I looked
Hamad up on Facebook before we met up at the lounge. After I finished meeting
with my tutoring partner, Shaykhah, I came in to the lounge and immediately
Hamad came over to meet me. From his profile I knew that he was interested in
movies so I started discussing movies with him. His English was good enough
that I could understand him, but a fair amount of his sentence structures were
choppy and simple. At times our conversations slowed, from either my inability
to continue on a topic or Hamad either not understanding me fully or just not
knowing how to respond. Either way, much of our discussion was punctuated by
slightly awkward silences where we simply nodded and smiled at each other.
Fortunately Dhugal, who is Hamad’s tutor, was there with another student and
the conversation shifted to talking about the Avengers movie, that Hamad and
the other student had recently seen with Dhugal. From there we talked about
more specific movies like Pulp Fiction and Inception, which lead us to talking
about music. Turns out we all had a shared appreciation for post-rock-ish
instrumental music or as Hamad described it, “movie score music.” Talking with
Hamad was a little awkward mostly because we kept talking about shared
interests, which at a certain point reached a natural conclusion. We both seemed
more engaged when we were sharing personal information like future goals and
plans or where we came from. Hamad shared with me that he had come from Kuwait
and had been in America for about three weeks or so. We made small talk for a
while which was greatly facilitated by Dhugal and his tutee joining in the
conversation. After a while I looked up and saw that it was almost time for
class, so I made plans to meet up with Hamad at the lounge after class next
week, but also suggested that we make plans for the weekend. Meeting up with
Hamad made me more aware of the challenges of simply engaging in conversation
with students that were still in the process of learning English.
It seems like a group approach might work better here to get others to contribute to the conversation. Perhaps you could meet up with him and some other TEFL/CIESers?
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