On Thursday evening, March 20th, I participated in my first conversation partner session with Ahmed. Ahmed is a beginner student in English. We conducted our session at the local Starbucks not far from campus.
After introductions, I asked Ahmed a series of questions to gauge his English comprehension level and soon learned that he is a very new student of the language. He has only been studying for five months. As a result, we kept our discussion to a manageable pace for him. Despite his limited time studying English, he demonstrates significant progress and remains eager to learn as much as possible during his one year at CIES. His initial progress is a possible indication of how the learning curve appears to be steep in the early stages, but levels out as studies continue.
As a conversation partner, my role in this interaction is somewhat different from that required in tutoring sessions. I am willing to make corrections in grammar, etc., however I avoid any instruction relating to grammatical errors. I welcome any input regarding this last point from my peers.
I think that's a good approach to take in your sessions as a conversation partner. I would also suggest maybe just keeping the conversations light and fun for your partner. I feel, in my opinion, conversation partners are supposed to be a "friend" rather than correcting the errors. A part of learning the language is to speak it and most of the CIES students don't use English on a day-to-day basis because their group of friends tend to be of the same cultural background. So, even if for an hour their English is not "correct," having them speak it for an hour is actually doing a lot for them without you having to continually correct them.
ReplyDeleteI agree with kyungah that our conversation partner conversations should mostly be an opportunity for cultural exchange and for giving our partners an opportunity to improve their fluency. :)
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