Tom - Fawaz, CP # 1, Tuesday, September 3

Tom CP # 1

This entry is an introduction to Fawaz, my conversation partner.  Abdul, my Saudi Arabian tutee, was also present and participated in this session.

Fawaz is an 18 year-old student from Al Farwaniyah in Kuwait.  Fawaz's family consists of his father, his mother, five brothers, and two sisters.  He has been in the United States for about a week.  He studied English for 12 years in his country, but is a foundations student at FSU CIES.

Since this was the first time I have spoken to Fawaz, our efforts were concentrated on getting some sense of his skill level.  We started by talking about Kuwait, a small country of approximately 1,200,000 people.  It is a flat, hot desert country, with a 9-month 'summer', and is rich in oil.  Water is piped in from Saudi Arabia.

Fawaz was capable of struggling through the above description of his origins, so we changed our activity to reading a newspaper article about how peace created new conflicts in the Arab world (Libya, Syria, and Tunisia), since that might be a topic he could identify with or may have heard of.  His reading ability, vocabulary, and pronunciation were very poor, giving me a good idea of at what level our conversations should take place.  Abdul had earlier done the same exercise, and his level was slightly better than Fawaz's, but still clearly foundational.

We then began to explore Fawaz's interest in soccer, and let the conversation lead from topic to topic in a random fashion.  This revealed a great weakness in his command of common western cultural icons.  For example, Fawaz said his favorite soccer team is Barcelona, and the best player on Barcelona is Messi.  I asked where Messi is from, first country, then continent.

Since Messi is from Argentina, I asked about another famous Argentine who is in the news recently, the Pope.  Fawaz did not really know about, and perhaps had not heard of, Argentina, South America, or the Pope.  While this is understandable, it revealed that an important part of learning a language is becoming familiar with cultural norms and common knowledge of the people who use the language.  This gives me another track to follow while we practice our conversational skills.

Through free association, we explored the concepts of 'between', 'close to', and 'far from'.  The Islamic world is divided between Sunnis and Shiites.  Kuwait is close to Iraq, but far from Iran.