[Essay 10] My first student
*Disclamier : This essay was written about a month ago.
Last Sunday, I had my first class with the first client, who is working for an airline as a new employee this month. As her workplace is at an airport, she is struggling with speaking to her captains who are from many different countries, because they rotate every day, and speaks English only. What she wants to learn is how to communicate well in English with them in case a troubling and unexpected situation suddenly happen. The reason why she decided to practice speaking English is because of one of her coworkers. One day, her coworker talked to one of the captains to ask what to do for one late passenger. The person didn't show up on time. So, she asked him if they had to offload or wait until the passenger showed up. The captain answered something that sounded ambiguous to her. She misunderstood what he said, since she was not good at English. She thought that he wanted to wait. In a while, the captain called on her and asked what's going on. He was really upset because what he meant actually was that he was willing to wait for a shortime, but not that long. It was completely oppsoite to her thought. She had to apologize for her misunderstanding. As my student watched the whole situation, she didn't want to make that type of mistake that resulted from being short on English skills.
After hearing the story, I suggested two options. Option A is to read through a reliable grammar book and learn how to make a sentence and describe a situation in English so that she can apply the knowledge from textbook to reality. Because if her knowledge of English is enough to understand all the grammars, she would be able to either wirte and speak in English confidently. Option B is that she simulates, scripts situation with her own sentence and gets feedback from me. It’s her suggestion and I agreed with that it’s quite effective for her, since she will have to work in a month and one month is not enough to study all the grammars.
In this project, my plan is basically to feedback what she scripts in English first and I will add some useful phrase or word on it, not just correcting. It will be English only during the entire lecture and also partially we will do role-playing that feels more realistic.
