This tutoring session was spent with Manal at CIES. We spent some time talking about how she spent her week off without having classes and how she was doing adjusting back to the busy school week. She seemed very tired and vented to me about her frustration of feeling like she was plateauing in her English. She said she wishes she had more opportunities to practice speaking with native speakers, for she said she thinks that's the only way she's ever going to improve. I told her about the Arabic Student Union on campus and hope that she will make more of an effort to go to their meetings and maybe get more of a chance to practice her English with them. We then worked on a composition homework assignment together until it was time for her to return to her classes again.
My third conversation partner meeting was with Josue, my conversation partner from Paris, France. He suggested that we go to a restaurant for this meeting, and recommended the Colombian restaurant on Tennessee St. called "Super Perros". I had never been to this restaurant before, so it was interesting to not only converse with someone from outside of my culture but also at a cultural restaurant with an atmosphere and menu different than what I am used to. Most of the menu was in Spanish, so we were able to bond over trying to figure out what the menu was saying, and ended up sharing a lot of laughs over it. During our meeting, we caught up on how he was doing at CIES, what he's involved in in Tallahasee, and discussed deeper topics such as the current political affairs going on in France. This led to a grander discussion about American politics, and it turned out we had similar views. It was interesting to connect our ideas across border lines, realizing we all want the ...
Comments
Post a Comment