Volunteering

I finally got to meet my Conversation English tutee today. I was kinda surprised that he was 28 years old as I had been expecting a student my age, but he'll do fine. Our meeting went well, we sat down at the cafe in Union South for an hour and a half or so to chat about each other and meetings, and all of that. The problems he has with English are kinda interesting, stuff I've never really considered to be an issue. Aside from just not knowing words or how to pronounce words, he has trouble with different uses of verbs. Things like, the use of the word "look" in 'look out', 'look up', and 'look after'. Being a native English speaker, I never thought about how that could wind up being a problem to someone who has memorized the definition of "look" to be "seeing with your eyes". He doesn't have trouble with his Electrical Engineering textbooks but he has a hard time with watching TV and reading newspapers, mainly because the engineering textbooks use very technical terms and stuff like the newspaper and TV use a much more common words. This might wind up being a bit of a problem for my English project, or it might help out. Maybe I could ask him to watch the nightly news the day before we meet, or get a newspaper, and just talk about the contents and the story itself. He seems more focused on learning common english though, rather than the more indirect approach of just talking, but we'll see how that goes.

I should have made paragraphs.