Recently, Steve and Gerdine Stanley had their language evaluation, so now they need to work on correcting all the mistakes they made!
Steve has some basic vocabulary to brush up on and there were questions on linking sentences together too.
After recovering from their language consultant visit (and the sickness they brought with them) Steve and Gerdine are feeling motivated to keep going. They have some concrete communication tasks to work on and were reminded of a few tools they can use to learn. Initially Steve felt tired after the evaluation seeing how much further there was to go (and that is just for language learning, never mind the teaching and translation which will follow) but that has worn off and the team are planning again.
The next big milestone for the team is the Hansen family’s return from home assignment in April. In the next four or five months, they are thinking that they will have another language evaluation. They all hope to move up a level and plan to get a chunk of their Kovol cultural summaries paper done. Everyone is enjoying a bit of a change of pace. Steve had been working on texts quite a lot where he needed to figure out word perfect what people had said so that he could study it and mimic it. Now when he is asking questions it is a little more natural and fluid, as he only needs to get the answer to the question – not a word perfect transcription. Steve is not sure if they have been given what you could call a ‘second wind’ – but the motivation problems Steve was having just before the check have melted away. They just need to be careful not to push too hard in all the excitement and become exhausted!