As of now, the plan is for her to move in with my family after our CIES classes are over with. I am so excited about this for her because it means she will have the opportunity to live with an American family and be around English in another setting. The implications of cultural exchange of great! We don't know how long the arrangement would be for, its up to her, though I hope its long enough that she really gets a lot of benefit from it.
We have also been talking about going to Orlando, which she's never been to. She wants to go to Disney and Universal and I told her about Sea World. She confessed to me last night that she has this dream of touching a dolphin and taking a picture with one. I smiled to myself when she told me that, explained that Sea World had a feeding tank where you could maybe touch the dolphins BUT my niece works at Discovery Cove, which is where you can definitely touch the dolphins and take pictures. Xin's eyes got so wide. I sent a message to my niece and she said it was no problem to arrange. I am so very, very excited and happy to be able to help make a dream come true for her. There is something so precious and amazing about that. As we talked about Disney and some of the things there like the World Showcase and China she said, "My heart has flown back home" (back home was an expression we were on using properly last night during our "Correction session"). Right now her Facebook status is "My heart has flown away -_-". I commented on it asking if it was to Orlando and she wrote back "my heart is in dolphin's heart". Too cute!
One of the things I love about working with Xin on her English is that she never gets mad at me over any of it. Last night there was a lot of great practice for her! She got to talk with a friend of mine via FB chat and it was hysterical, she's a firecracker and I thought she was really starting some trouble, but the friend she was talking to was the perfect person for it all because he's really snarky so he took it all in stride. She's talking with him online, I've got another friend on the phone and we're all talking too. It was crazy, but worked well and helped Xin with slang, abbreviations and communicating with people in general and in different ways. The friend on the phone said he couldn't believe she hadn't smacked me yet and I just oh-ho-hoed him and told him Xin thinks I'm a good English teacher. She backed me up with an "Exactly so."
She seems to have a lot of patience when we work together. What we do is we take time to just review what she says by writing it down and working on correcting the mistakes, or talking about things she doesn't understand. Last night I took her translator away from her and told her she couldn't look up the new I had just used on her. She had to listen to me to use it in sentences, I also drew a picture, and we used the clues from the sentences and the picture to help her get the idea of what snorkeling is. She has trouble with prepositions and using Chinese word order when speaking English, so these are things we are perpetually working on. I think I'm going to start working on corrections without writing things down though, to see if that helps more. Maybe that'll be the lesson I record, which she has graciously consented to helping me with! Chomy wouldn't work for a recording because her son is with us when we have tutoring sessions now.
Anyway, most of Xin's frustrations lie with herself and her having difficulty with the language. She wants to be corrected, she really wants to learn. I think she just can't do it fast enough for her liking and she gets exasperated by encountering the same problem over and over. Its a work in progress. She says English is so easy for me, I don't have to think about it. I tell her its the same for her and Chinese!
On a final note, our goal for this weekend is to celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year and go to a Valentine's party. Our first real large group interaction! She has admitted to being shy of such settings so I'm glad she's excited about going. I think it's the idea of the possibility of meeting a guy that is driving her. lol She talks about loneliness and wanting a boyfriend, but then she said that she worries about my getting a boyfriend. I told her not to worry about it and we talked about these things for a little bit. Loneliness, guys, daydreaming, the diffuculty of English, these are recurring themes. She just needs to make more friends, especially American ones, and we're working on it. ~_^
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