Will Stone- TP1

 

I told Shaykhah that I would be wearing a black shirt. As soon as I walked into the lounge a short woman wearing a full-length burka approached me. Shaykhah and I stepped out onto terrace to discuss what she wanted to cover in our tutoring sessions and how we might go about working on those points. In talking with her, I couldn’t help but compare speaking with her to speaking with either Yasmina or Hamad. Yasmina is an upper-level EFL student and as result is fairly proficient at speaking and Hamad and I can still communicate well enough to maintain a conversation. Shaykhah’s speaking however, was much more fragmented in her sentence structures and much slower when speaking, carefully planning out each word. Her accent was very thick, but not unintelligible and in the brief amount of time we sat planning out our future sessions, she was overly polite and quite formal. We mostly discussed what she wanted to work on, which was her speaking. I suggested that since we had some time that we practice speaking together in casual conversation. The small talk we made during this meeting was very jilted, resulting in several awkward silences that resulted from either of us asking the other a question that was given a shorter response than anticipated. She gave me a brief run-down of her situation that she moved to America to study education and was living with her husband, brother and son. At this point in our conversation she informed that she needed to go pick up her son from school and we exchanged contact information, arranging to meet again at noon the following Monday, and as quickly as she had approached me, she left. I had never had a conversation with someone who spoke such limited English and her burka caught me off guard at first. In retrospect, I probably should have expected it but still it seemed as a tangible signifier of the cultural differences between us and made it very clear to me that, in terms of improving her English skills, my work would be cut out for me.