Erin - TP 10

Tonight I met with Maria, as I usually do on Mondays. Today we studied English in one of the bedrooms because that's where the computer is. Sometime before, she had bought an 8-disc set from eurotalk.com, a site that I had never heard of before. She put in the first one, and I was fairly impressed. She wanted my help in figuring out how it worked because all of the directions were in English and were obviously too difficult for her to read. We did the first few lessons together: we started with numbers, which we went over several times, both for pronunciation on words such as 'thirteen' but also to clear up confusion, like that between the numbers 6 and 7. We then moved on to parts of the body; she was timid to do that section for some reason, but I told her it was absolutely necessary, since she is hoping to work as a physician's assistant soon. Some of the pronunciations were very difficult for her, and she got elbow and knee confused often, but I explained the pictures, and she replayed the game several times until she could name all of the parts of the body that were provided. Next, we looked at the lesson on the lesson on useful phrases; some were relatively useful, such as "help", or "where can I catch a taxi?", while it was lacking several other useful ones, such as, "Where is the bathroom?" I thought this phrase lesson left something to be desired and simply presented the phrases without explaining what they meant....which I guess would be impossible for the program to do, since its creators have no way of knowing who will buy it or what the customer's first language is. Simply presenting words, especially nouns, is okay because a picture is sufficient, but not in this case. Therefore, I explained the phrases to her in Spanish so that she could understand them, and we through them a couple more times, when she pronounced each on in English and then told me in Spanish what it meant so that I would know that she understood.
When dinner was done cooking, we went to the dining room, where she tried to explain to me in English what I was going to eat, since there were several things that I did not recognize. She also told me about her day and work and her neice's quinsenera. I gave her the verb chart that I had printed out for her; I explained how it works, and she was very grateful. On Wednesday, we will continue with the CD's...and I am hoping this practice will make her comfortable enough with English words so that we can move on to practicing for her practicum in a few weeks or months.