Charlie_TP2

Today I met with Yi-Jhen inside of WJB. During this past week, I had asked to her write five sentences in which she describes her favorite place in Taiwan. When she presented me her paragraph, she told me she was embarrassed by her inability to express colorful descriptions as many English-speakers can. So to build her vocabulary, and work on both productive and receptive skills, we read the first half of "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by JD Salinger. I figured this was a good selection as it has very good description, the story is very dialogue-heavy thus providing examples of speech, and is written by JD Salinger (how can you go wrong with Salinger?). Yi-Jhen loved the first half. She thought the story was incredibly interesting, she thought the expressions were very "American," and she liked that it wasn't a story written for children and therefore didn't belittle her intelligence. During this next week, I asked her to take the first half home and re-read it, taking notes, so next week she is able to re-tell me the story based on the notes she has taken. I was nervous about this selection, but it proved to be the right difficulty and a good piece to work with for an ESL student.