Zachary Backes - TP 8

6/21/12

Talal and I met today in the CIES break room, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite spots to hang out in between classes. However, we both recognized how hungry the two of us were so we decided to change the venue to someplace with food. Since I was on my bike and he didn't have a car we were limited by how far we were willing to walk in the Florida heat. Luckily, Pitaria is right down the street and the idea of falafels sounded good to us both.

As we were walking I brought up his recent trip to Orlando to celebrate the end of the summer session. As he was regaling me with stories of him and his friends living it up "Saudi style" I noticed a peculiarity when he was describing past tense occurrences. Talal tended to add "-ed" excessively to words. Some phrases were like "We had-ed gone to الندي (Club).", "He didn't-ed know her." He wasn't doing it all the time and it was slightly obscured by his accent but as I listened I tried to mark where he would add the "ed".

We made it to Piteria without incurring heat stroke, and I was still listening to the story of how his friend Muhammad was failing miserably at picking up American women when we walked up to the counter. The conversation was jumping from Arabic to English, a habit we seem to have developed, and the thought of "oh! maybe I should order for Talal" popped into my head. I needn't have worried. One thing I really respect about Talal is how fearless he seems to be using English outside of the class. I often forget that hes only been in this country for four months, especially when he walks right up to the counter and orders for both him and myself.

He also has such an optimistic view on learning language in general. He is one of my biggest supporters in learning Arabic, so much so that it is almost hard to call him a tutee, because he has taught me more than my text books have. As he was ordering the cute cashier girl behind the counter asked the normal cashier's questions of "would you like drink/fries/supersize/ect.with that?" Talal turns around to me and for an instant I think the questions might have confused him, but then he smiles and repeats her questions in Arabic. I still have a problem understanding everything in a spoken sentence but thankfully context clues like تشرب (you drink) and the fact I knew what he was translating made it possible for me to form a response.

I'm noticing that I tend to make better guesses at words I don't know when listening then when reading, and I think it is because you have more sensory clues like inflection and tone of voice that you don't have in a written medium. Anyways, as we got our food and settled into a table I brought up the whole extra "ed" thing I had noticed on the walk over. Funny enough, Talal had noticed it in his speech already but said that it's because words like had are very close words in Arabic like هدث (Hadith, "this") and he is so used to pronouncing these words that if he isn't paying attention he will add extra syllables to make them sound more Arabic.

I asked him if he would quickly write down the part of the story for me where I had noticed the most errors. and sure enough, his writing was almost perfect, a few spelling mistakes here and there but the grammar was solid. So it was not an issue of him understanding the concepts of the grammar but more of just pronunciation. We finished up the session by coming up with sentences that used "had", "didn't", "had not" and others that caused this verbal tick. I told him to practice saying these sentences for the rest of the day to himself and then, whenever he is bored or looking to practice, come with others that he knows cause him to do this and work at removing the habit. It's not something I look forward to doing in Arabic because I've noticed the same trend with certain words. I'll relate them to an English word that sounds familiar and Ill end up pronouncing it closer to English than Arabic. It really is amazing the things you notice in how people learn language, and we as TEFL students have such a cool opportunity to teach and learn at the same time.