Rosario's letter
Hello David!
Thee scribe one letter. You companion Rosario for who part how I am. Imagery who I got men and my name is Carlos.
Am high with the hair long blonde and swizzle.
Am I artist and give concert touch the flute, to taste to clothe extravagant for my actuations.
Expectation, who thee to taste my news image. Your leave from thee.
Your companion the friend from class.
Carlos
posted by blog-efl @ 8:17 pm
1 Comments:
This letter was written by a beginner the first year I started teaching.
Rosario was in her fifties and had decided she wanted to learn English. She had never studied the language before, and neither had she the benefit (as the other members of the class did) of being bilingual (Spanish and Catalan). She proved to be the most difficult student I was to have in that first year of teaching.
The assignment was: Select a photo (I had a selection of photos of people wearing a variety of clothes and involved in various actions), and to write a letter of introduction to another memebr of the class.
Rosario chose a picture of Ian Anderson playing the flute, and turned in the effort I have reproduced. I was so intrigued, I asked her (in Spanish of course) how she had written the letter, and she told me that she had written it out in Spanish and had then used a dictionary and looked up every word. It had taken her a long time to compose. It became obvious that she had used a very old Spanish-English dictionary to translate the letter.
It was a group class and Rosario soon fell behind. The school offered her weekly one-to-one classes that proved to be the some of the challenging teaching sessions I've ever had to endure.
After a few weeks of these classes, she finally gave up. My first failure as a teacher. I have often wondered what happened to her, and if she has ever tried learning English again.
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