Overcoming difficulties

A student of French as a foreign language with whom I thought I could speak English, but in fact I’d been wrong about this possibility, so we didn’t have a common language, we didn’t have enough of a lingua franca to understand each other. In that case, advice is impossible, so you have to try to do something, to gradually bring people into advice, but it’s impossible, so you come up against an impossibility. All I managed to get across to this learner was that I wasn’t there to correct her mistakes, so she should come to me having already spotted the places where she had problems, so that’s what she did, I’d had to give her a French method because what we generally do is pick up bits and pieces of what interests us left and right, but as there was no way of explaining the whys and wherefores to her, in fact she’d adopted a method and she did absolutely everything, which from a learning point of view is absolutely unnecessary as it wasn’t necessary for her to commit herself to all the exercises on offer. I tried to tell her, she politely said yes, yes, and then she left again, and every time she came back she’d done all the exercises and highlighted the things she still wanted explanations on. So it wasn’t self-directed learning, but it had to be like that for several times, well for a whole series of counselling sessions, that’s 8 or 9 counselling sessions, she signed up again, because she liked it, she thought it was very good, at the end of the second series she was starting to make enough progress and we were starting to be able to talk a bit about what she was doing, but she wouldn’t give up, she’d moved on to the next volume of the method and she wouldn’t let go, no matter how many times I suggested other things, she wouldn’t do them, so that was a very, very painful memory, but one that was actually linked to a poor initial assessment of the conditions in which this learning was going to take place. We thought we’d be able to communicate in English, but we couldn’t do it.