Deb_CP3 & TP3-July 16, 2012

Joyce & I started off our conversation time laughing about the idiom “playing ‘possum” that I had taught her during our last meeting.  She said that she was so excited when she saw the recent Geico insurance commercial on TV.  The commercial shows two children staring at an opossum lying in their yard.  They call to their father at the BBQ behind them that “it’s dead.”  He replies to them that it’s only “playing ‘possum.”  And then, the opossum jumps up and hisses at the children at the end of the commercial.  Joyce said that she was so excited because she knew what that meant! 

Joyce is always concerned about using her grammar correctly.  She asked about the proper use of “much” and “many.”  We explored several examples about how these words would properly be used.  We spent some time talking about the English speaking church that she attends.  She was worried that she meets so many people that she can’t remember their names.  I shared with her that this is a worldwide problem with people, not just someone learning English.  I gave her some of the business tricks that I had learned in remembering the names of people that you had just met and it seemed to give her some comfort.

We moved into her tutoring session with continuing to work on vocabulary and comprehension to take the nursing license exam.  One of the CIES staff members logged on to a computer for us to use to work through a test website.  We determined that she is better able to concentrate on the comprehension of the question, as well as reasoning the answer, if I read the questions and answers out loud to her.  She is well aware that I won’t be there to read the questions to her on the test.  But, for some reason, and not for comprehension, she said that she concentrates better thinking through the question, if I read it to her.  I can only speculate that by pronouncing the English words for her, she is focusing on the questions and answers, and not on pronunciation inside her head.  In the time that we were working on the test, she was not scoring it, but she still seemed to get a majority of the answers correct.  Two questions made her aware that her nursing experience and study guide were not enough to prep her for the exam.  One question concerned a common birth defect for Native Americans—not many of those in Taiwan.  Another question concerned a food measurement outside of the metric system.  We planned to try to find more online resources to expand her knowledge base for further study.