Met with my adult tutee for the first time today. She had suggested the meeting at the Starbucks on Tennessee Street near the campus. Soon Gyu is from South Korea and said she will be in this country for a year. She is a student at CIES. She already holds a Ph.D. from a university in Korea in Social Welfare. She told me that she was head of a counseling center prior to coming to the U.S. with her husband, an American.
She advised she first met her husband when he was recommended to her as an English tutor to help her prepare an English-language presentation. He is now teaching at CIES and working on an advanced degree in TESOL. We discussed some of the issues she dealt with in deciding to enter a cross-cultural marriage. She stated that after her parents got to know her husband, they accepted him. But, learning their daughter was involved with an American rather than a Korean man took her parents some time to adjust to. On the other hand, she said his parents accepted her right away. She said she and her husband will be visiting her in-laws over the Spring Break. She said that when her husband completes his degree program, they will return to Korea to live.
Soon Gyu had brought with her some grammar homework and classwork she had been working on. Although she asked for my help with this, she proceeded to complete it on her own. She only asked me to verify her thinking process.
She said that she is interested in learning to speak and pronounce words more clearly. Her pronunciation was quite understandable to me, but she stated she had problems with Ls and Rs. We laughed because my name has both and spent some time making sure she could say may name properly. I suggested that she sing in the shower, literally, using "La-La" instead of words for the melody. She said she would try this.
Since I had spoken with her and had seen her writing of sentences from her homework already, I asked Soon Gyu to try to read a prologue out loud from a science fiction book by Sherry Tepper (The Margarets). I did not expect her to be able to read it very well. To my surprise, she read every word and pronounced these correctly. She needed to sound out about four words, but did so fairly quickly without my help. She did not, however, understand all that she had read.
Near the end of our session, Soon Gyu's husband joined us for a few minutes. He was very nice, and he is clearly supportive of her learning process. Since next week is Spring Break, we made a tentative time to meet on Friday , knowing this may change because of Soon Gyu's planned trip. We discussed meeting at Strozier Library, but since I am not certain if I can access the library as a former FSU student (alumna only), we decided for certain to meet the week after Spring Break at Starbucks.
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