Thursday, December 2, 2010
How to Improve Conversation Partner for Next Year
After having so many difficulties with meeting with my conversation partner, I have a couple ideas of how you can improve it for next year. First, I definitely agree with lowering the amount of meetings to 5-6. College students have such a hectic schedule and that is double for honors students. My days are always filled with meetings, studying, and trying to get to bed at a decent hour. In addition, it is extremely important that the partners that sign up for mentoring actually want to do it. After watching my partner continue to cancel on me the day of, I realized that she probably did not want to meet up with me. This made sense considering she had a long day and probably just wanted to go home and get some rest. Another way to improve conversation partners is to possibly to meet in groups. Having 2 ESL students and 2 from our class get together would allow the ESL students to not be so intimidated. I observed that my partner was often nervous speaking in front of me, but if she had someone from her class with her, she would not be a scared.
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I definately agree with the amount of meetings. Not only our schedule, but obviously the ESL students have a lot going on as well. Meeting in groups would help out a lot. It make the experience not as awkward for guys like me, who are just awkward in general. And like you said, the students would not feel as intimidated around someone the can relate to. Group dates are always more fun anyways.
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of meeting in groups to calm the nerves. I think that while you keep the same conversation partner it would also be great to rotate the groups so you and your partner are meeting someone new each time you get together. Also, in order to get the ESL students to want to go to these meetings, I think their teachers should give them a litte incentive. For example, maybe they can get some extra credit on one of their tests if they have met with their conversation partner a certain abount of times.
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