TS Halima Alnakhli

 

Conversation session – with: Qiaochu 4/extra, Tuesday 10/6, 1455-1520hrs, Zoom.

Covered:  Critical Incidents discussion

 

            I had already done all six of the required conversations and blogged them, so this required reaching out and asking for an additional meeting out of the blue and somewhat under a time-crunch.  Shout-out and Thank You to Qiaochu for the extra meeting and conversation.  Instead of explaining to her what I needed to learn from her on the outset of our meet, I decided to start by sharing my own critical incident experience with native Americans (not Native-Americans) when I was around nine or ten years old, and how it affected my social outlook and personal ESL development.  I rarely but still, sometimes, learn something new that isn’t new because it could be new to any American, instead from the ESL angle.  Most recently, maybe in the last two years, I learned that those “Boricua” stickers with the shapes and colors of the Puerto Rican flag mean to say that the person is Puerto Rican.  I had been in America for 28 years at that time, 23 of those in Florida; everybody knew of those stickers.  Not a big thing for you, inconsequential, but it surprised me.  And I felt shy about it, so I never speak of it.

Then I told Qiaochu there are two things I noted, the incident and the effect and response/corrective measures.  For Qiaochu it is an ongoing process based on a first experience.  Her first American friends, not usually aware of ESL matters, blathered on to her as if she understood everything even though she was just starting to get a feel for some of the colloquialisms and such in American English.  It took her a bit of time to remedy this with those and subsequent American friends.  The thing she does is she intones, mentions or sometimes even outright tells her friends that sometimes she won’t understand the meaning of what is being said or how to respond.  Considering how well she speaks and how much she’s gotten the hang of it I think her American friends had to have been coming through for her.