Sabrina - Conversation Partner Wk 4 - "My ESL ninja gal"

Wow, what a difference a week makes. Or maybe it was the rain, but Shin was on point today. She was using many more complete sentences than I have heard so far.

Since it was not so sweet weather outside we chose to stay inside and grabbed some tea before settling in on the long yellow mini couches that line the exit hall next to the TOEFL classroom.

I am here to say that my girl did not take the driver's test as she had planned. She had too much homework. She plans to try next Friday. This gives her plenty of time to study however so that's a positive.

This time I tried to keep on one conversation theme without breaking down into explanation overkill, which always gets us off topic. I started with the simple question, "So what did you do this week?" She told me about some of her class work and weekend activities. I kept edging her on with, "And then what?" and "What about the next day?"

The one point where we did a little breaking it down was on talking about time. We created a time line with the word "today" in the middle (obvious really) and then to the left of that we wrote yesterday, the day before yesterday, 2 days ago, 3 days, ago, etc... and to the right, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, 2 days from now, 3 days from now, etc. We used this as a reference for her account of what her week had been filled with and some future plans (such as this pending test which she will take "three days from now"). Her sentences were not complete but for a few lucid moments. I let it go and just filed in a few verb tense corrections in passing.

What I did do however was write, "Today, Yesterday, Sunday, and Saturday" on notebook paper and jotted down what she was telling me of her activities next to each: "woke up, washing face, checking email, practice cello, etc." Then I let it drop and we moved on to something else. We talked about where we had both traveled to while sitting next to the giant map. Also, the places we wanted to travel to. This was basically - everywhere.

Shin-hye picked up on one part of our talk that she said she had heard a lot since coming to Tallahassee just a month ago, that being the use of the word "crazy" to mean a lot or to an extreme degree. I told her it was "crazy hot in India". She liked this bit of slang and I am pretty sure I will hear it come back in a later session.

In winding down with just a few minutes left, I pulled out the notebook sheet with the activities jotted down as she had said them earlier and rewrote each activity on a single line on a separate piece of paper. Then I asked her to tell me the same things but in complete sentences. All I had to do was ask her the question words - who? when? where? why? and she filled in the rest. She got so good at this that she started to work towards compound sentences. What was " I checked my email." became "I checked my email and surfed the net." Then even bigger to "I checked my email and surfed the net for three hours." She was visibly pleased with her progress.

She did not call me over the weekend as I had asked. She said she was scared. I asked her to try it again. I did not care what she said as long as she said it in a complete sentence. I think this time she can do it. I'll let you know.