Today I had my first session with my tutoring partner. We met at the downtown Leon Country Public Library. His name is Cyriaque Francis Klao. He’s 40 years old and has a Master’s Degree in Biochemistry. He was born in Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) in West Africa. He has a green card and has been in the US for 4 months. He works in a restaurant at night and during the day attends an adult literacy learning center in Tallahassee.
His goal in tutoring is to learn better English speaking skills so that he can attend school and finish his research on the antifungal properties of some traditional plants.
I hadn’t prepared much in the way of teaching materials for our first meeting and thought we could get to know each other. Cyriaque, however, came with his own agenda and when I asked if he had any questions, he had many.
He wanted to know how to pronounce certain words like “bean,” “diet,” and a few others that I recognized as words with 2 vowels together. I remembered (from Sesame Street?) the jingle: “When 2 vowels go walking, the first one does the talking.” We used this “rule” and practiced some examples from a pronunciation book I found in the resource area of the literacy center. Later, on the internet, I found that this “rule” is no longer taught because it has so many exceptions. Anyone care to comment?
He also had questions about the different forms of “it” as in “it’s” and “its.” I had to admit that I wasn’t sure of the difference between the possessive and the contraction form and I told him I’d get back to him.
He also had a question about the pronunciation of the “th” sound. This was something I knew and we practiced the voiced and unvoiced sounds.
We both like movies. He said that it would help him develop more vocabulary if he could view English movies that had French subtitles. I promised to find some movies for him. Most of my DVDs are copied from the TV or are complete chick flicks. I am surprised to find that there aren’t many DVDs in English with French subtitles. Anyone have any suggestions?
I will continue to dig through the $5 DVD bin in Wal-Mart. I just don’t want to lend out my beloved copy of “Hell Boy.”
Sounds neat! A suggestion on finding films, that video rental place off of Appalachee, Video 21, has a ton of international movies, especially French and Spanish. Most of the ones I've rented had English subtitles (which is opposite of what he'd asked, but they might also have English movies w French subtitles) It's definitely worth checking into!
ReplyDeleteYou should consider going by the Goodwill bookstore on Thomasville Road. They have a huge movie selection for really cheap! Red Box is also another good route to go!
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