Today saw another one of my forays into investigative journalism/trying
to make some cash in the two hours when my youngest is at nursery.
I had decided to interview the Hungarian proprietors of the newly opened langos takeaway with the hope of generating a little publicity for their business. I was all prepared with Dictaphone on the table in between myself and my interviewee, Robert. Sadly, however, the door of the shop opened and a very noisy langos customer talked loudly in Hungarian for the duration of the interview.
When I got home Robert's softly spoken musings were drowned out by the sound of frying langos, the rattling of plates and the bellowing of the langos customer. Ah, well.
In tonight's lesson we looked at the difference between will and going to . Despite having taught an assessed lesson on this very subject on my DELTA course a mere year ago, I feel I have failed to crack this very subtle difference in the minds of my learners. Especially when the class consists of two Thai learners (the Thai language has no equivalent to the way English expresses the future) and two Polish learners (who have a future auxiliary verb, but struggle to distinguish between will and going to.) The course book only muddy matters further by providing decontextualised snippets of dialogue. I will have to mull this over before next week...
In the meantime...preparations are underway for International Night at the library on Friday, and we are gearing up for our poetry translation workshop, led by Jen Hadfield, tomorrow. It's set to be a fun week...
