On Halloween day I met my adult
tutee Joey. She’s a foundations level student who’s not yet in the CIES, but
will be joining next session. Conversation was difficult because her level of
English was pretty basic. I helped her with a fill-in-the-blank exercise that
practiced which verb tense to use when confronted with wish and hope in a
sentence. She did reasonably well, and I only had to give her a few of the
answers because she simply didn’t know the words. That took most of an hour to
complete. After we finished the worksheet she asked me a very good question:
why do we say at night but in the morning? I have to admit that
that question had never occurred to me before. I also admitted to her that I
didn’t know why we say it that way and I had to look it up. Once I found the
answer I tried my best to explain the rationale, but I think some of it was
lost in translation. I knew it would be difficult tutoring someone who doesn’t
speak the language, but it became a reality when my explanations fell flat. One
thing that we haven’t learned in class yet that I’d like to know is how to
teach someone who doesn’t know what you’re saying.
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