Jeff Dinert TP2

On Wednesday July 6th I met with Abdhul Rahmand fo the second time by picking him up sfter CIES classes, and we went out to eat some Mexican food. This meeting almost began mostly as a conversation partner type meeting, for we spoke a lot about where we wanted to eat, what he wanted to do, how his week had been, and how he was having trouble shopping for an automobile because of the communication issues between him and the sellers. All of this is to the good, for although I found out that his level of comprehension and vocabulary is lower than I had expected, or perhaps simply in the lack of practice it may have to do with lack of recognition, for when I dropped him off later he said his apartment which was messy due to his roommates, was something he apologized for being so "corrupted," in which instance I said that was perfectly proper and very descriptive, but "messy" was less formal and what most Americans would say. The lesson I showed up with, and was more to gauge as I listed in the last blog how much he was cognizant of and how much he was trying to listen and faking his way through, was a list of simple conversation questions about himself, his goals, what he wanted to do in America, what he like about America, What he missed about Saudi Arabia, and other interview type questions, to get him speaking for a few minutes on each question. Although his vocab is somewhat limited, he does understand with little explanation what the idea of the questions were asking. I found it to be successful, for he ended up speaking for most of a half hour on the list of topics I brought, and aside from not really getting the idea of what you miss from Saudi Arabia to which he talked about the weather here as better than Saudi Arabia, probably faking it through the comparative nature of the question what do you like about the U.S prior to which he had a lot of examples, I gauged where he was at, learned about his way of thinking about technology for his educational goals, and about his family. Next meeting we are going to see a movie, to which I will ask him afterward to write a list of questions about what he did not understand, we will go over them and I will introduce next week some basic sayings and idioms and hopefully see if the extra speaking activities are at least helping him speak more and work though the faking it/frustration phase.