Catherine TS #9

Today I met with Saeed again. We worked on American English idioms, such as "cats and dogs" and "arm and a leg". I explained to him that idioms have a different meaning than their figurative, or literal description. I asked Saeed to give me an example of an idiom in Saudi Arabian Arabic. This brought us into a discussion about the Arabic vocabulary, and how Arabic is more about communicating direct meaning, rather than implied meaning. For example, in Arabic, the alphabet consists of symbols that represent the sounds of words. Simply by understanding the sound of a word,  and its matching Arabic symbol, one can learn the language. This session felt like another needs assessment. I was able to see exactly why Saeed struggles with writing English. It is because he is more of an auditory learner, possessing a very fluent spoken English, but very poor spelling. I helped Saeed understand that English also has rules for sounds, pertaining to how the words are joined together and spelled. We worked on words such as late, space, mate, ate; he learned the meaning behind the silent "e," and how to decipher when it is used, or not.