2nd ESL Class

            During my second ESL class, I was paired with Mary, a 20-year-old from Guatemala. Her boyfriend, for lack of a better word, will be called "Alex." He also comes to the ESL class. Mary is currently 8 months pregnant and works at Target. Being from Guatemala where there are many different languages spoken, she speaks Mam, a derived form of the ancient Mayan language. So it was a very interesting situation when I learned that the person I'd be teaching English was in a very similar boat as me: she, too, was also learning Spanish. 

            First, I started with an introduction to break the ice, just as I had with J. I wanted to see how good her Spanish was versus her English. Sometimes, when I would talk hurriedly, I would conjugate a verb wrong and she would correct me, which I'm glad she did. I asked about working at Target and about her pregnancy. She also has another kid with Alex. Dennis and I were sitting next to each other while he was simultaneously instructing Alex. At times, Dennis would try to talk to the 2 of the them at the same time and try to see what each of their answers were about a certain situation. For instance, he asked them at the same time who does the shopping and who does the cooking. It turned out that Mary did both, and she seemed to know more English than he did. 

            I then moved on to the text and had her read some paragraphs to see how her pronunciation was. Then I would translate some of the paragraphs to Spanish and she would correct me here and there. 

All in all, it was a great experience, but very different from teaching J because I did not know the first language in which Mary spoke, so I didn't really have anything to compare English to, except for the little she did know in Spanish. Hopefully everyone understands what I mean by this.