This Summer

I want to backtrack a bit, and talk about what I did for the first two months of the year.  I was back where I had been studying, after spending Christmas with my family and friends at home. This time I was helping to teach the Summer School, in the Language Learning subject, one of the four Summer School subjects.

Summer School is the minimum requirement for people in my organisation before they leave the country to work in another context. Language Learning as a subject prepares people to learn another language in a context where there may not be a language school, or a textbook, or indeed even anything written in the language at all! The method involves the learner planning the lessons, working with a native speaker as the expert in the language. The learner requests information in or about the language, and the Language Resource Person (LRP) responds.

The class was divided into two groups, one to learn Indonesian and the other to learn Romanian, and I was tutoring the Romanian group. Romanian is a Romance language - related to Spanish, which means I was able to discern patterns and develop theories to help the students, even while I was also learning the language. It was a lot of fun! Our LRP was a young woman, and she had a lot of fun sharing her language with us.

Teaching adults was interesting - quite different from working with teenagers! Marking is always something I find quite stressful, and I put a lot of hours into writing feedback for their language learning progress, which I hope they found helpful! In the end, though, I had the opportunity to try a new recipe, prăjitură Brașov. Unfortunately, I don´t have any photos on my computer! I´ll add some if I work out how to get them off of my phone!