This week was midterm week so for one day the big sisters did not attend the class for the written portion of the midterm. The second day big sisters interviewed their teaching partner little sisters. The first interview was on the second week of the semester. They will be interviewed again at the final exam.

I had three little sisters to interview. The direction they went with their interview topics were quite interesting. One little sister is interested in calligraphy and also lives in the same new city outside of Seoul that I do. Another little sister talked about her beliefs in friendships and expectations of relationships. She also touched on how one can achieve their goals.

There was a wide range of conversation topics. 

One little sister struggled to produce language. She had very long pauses before forming her response. Once she did respond, she was able to form pretty coherent answers. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if it was the topics or just that's how she speaks English, she took too long of pauses to be considered for any more advanced proficiency. I haven't encountered someone like this quite to this extreme. It was almost like she was so comfortable with only talking about something that was of interest to her, but it was very very difficult to find anything that she was interested in to be comfortable to talk about. Even when I asked her a question about her interest in art, which I learned about from a previous class, she struggled to talk about it with ease. 

The format of the speaking interviews is interesting when we test students at a level higher than they are comfortable with for the "probing" stage. Because of the probing stage, it's easy to see if students continue in the lower level. I think with this observation, it's pretty standard and expected. But going back to the student who pauses, she was doing this in her expected level of performance as well. I don't know if this is a sign of uneasiness of understanding the topic or more translation of advanced grammar. I assume it's the latter. But at times, there would be almost no response as well. The final stage was a role play and I picked the one that would suit her the most. It also seemed to be fairly simple and I hoped it's as interesting, but the little sister was having a very difficult time forming ideas to continue in the role play. So it took three times as long, than perhaps needed, with the long pauses. The questions themselves were fine enough. But it's almost as if the little sister avoided simple content and forced herself to try to find very difficult questions that she wasn't quite fluent in. It's hard to evaluate someone's fluency in a language when it seems like they are only focusing on their highest possible accuracy of grammar level.

But I tried to end each interview efficiently but with a good "cool down" to keep them in a good mood when they left the interview room.