Reading 2

Part 1

You are going to read a magazine article about a language course. For questions 1-8. choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according to the text.

Travelling to learn

Having decided in later he that it might actually be quite nice to master another language, rather than dusting off my schoolgirl French, I opted for a dean break Spanish. Three years of half-finished evening classes later, thanks to the enthusiastic teacher's efforts I could order in a restaurant and ask directions, but my conversational skills were limited to asking everybody how many brothers and sisters they had. The only true way to master a language is to live and breathe it for a period of time. I toyed with the idea of taking a language 'immersion' course abroad, but two little words always stopped me: home stay. Then I saw that tour operator Journey Latin America had started offering Spanish courses in Peru, amongst other places. The opportunity to realise two long-held ambitions in one holiday — to improve my Spanish and to see Machu Picchu — proved irresistible. (line 21) My misgivings evaporate the moment I am met by my home-stay family, the Rojas, at Cusco airport.

They greet me warmly, like an old friend. Carlos is an optician and Carmucha owns a restaurant. With their four children they live in a comfortable house right in the centre of town. Then I'm whisked off to a family friend's birthday party, where I understand nothing apart from the bit where they sing 'Happy Birthday'. By the end of the evening my face aches from holding an expression of police, but uncomprehending interest, and I fall into bed wondering what I've let myself in for. The following morning, I'm off to school and get to know my new school chums. We're aged between 19 and 65, each spending up to a month studying before travelling around Peru. We had all clearly hit it off with our new families, though one of us is a bit alarmed at the blue flame that jumps our of the shower switch in the morning, one of us has a long bus ride in to the school, and another is disconcerted to find that his host mother is actually six years younger than he is. We're all keen to meet our teachers and sec which class we'll be joining, but after sitting the placement test, we learn that as it's not yet high season and the school is not too busy, tuition will be one-on-one.

Although (line 49) some find the prospect daunting, to my mind, this is a pretty impressive ratio — though even in high season the maximum class size swells to only four pupils. As the week unfolds, I slip into a routine. Four hours of classes in the morning, back home for lunch, then afternoons free for sightseeing. Cusco will supply anything it can (line 57) to lure the feckless student away from his or her homework. It's all too easy to swap verb conju-gations for a swift beer in a bar, although it's at least three days before anybody plucks up the courage to suggest that maybe we don't have to go back to our respective families for dinner every night. Once the seed of rebellion has been planted we queue up like nervous teenagers outside the phone box plucking up the courage to ring our 'Mums' and ask if we can stay out late — all the more strange when you consider that our average age is probably thirty-three. But after one strangely unsatisfying restaurant meal, I decide that true authenticity is back home at the dinner table with Carmucha. As the week wears on, a strange thing starts to happen: the dinner-table chatter, which at first was so much 'white noise', starts to have some meaning and, miraculously, I can follow the thread of the conversation. What's more, I've started to dream in Spanish!

1 How did the writer feel after her courses of evening classes?

2 What put the writer off the idea of doing an 'immersion' course?

3 The word 'misgivings' (line 21) refers to the writers

4 How did the writer feel after the party she attended?

5 What did the writer discover when she met her fellow students?

6 The word 'daunting' (line 49) suggests that the writers fellow students viewed one-to-one lessons as

7 A 'feckless' student (line 57) is one who

8 How did the writer feel when her fellow students suggested a night out together?