Kelly CP-7

On Monday I joined Rose for her lunch hour. It was quite a lovely day outside and we enjoyed it over dried Chinese plums and Bahn trang me, which is a Vietnamese sesame rice cracker. Rose was very kind and brought these for me. The crackers were made in Vietnam and brought over by friends of her family. I was familiar with these sort of dried plums from my childhood, and made my mother jealous- Mom: "Oh God! I love those!" Apparently the plums are known to be a girl snack food in Vietnam.

As always, Rose is a diligent student, and once brief niceties were out the way, she was ready to work on her English. She presented me with an argumentative essay she is working on. The topic is whether public smoking should be allowed- she has taken the side that it should not. I tried to steer away from making this a tutoring session, and instead asked her to tell me how she felt about the topic. She explained the sides of her arguments and why, in a fairly organized fashion. I was able to help her with some pronunciation and slight grammatical speaking errors. Initially Rose seemed daunted with the task of this essay (she's not exactly an argumentative person), but I think her fears eased a little by talking about her topic casually. This is of course true for anyone writing about anything, but it can be difficult to get out of writing mode and just blab about it. So many more ideas and clarity will come to you!

We then got onto what Rose most wants to work on- pronunciation. In the brief time we have been in our class, I have realized how much our mouths  move when speaking English. It's like a Moulin Rogue cabaret show all up in and around that mouth! I asked Rose to say a few sentence in Vietnamese so I could watch how her mouth moved. As I had imagined, it moves quite a bit less. Something I keep reiterating to my students is the need to practice the "muscle" of pronunciation to gain strength in saying these strange new words. For the remainder of our time together we looked like two cows under the oak tree hyper-exaggerating vowels.  Something that seems to help Rose is to watch me place my hands on my face to give more of an idea of how my mouth/jaw are moving. She even found some help by initiating herself to place her hand briefly on my diaphragm while I pronounced something or other.

We both realized time had slipped away and ran to our respective classes!