ESL Conversation 5

For my fifth conversation with Giovanka, we, as usual, met at Union Grounds. As I began asking her how her day was going, she flat out told me “I am very scared.” She always is very dramatic when she talks, so her “I am very scared” really scared me. I began to ask her what she was scared about and what was going on in her life. She explained to me that she was nervous for her English final because she had just taken a practice test and didn’t do so well on her essay. I asked her what the topic was, what she wrote about, and what made her do so poorly on the exam, and realized that all she needed to do was learn how to make a simple outline.

            I love grammar, organizing, and outlining, so this was right up my ally. I showed her how she needs an introduction, three main points, and a conclusion, helped her learn how to come up with topic sentences, and taught her about a thesis statement. She said that she had already learned all of this in her classes, but that she just wasn’t “getting it.” I wrote it all out for her on a piece of notebook paper so she could use it to practice when she studied, but, in the meantime, we decided to make a game out of it. In this “game” I gave her a question or topic to write an essay about and she had to come up with a thesis statement and three main arguing points and write them as an outline (just number them with roman numerals, pretty much) as fast as she could. I gave her some silly topics, some hard ones, some that I knew she would like and others that I knew she would hate (because that's the true test, if you can write about something you don't care about). We actually had a lot of fun playing this game—she was learning and improving and I love teaching so it was perfect. We ended up playing this game until I had to leave for class.

            Giovanka told me that American writing is much different than writing in Brazil. Ours is a lot more structured, while theirs is a lot more flowy and less structured. This is probably why she was having such a problem making distinct paragraphs. After our meeting, though, I hope that she will be able to ace her final and write a brilliant essay. I know she can do it!