Rachel
7-17-19, 8:45am
Yesterday I tried out my first volunteer experience since retiring a month ago. (I'm not counting church volunteering, which I've done all along in a very minor way.)
The public library has a drop-in conversation hour for English language learners and they welcome fluent speakers to be "hosts" for the conversation groups. I showed up, got my 2-sentence training :D and sat where they told me. There were about 10 of us, one for each circle of 6 chairs.
Then the participants came in. Everyone had a name-tag. The hosts had handouts with a list of conversation-starters. They just want you to keep the conversation going.
It was so much fun! I had 6 people from 3 different countries. Every one of them was eager, motivated, courteous, and thankful. What a pleasure. I was so impressed by how hard each one of them seemed to be trying. It takes courage to show up and speak up in that type of situation when you are still struggling to learn a new language. Even though some of them had only rudimentary expressive skills, I could tell that they each had a lot of general knowledge and life experience.
I want to find out more techniques for getting better at this and I want to come up with more prompts and so on. If anyone on this list has sites to recommend with helpful tips on how to be a better English conversation coach I would be grateful.
I would definitely recommend volunteering in this way to anyone who is looking for a retirement volunteer experience.
The public library has a drop-in conversation hour for English language learners and they welcome fluent speakers to be "hosts" for the conversation groups. I showed up, got my 2-sentence training :D and sat where they told me. There were about 10 of us, one for each circle of 6 chairs.
Then the participants came in. Everyone had a name-tag. The hosts had handouts with a list of conversation-starters. They just want you to keep the conversation going.
It was so much fun! I had 6 people from 3 different countries. Every one of them was eager, motivated, courteous, and thankful. What a pleasure. I was so impressed by how hard each one of them seemed to be trying. It takes courage to show up and speak up in that type of situation when you are still struggling to learn a new language. Even though some of them had only rudimentary expressive skills, I could tell that they each had a lot of general knowledge and life experience.
I want to find out more techniques for getting better at this and I want to come up with more prompts and so on. If anyone on this list has sites to recommend with helpful tips on how to be a better English conversation coach I would be grateful.
I would definitely recommend volunteering in this way to anyone who is looking for a retirement volunteer experience.