Back to work - Lots of Input, but no Tomatoes

Okay, it's been a week since I've been back at work, and several interesting ideas have come up, but no tomatoes yet...

On the work front, just as I started considering working less, I got an offer to work more! Isn't that always the case?? And it was a good offer, and of course, I said okay (I'm not known for refusing work), and it turned out to be a really enlightening course, on so many levels! This was an intensive (total immersion) course, where one person wanted to perfect her English as quickly as possible.

In this type of course, the student and teacher are together for 10 hours a day for 5 days. Sometimes, we split up the time a bit to give the student some breathing room and have the benefit of two different teachers and teaching styles... but it still means A LOT of time one-on-one for both teacher(s) and student.

This particular student is extremely interesting as a person. She's affable, easy to get to know, experienced in her work area and also in life, and has a deep determination to improve her English. I brought tons of material to use, but a great portion of our time the first 3 days (we will have 2 more days next week) was spent in talking - her talking. Whatever the question was, she always provided an extensive, well-thought-out answer (though limited in terms of vocabulary and structural possibilities), showing tremendous perception, humor, and analysis.

At the end of our last session, I said, "Okay, Gina, we've covered a lot of ground today, but for this last hour, I'll give you the chance to choose: we can go over the last card trick you did, we can finish the phone call listening exercise, or we can do a reading about friendship, in relation to an idea we talked about yesterday. Which do you want to do?"

She was holding the deck of cards at the time, so I thought she'd opted for that alternative - she had learned and perfected a magic card trick, but I had promised her one more and then we'd gotten off on a tangent which led us into an hour-long discussion - but instead she said she preferred the reading. So I handed her the 3 pages of one of Fned's blogs about friendship.

I really like Fned's blogstyle because of the natural way it flows and her innate humor in describing events. I have used a lot of her entries in my classes and the more advanced students find them highly amusing and informative.

The intermediate students, however, usually have to struggle to get through them, and I never understood exactly why, until yesterday after Gina had read the text (she's an intermediate student). She really had to struggle - partly because I had her read out loud and pronunciation is one of her weak points, but also because the sentences were long and winding, and I realized that even though the words were pretty much within her vocabulary range, the length of the sentences, and their inner clauses and such, were difficult for her to sort out (there were also some spelling mistakes that I forgot to correct before printing!!).

So I tried to take it slowly with her, since we had a whole hour left - but I saw too late that the length of the reading had had an adverse effect on her. She immediately dived in, hoping to read through hurriedly. As she advanced and started to get bogged down, I tried to gently stop her along the way to ask about certain words, phrases, or her general comprehension thus far, and I saw that she was getting the idea, but missing the subtleties. At the time, I thought it was sad that she didn't seem to realize that the whole idea of this exercise was to enjoy and savor the natural style of the writer, the cadence of the text, and pick up some cues for her own English speaking style. I kept trying to direct her attention to these things, but when she finished, I didn't feel like she'd "gotten" it.

Since it was our last activity and I didn't want her to leave on that note, I said, "Okay, let me read it and you follow with your eyes." Then I started reading, slowly, but with the right intonation and pauses, trying to show how naturally and beautifully descriptive it is, and hoping she would understand the whole tone of the text in a deeper way. I only read about halfway through, but I got the feeling that she wasn't really receptive, so I stopped and asked her if it had made any additional impression on her at all.

Her answer astounded me. She said, "you know, now I understand why our customers never understand us when we write to them. We think we have good English; my boss got an excellent score on the TOEIC exam; she speaks very good. I speak okay, but the Americans always write to us and say, 'I don't understand; can you explain, please?'. Now I see - we need to develop these kinds of structures!" (here, she taps the papers in her hand). I said, yes, I was glad she could see the structures that we had talked about in the last few days. I told her: that's the difference between people who speak English, and people who speak really good English. Then she summed it up by saying, "We need to explain more." I was glad she had come to that conclusion. I mean, that's the whole point of language - to be able to EXPLAIN YOURSELF!!! Right???

And by the way - guess what?? I just went to check the garden, and I think there are really really finally finally some tomato plants!!!! YEE-HA!!!