Today I met again with Sultan. He had many questions ready for me. He really does a great job with his speaking. He wanted to know about Orlando and the Disney World attractions. I told him it had been a while since I had been there, but I explained how much tickets cost, the different kinds of tickets you could buy,what parts of the attractions were included with the price of the ticket, the hotels that are on Disney property, etc. It was basically an Orlando 101 class. Then we covered how far Orlando was from Tallahassee and the different transportation options that are available.
The next big topic was where to get his hair cut. I never really stopped to think about how difficult or frightening something so simple as getting a haircut could be. He did not know where to go, so I told him a few different places. He asked if men and women went to the same places or if they were separated by gender. I told him where I go and how to get there. He found a picture of a soccer player that is famous in Portugal. He told me what he liked about this guys haircut and how he could tell the stylist to style his hair that way. I explained the terms he would need, such as what cutting the hair close to the head means and what length means. He wanted to be able to "spike" his hair and needed to know how to tell someone that.
In the end, I think that we were able to get it all sorted out for him. I am looking forward to seeing if he go and gets it cut before I see him again.
I have never thought about how scary it would actually be to get your haircut while describing how you want it in another language. My hair would not turn out well if I tried to tell someone how I wanted my haircut in Spanish!
ReplyDeleteRole playing can help a lot here. You can really see what gaps the student has with grammar, vocabulary and pragmatics and instruct from there.
ReplyDelete