The 6 Phases of GPA

Phase 1: Connecting

Your first connection to Tunisian culture enables you to identify & interact with hundreds of objects, actions, positions, power tools and survival expressions - all in Arabic! Emphasis on listening and TPR (Total Physical Response). 100 hours. 800-1000 new words.

Phase 2: Emerging

As you emerge as a real person to Tunisian people, you will use wordless picture books and Story-building techniques with your nurturer to strengthen talking ability and build another 1500 words, using multiple tenses. Record all stories in various tenses for later review.

Phase 3: Knowable

You are no longer a foreigner to Tunisians, you are knowable. Activities in this phase use shared stories, world stories, scripts of life, reminiscing, legends, jokes, and proverbs - gaining more of an insider’s perspective.

Phase 4: Deep Personal Relationships

Your nurturer takes less of a protective role for you, but still helps you to go deeper in conversation with a broad pool of relationshps. To enable you to do this, you will use ‘life story interviews’ and ethnography to ask insightful questions, to understand the purposes and underlying significance of all that is around you. You will possibly even be able to tell a joke that makes your Tunisian friends laugh (because the joke is funny to them, not laugh at you).

Phase 5: Widening Understanding

Sky’s the limit! Now, you can understand “Native to native discourses” of all kinds: groups of friends, television, radio, lectures, art classes, or whatever! You make recordings to review with your nurturer in sessions, correcting and explaining anything you do not understand.

Phase 6: Every Participating and Growing

You intentionally keep building vocabulary as you are immersed in the Tunisian languacultural world, understanding most of what you hear around you.