During my second week, I tutored two new students. The first was my first American student. He was an African-American man born and raised in Nashville, and came to NALC to work on his reading so that he could graduate from Barber School. He didn't say too much about himself, but we did some great work together. It was clear that he had a firm grasp on speaking, and could use visual clues to guess at what words meant. But it was also clear that he wanted to sound words out for himself and do his own work. It was encouraging to see that he really desired to learn.
My second student was a man from Korea. He told me he was studying at Vanderbilt's business school on a grant from his company. He had been reading English for about five years, but admitted that his biggest weakness was listening and speaking. After blazing through our written lesson, we worked for the rest of the time on speaking different sounds he had difficulty with (th, t, d, and l) and just talking, so that he could practice listening. I was amazed that he was able to get through his classes based on his reading skills alone, even though they were quite advanced.
After I left, I reflected on how different my two students were. One was a native-born speaker who struggled greatly with reading, and the other was a foreign speaker who was a very good reader. In a brief encounter, one might be inclined to write off the poor speaker as uneducated, but my experience with these two students proved just the opposite. An inability to speak and listen well does not indicate a lack of education, merely a lack of experience with the spoken language. This experience really brought the old saying "don't judge a book by its cover" to life.
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