Last night, I met with Maria, as I usually do on Mondays. She is very friendly and fun to talk to, so we have basically gotten into the habit of spending the first hour studying English and the second hour speaking in Spanish. This time, she booted the family out to a friend's house so that we would be alone to study and not have any distractions, which I appreciated. She brought out her practicum study book and tried to explain to me in English what we would be expected to do. Each page that was dedicated to a specific task she would be asked to do had two columns, one with the directions in English and the other with the directions in Spanish. So she covered up the Spanish column on each page with her hand and tried to read the English side and understand. She seemed mostly concerned about pronouncing the words correctly and appeared to understand several of the directions already (partly because she already knew the actions and expectations, as she was already a P.A. in Cuba, and partly because a lot of the words were cognates). I helped her with pronunciations and with helping to explain words that she did not understand. She has not studied the guide as much as she would like to, since she works full time and has a family; however, she said she will try harder to study it, and so I would like to practice with her on Wednesday by giving the question topic in English and having her go through the actions and attempt to describe what she is doing.
She then referred back to the worksheets she had done and the notes she had taken during her previous English classes, and now she seemed primarily concerned with vocabulary and verb tenses. She had the Spanish translations written in for basically everything, except a few words, which I explained...and like the last time, I was grateful to know Spanish because a couple of the Spanish definitions she had written down were incorrect (in one instance, she had defined the word "good" as "adios"...which makes sense considering "adios" is "good-bye", but however understandable, it was definitely wrong. She had apparently learned about superlatives at some point because she had a few examples of them, but she either had not understood how they worked in the first place, or had forgotten. For example, there was a page about superlatives in her notes, and she knew what the root words meant, such as "long", but did not understand what "longer" and "longest" meant in relation to the primary word. Once I related them to Spanish and explained what they were, she seemed to understand completely.
She had taken many notes before on the present and past tense, but appeared to think that the infinitive was the same as the present tense. So, I once again related it to Spanish and told her what the infitive would be in Spanish and how it is more of a noun than a verb, and she got what I was saying. I am planning to find some type of chart that displays simple English verb tenses to give to her because I feel that showing it visually would be a lot easier than explaining it, and a pictorial representation might help her remember better.
Overall, she is a very intelligent woman and catches on to concepts quickly, especially when I relate them to her own language. The major problem that I see is that she doesn't feel confident because she does not have much time to study; and because of this, she understands concepts concerning English but does not feel comfortable speaking English, which is what I hope the activity Wednesday will help with because she will need to be able to communicate with patients in English.
When she got tired of her hour of studying, we ate dinner, which was delicious as always (and I am always trying new things...) and spoke about family life, religion, and America. It was awesome!
No comments:
Post a Comment