Alexandra TP 12

TUTORING PARTNER 12 – Geonae

On Wednesday, Geonae and I finally experienced a breakthrough, and I couldn’t be more thrilled. The victory was small but significant. Given some of the work we had been doing to this point, I felt that Geonae should at least have sufficient grasp of basic sentence structures to at least begin experimenting with verbalizing sentences. Being a diligent student, though I knew she was making progress in terms of her grammatical learning, I had been making virtually zero progress in coaxing her to speak, despite my best efforts to take baby steps towards this goal. Even after eight or so meetings, she had barely ever verbally joined more than three words together of her own volition, perhaps out of fear of making mistakes. Thus, in preparation for this session, I drafted two whole pages with the beginnings of sentences so that would make her have to work with me verbally in order to find logical consequents to the antecedents, however simple the final outcome.
Though at first it would take us about five minutes per sentence (I tried to be patient with her so she could feel she was generating sentences based on her own ideas), she began to work a bit more quickly. Although this was promising in itself, what made me happiest was when she would look up and mumble possible English sentences to herself. Some made only minimal sense, and others were surprisingly sophisticated compared to her other work, but it gave us great ground to begin discussing grammatical issues in the way she thinks through sentences. By the end of the session, we had only made it through the first page, but both she and I were pleased with the progress, and she seemed visibly proud of what she had done, which gave her courage to initiate an occasional direct question or comment to me unprovoked. As we were photocopying some of the work, I took advantage of both of our relieved moods, to tell her in earnest how glad it made me to hear her speak, and how I wished she would trust me enough to feel free to continue in this way, even if it meant making mistakes. I think she understood and I look forward to future progress and seeing what she does with the second sheet, which I left her for homework.