On Wednesday evening, April 16th, I had my sixth conversation partner session with Ahmed. We held this meeting at our usual hangout, the internationally known Starbucks. I tried explaining to Ahmed that the founder of Starbucks is a big fan of Herman Melville's "Moby Dick," but this did not seem to gain any traction with him.
Anyway, Ahmed departs for Kuwait City tomorrow. Needless to say, he is very excited about going home for some well deserved rest and relaxation. Since all he could talk about was his upcoming trip home, it gave Ahmed the opportunity to practice speaking in future tense. Although he had to repeat a few sentences in order to make them grammatically correct, Ahmed was soon on his way telling me about what he was going to do while at home. In addition, he gave a very good re-cap of his flight route from Tallahassee to Kuwait. He will travel from Tallahassee to Atlanta to Washington DC to Istanbul to Kuwait City, for anyone interested in how to get there from here.
When speaking in future tense, Ahmed's anchor phrase is, "I will..." and there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. For example, I will visit my family, I will see my friends, I will smoke sheesha at the Diwaniya, etc., these are all excellent clauses in the future tense. However, attempting to use the future continuous, in essence, "I will be visiting friends" or "I am going to be visiting friends" was not so easy. So in order to avoid serious confusion, we stuck to simple future.
Although my TEFL course is ending, I hope to meet with Ahmed again in the future. This is possible since I'm registered for the 70-hour advanced TEFL course which begins at the end of this month. Ahmed is a motivated ESL student and makes for an excellent conversation partner. All the best of luck to him.
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