Alexandra CP 9

CONVERSATION PARTNER 9 – Latifah, Meeting 1

My conversation partner is Latifah, very lovely Saudi lady in her perhaps her mid-fifties who has been sponsored by her government to learn English as part of a larger national drive to keep the country’s school systems competitive with other modernizing gulf states. Latifah is a professor of Art education and design at one of the largest Universities in her home country. Having met her and sensing her nervousness, I eased into the session by asking her how she felt about the CIES experience overall, and what her own personal reasons for wanting to learn English were. Within a few minutes of greeting each other, a young girl walked in the door and excused herself, and spoke to Latifah in Arabic.
Given the resemblance between them, I had correctly guessed that she was her daughter, and invited her to join us if she had nothing else to do. The three of us soon found ourselves discussing Middle Eastern curricula, the concept of dialects, and the differences between British and American English (they seem to find British English and British habits very amusing).

Though she is very cheerful and meek mannered, at times I questioned whether I had done the right thing by inviting the daughter to join in the session since Latifah would sometimes turn to her for translation of what I had just said, or to help her find the English word she was searching for. I did my best to try and innocuously prevent this interdependence by maintaining closely related, yet distinct lines of conversations with each of them, turning to one or the other at a time to add her own insight into the topic at hand. This was very difficult to sustain for a full hour, but to my surprise worked out very well. In the end, once I had found an effective way to manage this situation, I think it was a very positive experience for several reasons.

First of all, having her daughter there helped Latifah to feel more comfortable, at which point, her self-reliance would slowly increase especially if the conversation. It seemed to also be very practical for the daughter, allowing her to work out ways of expressing more complex ideas. She proved to be not only a solid communicator with me, but a very quick translator. With regards to my own experience, it was also beneficial to me to hear them speak between themselves since it allowed me to practice my aural skills in Arabic, even if briefly. Assessing Latifah’s verbal skills, she has a fair vocabulary overall, but needs to work on confidence first and foremost, and then verbs and adjectives. Because of her specialization in art education, she was familiar with some very advanced field-related vocabulary, but seemed to be lacking knowledge of verbs that would help her to produce and link sentences together, something which stunted her fluency substantially. I can also see that she will need to improve her listening skills, which are less developed than her speaking skills, but I also found out that I will have to learn how to speak even slower.

Nevertheless, I see potential for quick advancement (at least in conversation) if we continue to work together, mostly since I noticed that at times that when she would forget herself, she would become many degrees more coherent and expressive. She would self-correct her grammar and repeatedly expressed an interest in more intensive, in depth tutoring which I am working to arrange in addition to our conversation sessions. I am very much looking forward to working with her and her daughter if she should choose to join. The main problem with working with Latifah, though, is that she seems to be unreliable in terms of scheduling. I am concerned that her family obligations may make it difficult for her to maintain a schedule. I need to find a respectful way to make my own expectations clearer because I have already lost several hours due to her aversion to using the phone and resultant miscommunication.

---Since our initial meeting, it seems as though Latifah has made every effort at avoiding me, either by cancelling our sessions as they are ready to start or being extremely slow about communications. It has been several weeks of this. I don’t take this personally since I have racked my brain and don’t think there was anything I could have done differently, but I am very curious as to her motivations for avoiding instead of merely saying she did not which to continue, whatever the reason. I really don’t understand what happened.