Tuesday afternoon (the 16th)
I met with Haneul for the second time. I had told her the time before
that I would find some phonics resources, which I had done. We went
over the short/long vowel sounds again for a little while. She then
wanted to move into just talking and error correction, so we did. I
began asking her questions about her family, which turned into an
interesting discussion. She described her parents in detail,
mentioning some of their unique characteristics and personality
traits. Her father is the manager of a hotel situated close to a
mountain that is ideally suited for hiking and is popular with
tourists. He plans on retiring soon and wants to move to the US. She
described her mother as a worrier and detailed some of her worries.
It was interesting to observe as Haneul seemed to recall various
descriptive words that fit the situation she was describing and
realized that they were no longer just letters in a book strung
together to make a certain sound, but that they had actual
communicative value. She also talked a little bit about her sister
who is in NY studying right now.
There were quite a few times that
Haneul asked me the proper way to express different concepts, so I
would tell her various ways of expressing the thought, and some of
them really intrigued her. At one point our conversation went off on
a 'rabbit trail', so I introduced the expression to her and explained
what it meant and how to use it.
I enjoyed reading your blog about tutoring with Haneul. What country is she from?
ReplyDelete"Rabbit trail"
I have never heard that phrase used in conversation. It must be a local thing? I can predict its meaning, but how did you explain it to a non-native speaker?
Haneul is from South Korea.
ReplyDeleteOne definition of 'rabbit trail' is "veering off subject or off the point of the conversation" (Urban Dictionary). That is basically the definition I gave: you are travelling down a specific path (of conversation), and then you take a smaller trail, which, although it is directly related to the topic at hand, it tends to deviate more and more from the original topic. (I forget my exact words, but they would have been somewhat simpler than these.)