what context to use them in, but he was able to construct sentences in them, which is still a good step towards productive use of them, I think.

    Next, we did an intensive reading exercise that I had found online. I really like the ones centered around American society, because they start interesting discussions about similarities and differences between the tutee's culture and Americas. Because I was interested in hearing about the nature in Ivory Coast from Moussa, I selected a reading where a tourist narrates his visit to Las Vegas, including the nightlife, and leaving the city to see the Grand Canyon also in Nevada. The most difficult part of the reading for Moussa seemed to be units of measurement, which makes sense, given most of the world does not measure things the way Americans do.

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