I haven't been able to meet up with my CIES CP yet, so I'll be blogging about my time at the English Conversation Club at the Center for Global Engagement (http://cge.fsu.edu/interculturalprog/ecc.cfm). I basically show up in the CGE lounge every Wednesday afternoon, ready to speak English with whoever shows up that week. The English Conversation Club is open to all international students, visiting scholars, spouses, etc.
This week only two people were able to attend - one an intermediate level, native-Hindi speaker, the other a beginner, native-Korean speaker. For the period of time that both were there, we carried on a 3-way conversation, despite the two different speaking levels. Fortunately, the Korean woman had a high receptive listening knowledge and could follow the conversation, even if she did not have enough productive vocabulary to contribute often. Once the other person left, she and I had a one-on-one conversation which went very well. She especially opened up when I asked her questions about her life in Korea. In future, I plan to use ideas from Appendix B of our textbook - "Culture-Topic Activity Ideas for Oral Skills Classes" to lead attendees in conversation.
Sounds good!
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