Catalina - CP #2

The second meeting that was to-be ended up morphing into a tutoring session. Rashed doesn’t really seem that interested in keeping up the conversation partnering going and Hanan is also my tutee, so we took advantage of the Thursday hour with Jia. So my actual second conversation meeting was this Thursday tea time with only Hanan. Our relationship has changed due to the fact that we meet also as tutor/tutee, so I think she feels more comfortable with me. I can also actually hear her improvement in English during these two weeks! I guess being subjected to six hours of English per day is helping her out a lot. Therefore, our conversation was a lot more interesting and fluid than last time. Our main topic ended up being arranged marriage and I thought it was very interesting to get her insight on the matter. It brought us to some difficult concepts to express, and I saw Hanan struggling. Sometimes she would say something and I just didn’t get it… she’d ask: “did you understand?” And I had to say: “…not really!” with an apologetic face! This really made her have to reorder her thoughts and build her speech with simple sentences organizing it in a consequential way. I think it was a really good practice for her and I got a lot of thought-provoking information out of her opinions. After speaking for about forty minutes, she pulled out her homework and asked me to help her add some sentences to her speaking text. It was pretty obvious she had not written the main body of the text herself because it had no mistakes at all... so I was wondering how to help her out but not simply dictate some phrases to her. It put me in a tight spot! We ended up the hour joining the Taboo game with the rest of the Conversational Partners. She didn’t want to speak during the game (I think she didn’t really understand the game in general terms) so I’m thinking we probably won’t try this again!