Sabrina TS#5

March 19th @ 6:30pm to 8pm 

Taslima’s Apartment 

This session we worked a lot on learning words and using them in conversation. I bought a list of verb words used very frequently in the English language. The list had all the verb tenses listed in different categories. Taslima and I went through the entire word list (which was quite huge). To my surprise she was familiar with most of the words but had only a receptive knowledge of them. Whenever she had trouble defining a word, I gave her hints. I would act it out with whatever stuff was available in our setting or give or other clue words. We focused on a few words that Taslima seemed to have questions about. For example, “put”, “set”, “bought”, and “brought”. She asked what was the difference between putting something on a table and setting something. To be honest, often I was not ready to answer her questions. In these cases I gave her a lot of example sentences to help her understand. 

Afterwards we worked on conversation. First I had an example scenario. I chose the topic shopping and began with myself. So I asked a question and then answered it myself, demonstrating how I would like our conversation practice to go. We stayed with the topic of shopping. I asked various, “when, where, how” questions and Taslima attempted to answer. I noted down the major errors in pronunciation and context as we went along. An error she kept having was saying “weekend-day” instead of “weekend”. I reviewed the errors and repeated to redo the conversation. 

The next topic we chose to have a conversation about was “work”. Taslima is a stay at home mom at the moment, but I told her to describe what work she does as a mom. I wanted to help her use the verbs she already knew productively. This conversation seemed to go well. 

Overall, I was very pleased to see Taslima engaging in conversation. I think she is growing confidence in her speaking abilities. I realized I should choose topics more to her interest and this might further help improve her English speaking skills.