Zola 8-16 Tutoring

     This afternoon I met with Moussa at the Hecht House. We had been doing a lot of reading and speaking in previous meetings, so I chose to open up with dictocomp this time, to get some practice with listening and writing. He had not done dictocomp before, but given his promotion to Group 3, he will likely be encountering it soon, and hopefully he will be extra comfortable with it when it happens.

    For the exercise I used a very short clip, around one minute long, from Friends, the TV show. The dictocomp went okay. The problem was with getting him to accept that it is okay to paraphrase certain parts of dictocomp, as it is a bit different than pure dictation, and therefore getting the general meaning of the dialogue across is most important.

    Following the dictocomp, I chose a reading topic that I thought would promote discussion afterwards: teachers being replaced or supplemented by robots. I began by going over some vocabulary, providing example sentences for each word, along with a simple definition. The first thing Moussa always does when learning a new word is see if has a French counterpart, which it often does. The two languages share more cognates than I thought languages from separate branches of the Indo-European family would. Which goes to show I don't know a lot about linguistics.

    The reading went okay. We did not get through all the questions, but we had lots of interesting discussions about the subject anyway, which also builds language skills, so it's okay.