Nearing the End of This Journey

During some of my last visits to the refugee home, a sort of sadness began to creep over me because of the bonds that I have created and the realization that I will probably not see these people again. I started noticing more and more improvements being made to their knowledge on the English language; this made me extremely excited to be seeing how I was helping them learn and the positive impact that I was bringing to the family. Their vocabulary had improved and they were excellent at telling me the names of each letter in the alphabet, however, they still were having troubles with pronouncing the certain words, or their phonological interpretations. The family still needs a lot of practice in developing their syntactic language, meaning their sentence structures, because all they know is some vocabulary.  Therefore, their semantic language was coming along quite beautifully, in the sense of they were getting better at matching words to functions. Also, sometimes our pragmatic communication would get jumbled because perhaps the way we were trying to communicate with them, they might interpret it or perceive it in a different way, causing a miscommunication between us. We then had to find other ways to communicate with them in order to get them to understand what we were talking about or asking. One of our strategies was to set out several rows of vocabulary terms and then we would ask them to find one of the several vocabulary words that were in front of them.  Towards the end, my partner and I noticed drastic improvements regarding matching these terms to the correct word being said.

Next time I need to communicate with non-English speaking individuals, I know that I need to approach it in a different way.  For example, should I one day meet someone that cannot speak English well, I will try and apply the skills I have learned towards that situation. I will try to be more specific and not vague with my language choices and even use precise non-verbal language as well.