Today was my first official meeting with Giancarlo. We met at Strozier, over by Starbucks, and reviewed some assignments from his classes. His mistakes and misunderstandings are pretty common for ESL students, especially those who might come from a Spanish speaking background. His vocabulary was sometimes a direct translation from Spanish that did not sound quite the same in English. He definitely had some moments where providing examples was the only way to help him understand and get a better picture. Overall, practice is all Giancarlo needs at this time and being able to work on his usage is the most important part. The more exposure he has, the better he will be able to apply what he knows to his work in class and his GRE practice. It sucks that Giancarlo has to learn all these things so fast for the GRE as his skills are taking time to build and that is a natural part of learning a language.
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 ...
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