During Service #3

         Our visit today was a little bit more laid back than our past visits. Do and Sui are already very good at their alphabet so today we started off by focusing more on difficult numbers and how to count money. We brought a small bag of multiple pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters and also some singles and a five dollar bill. The bills were easiest for them to remember because they had the number values clearly written on them. When we first got there, Do answered the door and only him and his mother were at their apartment. I figured it would be like the last time and we would be able to focus on Do and give him our full attention again. Do started off a little bit slow with the memorization of the names and values of the coins, but after he got that down it was smooth sailing from then on. 

         About a half hour after we arrived, there was a knock on their apartment door. Sui and Nei had just gotten back from their English classes that they take during the day. Even though Sui was just learning English in her class she still was very eager to come work with us. Because Sui showed up we got to work with Do with the money before she got the chance to. We went over the names of the coins and their values and it helped Sui and also made Do an expert with money. As I had talked about before I thought it would be beneficial for Sui if we worked with her separately. It was perfect since Do knew what we were talking about he knew to sit back and watch and even translate for Sui exactly when she needed him. In a sense, we did get to work with Sui independently and I think it helped her tremendously. 

         The rest of our time with Do and Sui, we spent just trying to have conversation with some verbal and nonverbal cues as well. This helped them to not just hear the words and memorize a word with a picture, but also to comprehend what we said and comprehend how to respond. During our time I began to realize the Social Penetration Theory taking place. The Social Penetration Theory explains how people move from an impersonal relationship to a personal relationship. The very first day we had a very impersonal relationship with Do and Sui. All that we disclosed to each other was our names and then teaching them some basic words and numbers in English. Now that they are more comfortable with us I can see us all peeling the layers of our onions to reach a more personal relationship. We were talking about how their classes were going and what their favorite things were such as food and subjects in school. Their vocabulary is limited, however, with the amount of words they can understand and put into sentences they are giving us a look into their lives more and more everyday that we see them. I can also see the Social Penetration Theory taking place within the group of volunteers and especially with Aj and me. We had a rough start with coming together and being able to actually cooperate to go and visit the family. Now, we are becoming a lot closer and having detailed conversations with each other on the car ride and comparing music selections.  

        Also during our conversation I started noticing how they spoke English words. As we teach them more complex words it is more clear for me to see what they can and cannot pronounce. They do not know the phonological rules of linguistics in English. Phonological rules have to do with how the words of a language sound or how they are pronounced. Whenever we would ask them what we were sitting on they would say "cou" and leave out the "ch" in the word couch. I said it slowly for them and it took Do an especially long time just to say the full word couch. In their language I am guessing the sound of "ch" is not used very often or maybe even ever. Another word they had a hard time with was saying dime. Instead Do would say "dine" and when he did pronounce it right he had to use a strong and long emphasis on the "i". When Sui said dime she would actually pronounce it "dame" and use an a sound instead of an i sound. Even though we were speaking these words to them and they could hear us, it was their phonological rules in their language that kept them from being able to correctly pronounce English words.

        The Social Penetration theory is explaining to me why I get more and more excited to see our family with the people I have the pleasure of volunteering with. In the future I am looking forward to moving our relationship to an even more personal state and getting to know these people beyond what they would disclose to an impersonal relationship. I can also use it to know my boundaries of how fast or how slow to move into our relationships and become close friends. Knowing that their memorization and understand of words is tremendously improving, we can try to spend our last day together working on the pronunciation of words. We can move forward to harder readings and be right next to them to help them with any pronunciation help and also give them a visual how certain letters together make a different sound than what they are used to.