When I was selecting a tutee, I wanted to try my best to get a partner who spoke French. I read down through the lists and actually went as far as looking them up on Facebook! I couldn't find anyone from mainland France, but I'm glad I didn't, because I found Rebecca. Rebecca Oubda is my tutee, and she is a very sweet, calm, shy girl from Burkina Faso. I did not know Burkina Faso was a country until meeting her. Rebecca is (I think) a level 3, group 2 speaker.
Our first tutoring session was during her 12-1 lunch break at the Center for International Studies. We had to work through a worksheet for her reading class about an emu named Emer who escaped and got a lot of notoriety for escaping. Going through the lesson, it was interesting to realize the kind of problems inherit in anyone's understanding of a language. For example, despite describing Emer as an emu who was a tall bird, she did not understand until about 15 minutes of discussion about the article that Emer was in-fact, an Emu. Also, some of the vocabulary she did not know was pig-pen, and escape. For pig pen, I tried in vain to describe to her, but I ended up Google Image Searching a pig pen, and showing her pictures. In this way, that for some concepts, it may be quicker to show rather than tell. For escape as well as meander, I described the concepts in words to her. In the course of an hour, we met, read the article, discussed it, went over questions and then made an appointment for the next time we would meet.
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