Peter TS #2

              On 24 March I met with Umutoni at her family’s apartment. I had brought with me The Cat in the Hat, a children’s book by Dr. Seuss. When I arrived, her entire family sat in the living room and greeted me joyfully. The father introduced himself, and spoke comprehensible English; a friend, who lived in the same complex, was present and spoke English to me. The mother sat on the couch; when I came in, she rose and set out a blanket over the sofa for me to sit on. The father was outside, giving his daughters haircuts; Umutoni had already had hers. We sat on the couch and I asked her to read from the book I’d brought. Here’s what I noticed: she reads well, and commits few pronunciation errors, a proficiency I would guess she had developed in school. But she couldn’t understand what she was reading. From then on, I would have her, for practice, read a page aloud, and then I would focus on a few vocabulary words in it, giving her the definition and pointing to a depiction of the word in the picture.