The Great Decoder

To teach English as a foreign language it helps to be a really good decoder. The student says something to you that comes out all scrambled, it enters your brain, you descramble it, repeat it correctly to the student with a smile and the student then repeats the correct phrase, smiles and continues talking. You get about a 2 second window in which to take in, decode and spit out the correct sentence...if you take longer and the student can see you puzzling about what they said, they get uncomfortable, lose confidence and shut up. Let me tell you, when you have 75 minutes to kill, the last thing you want is the student getting uncomfortable and claming up. So, as you can see the decoding game is very important. If you do it well, the student can learn something AND he or she will happily chat away to you and the time flies by.

Here are some excerpts from this weeks classes:

Student A: Hello Kristina! Did the Christmas father come to search you in your parent's house in USA?
Kristina: Yes! SANTA CLAUS did come FIND me at my parent's house in THE STATES!

Student B: I met my old friend hazardously in the street.
Kristina: You ran into an old friend in the street? That's nice!

Student C: For Noel my childrens received movie plays!
Kristina: Your children got video games for Christmas? I bet they liked that!

Another student told me that at the lunch break after the seminar he lead in English, he asked one of the participants, "Did you pleasure yourself this morning?" He couldn't figure out why she got flustered and acted so strangely. I told him that I thought something had gotten a little lost in translation and that next time it would be better to ask, "Did you ENJOY yourself at the seminar this morning?"

Of course, I get a kick out of the little things I hear people say in English...but there are two sides to this coin! It makes me wonder what on Earth I'm saying in French half of the time!