Catalina - CP #8

Tuesday Ania and I met again at her place. It was really interesting to see how her room looks. It’s really austere, only has a desk, bed and closet and the only things she has on her walls are sheets of notes for the TOEFL exam, with lists of expressions and their synonyms, outlines on how to structure a text, etc. As I had promised, I brought a list of topics to speak about, and surely, we went over them. Again, she simply jumped into answering with a preconceived structure without really understanding the themes or how she was going to answer. First I tried to make her speak a little bit slower – this would help in making it clearer. Second, I tried to help her understand that many of the statements she makes (about, places, locations, etc) are things unknown to the listener, so she should explain a little bit more. And then her main issue, which is actually building grammatically correct sentences! She seems to think that her only goal for learning English, at least at this point, is to pass this exam. She only needs four more points on the speaking exam to enter into the college she wants to access. However, we had a small chat about the fact that the TOEFL exam will be able to grade how you due regarding your use of the language: you need to understand questions, have a large vocabulary and be able to produce correctly in English to pass it. It’s not just piecing a pre-existing puzzle together, you have to draw the image for the puzzle first! I told her not to miss class to study only for the TOEFL, she will be missing out on vocabulary, listening and speaking that will add to the knowledge she can apply to the exam. It will also add to her general English skill, since learning a language is a very difficult process. I don’t think she’ll listen to me, but at least I tried!