Catalina, C. Smith, Chris - CP #4, 4, 1

Well, I can say that this Friday’s conversational partnering has counted for three of us. There seems to have been some sort of planetary alignment that united TEFL students on campus at midday. I was on my way to meet Hon Woo and ran into Claude in invited him to join us! We were talking about weekend and holiday stuff during our walk towards lunch, where we ran into Chris! It was very interesting to see the three of us interact with Hon Woo since each of us has a certain style in trying to explain concepts. Claude will be very systematic, introduce new vocabulary with each unknown word, therefore adding to the field of knowledge, speaking very slowly and clearly. I normally just try to talk as casually as possible, and then answer any questions regarding expressions or slang that I use, with examples of situations; and Chris speaks at a mid-velocity, laying out concepts of each vocabulary question. I think Hon Woo had a handful with us!

I´m sure he really enjoyed the random meetings, since it really kept the conversation flowing. We lost him for a moment when making references to TV and television pop culture, since he doesn´t have the background, so we´d had to add a very long detour on what the joke was about when those where the themes. We talked about holidays, weekends, fairs, wildlife, food, planning, campus life. I think it was a great conversation that lasted for about two hours! Hon Woo and I ended up going over some more of his doubts on his reading-writing assignment with Chris’ help on Landis Green. It was the first time he’d ever sat on the grass to simply hang out! He previously didn't really know what to think who the people laying on Landis Green were! ‘It is out of the equation’ proved to be a difficult explanation, but he was faster than us with ‘bailing out’, giving the second possible reference to ‘being bailed out of jail’ before we got a chance to mention it. I really like HonWoo, he works hard at his English and seems really motivated to learn. He’s fast at grasping expressions and putting them into practice and I am very impresses at his amount of passive knowledge! The afternoon ended with Taylor running into as at Landis Green. I wonder what will happen if more than five TEFL student unite at the same place out of class at a time… will the Earth shake? We should do a farewell dinner and see what happens!