Today (Jan 21), I met my new tutoring partner, Rasmane, at CIES after classes got out. He is from Burkina Faso in West Africa, and came to America only a few weeks ago. He is 24, and has two brothers and two sisters who he misses dearly and Skypes with every day. He told me that in his village, there are 27 local languages, and of them he speak 7, including French and English. He has a very thick French accent which is difficult to understand, so I have him write down the words that I cannot understand and help him pronounce them correctly. We talked about Atlanta for a little bit, as well as the weather--I learned that he really, really hates snow. He's also fascinated with climate and science, which I thought was cool. We talked about weather and some climate related vocabulary (including 0 c/32 F is the temperature for snow), as well as some American geography.
I started just figuring out his English level by asking some basic grammar questions, and he asked me to help him on prepositions. We talked about some simple ones ("across," "on," "over," "behind," and so on) from his textbook, and he understood my explanations. As I was thinking about SchoolHouse Rock earlier, I decided it would be good to show him a video of "Busy Prepositions," and afterwards I asked him what he learned from the video. He said he had learned "through," although he had some serious trouble pronouncing "th"--something we will work on in future sessions. As he specifically asked for speaking and listening practice, I think we will focus heavily on these skills for our future sessions.
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