Hour 6
I worked with a woman from Laos. She was very nice and flew through the lesson. We ended up completeing almost three whole lessons. She was very smart and picked up on things quickly. She was a little slow listening and comprehending what was said and she also had a little trouble pronoucing some phonetic sounds.
Hour 7
This time my second student actually showed up! He was a man from Egypt. The lesson was going great until about halfway through he proposed a question. We were learning about school supplie vocabulary and counting money. One of the questions was, "How much money does Tomas need?" This man asked me what does meant. Whoa. I sat there stammering and stuttering all over the place trying to think of how to explain it to him. The only answer I could come up with was it just sounds right. Sometimes it's hard explaining easy things to people that speak limited English. I got up out of my seat and approached the man and woman in charge of the Antioch NALC. They pulled some books from shelves, a few English to Arabian translating dictionaries, but could not come up with anything. We even used Google translator. Still, we could not find anything to help this man. It was very frustrating, but at the same time it made me think deep about our language and also, being an education minor, it made me think about the process of teaching English in schools and how these issues are overcome.
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