Jaime TP5

My first (and really only) formal meeting with Alice came in late July. She had said she wanted to improve on her speaking for her TOEFL degree. I was pretty excited about this and decided to do the TOEFL exercise we had done in class. Give a prompt. Give the person 15seconds to brainstorm and 45 seconds to speak. I figured we would start in a larger picture- 45 seconds to prepare and a minute and a half to speak. I downloaded software called audacity and was pretty excited to have Alice practice speaking. Audacity allows you to record sound files, and later email them. I figured that we could review the files and Alice could keep them later for review.

Well plans change. And as I made my way to the lounge I found Alice pouring over a piece of paper. Rather than practice speaking she wanted to go over words on her homework handout. Fair enough. It’s about the tutee right? So we talked about murder and crime in the U.S. I explained words like fabrication, and rather than simply tell her answers (where’s the fun in that?) I had her explain what she thought they meant.
I was pretty tickled with the word fabricate. Alice asked if it meant something about clothes and fabric. Not exactly. I gave her the terms ‘fabricate a story’ and ‘fabricate evidence’. She understood that fabricate was a fancier word for lying (skillfully), and asked why we used a word that refers to clothes. (disclaimer, I’m not sure if this is true but I am proud of myself for coming up with this….) I asked if she had heard of the English idioms ‘to spin a lie’, ‘weave a tale’. She had. I explained that people who weave, or spin, or make clothes are taking pieces of different parts and putting them into one grand project- something that looks entirely different from the original. And essentially, that’s what people do with lying. Now, I know I took quite a bit of liberty with that description, so I made sure Alice realized this was my interpretation. She seemed happy with it, and we went on with the words. In addition, I would ask her to say a couple of sentences about a topic using the specific vocabulary words.