Chris H. CP 2

I met again with Marcel by the pool near my apartment complex. The weather was not great that day and we had to get under the pavilion when it began to rain a few minutes after he arrived. We talked some about Spring break and his plans for the upcoming week. He said that he was going to go the Panama City with several other Dutch students who were seeking pilot’s licenses in the area. We began talking about flying, the drawl of airline flight, and we both agreed that on both sides of the Atlantic it was horrible. I told him how I too pursued a pilot’s license at one time, and that flying had always excited me, especially with the prospects of landing and traveling. After that, we began speaking about conservation skills in English. He struggles most with tenses and finding the correct vocabulary word to facilitate flowing thoughts. Often he will say a sentence and motion for me to fish for a concluding word or phrase. This is helpful, to a degree, for him, but I feel also that it limits him from real comprehension in the language because he is all too often provided the missing piece. He told me how his sister learned English in under a year while studying abroad in London, and then described to me several of the cockney phrases she taught him on her return to Arnhem. He surprised me on his ability to mimic accents, both British and American, and I told him that it is a real strong point in linguistic ability to be able to resonate the tonality of speech. I encouraged him to join my tutoring group the following week, in which I planned to practice speech and listening skills. He agreed and I hope that he will follow through as most of his difficulty with English arises in word comprehension and usage errors, not in listening and understanding.