Chelsea TS #3

Today, I met with Lester for our first tutoring session. Lester is from Guatemala and speaks two languages, Mam and Spanish. Mam is part of the Maya language family and is only spoken by approximately 500,000 people! Lester mostly wants to improve his speaking and listening skills.

This English learner is particularly interesting because while he studies with Duolingo occasionally, the majority of the English he has acquired was picked up in the kitchen where he works. The English speakers there are actually Taiwanese and don't possess the best speaking skills themselves. While listening to Lester speak, I was on the lookout for mistakes in pronunciation and grammar typical of someone who speaks Spanish. However, I actually found that his errors were of the kind that his coworkers and superiors probably make (completely omitting prepositions, articles, and "to be"). This tells me that the mistakes are unlikely to be stemming from mistakes in his monitoring; he has acquired these habits through communicating at work. On the bright side, I have no trouble understanding what he is saying when he speaks. For now, we will work on reinforcing the good habits through correction of the above mistakes and exposure to lots of native English speaking!