Zeb TP#1

    Wednesday afternoon shortly before 4:30 I met David and Matthew Hong for the first time: I frequently find it challenging to remember peoples' names for the first little bit after I meet them, and throwing two identical looking people into the mix doesn't help very much . I found myself looking at the name on their notebooks quite frequently....... hopefully I'll be able to wean myself off that crutch fairly soon.                               After some brief introductions we started playing a game I had brought called Apples to Apples. In this game each player is dealt seven red apple cards, then a judge is chosen who draws a green apple card and reads it (one example of a green apple card is the word 'Spooky', with the synonyms 'scary, weird and ghostly' listed on the card). The other players must then select one of their seven red apple cards which describes an object or situation that they feel comes closest to matching the green apple card currently being considered. One player may have a group of cards consisting of 'My Refrigerator, Sharks, The Universe, Telling the Truth, New Shoes, Fort Knox and Push-ups', while another set of cards may consist of 'The Wright Brothers, Noisy Neighbors, Oranges, Oxygen, Truck Stops, Windsurfing and The Titanic'. Each player states the reason that they think their card is the best match (including a brief definition of their card and how it relates to the word on the green apple card), and then the judge gives his verdict. Whichever player handed in the winning card becomes the next judge, the players are given a card to replace the one just played and the process is repeated.   Very quickly I realized that approximately 30-50% of the cards were above their comprehension level (particularly descriptions of abstract ideas or somewhat obscure historical figures: some of the cards that I specifically remember were 'Firestorms, The Vietnam Memorial, Mahatma Gandhi and Nobel Peace Prize'). This is not too surprising since they are somewhat younger than the recommended age level. I gave a simplified description of anything they didn't understand, but they didn't express much enthusiasm in trying to learn new words or concepts so I sorted through the cards and removed anything that I felt they wouldn't understand. We still came across some that they didn't understand (although out of that number there were quite a few that when I said the word or gave a description they were like 'Oh, I know what that is'). Once we got the cards sorted to a more appropriate comprehension level it seemed that they were engaging with at least a moderate level of enthusiasm and enjoyment, and several times I noticed that they seem to have good geographical knowledge of US cities for their age. After approximately 30-35 minutes their level of attention and enjoyment took a nosedive so soon after that I started wrapping things up with the game.
     After the game was put away I showed them the pictures from my sample grammar lesson and asked them questions about what the people in the pictures were doing. I don't think that I had showed them all of the pictures before they figured out what I was talking about and told me that I was talking about future, present and past tense. After that I told them to write down the names of 5 different animals (I had to offer some suggestions) and then write a sentence using one of the three verb tenses to describe something that each animal does. They weren't happy about writing sentences and I had to give a good bit of encouragement before they would do all 5, as well as ideas about what some of the animals might do. Once they decided that they really did have to write the sentences they came up with some ideas of their own and besides taking up a whole page for 2 or 3 sentences they did quite well.
   This is probably the first time that I have been in a real life situation of needing to give a quantifiable assessment of someone's language learning needs, and going by my impressions so far I am having a hard time knowing how much of David and Matthew's weakness in English to attribute to a genuine deficiency in English and how much of their apparent weakness is simply due to their age. I never felt that they were having difficulty understanding me, and I never had a hard time understanding them. They seem to have an age appropriate comprehension of grammar and in the hour we spent together I don't recall hearing any inconsistencies in their sentence structure. The one weakness that I consistently noticed is in the size of their vocabulary, even after making allowances that some of the words we encountered were just above their level, and there were also several times that they didn't recognize a word by sight until I said it, which would indicate some weakness in reading comprehension. Another thing I noticed is that it seems like much (all?) of their language learning motivation is extrinsic when it comes to anything that feels like actual school work.
   I think that in my coming meetings with them I will need to come up with more word games that will somehow get them focused on talking and expressing their own thoughts, and I also think that I will likely start wrapping things up after 40-45 minutes, otherwise their interest is rather low.