Getting to fluency with a little help from your friends

June 26, 2023 8:59 AM

Directed (rather than informal) conversation clubs/groups for a foreign language. If you have belonged to one, or facilitated one, would you share your best and/or worst experiences?

Which activities were most engaging? Were there any activities that really galvanized the second-language part of your brain? Any activities that put you at ease with speaking? Activities that had you cooperate creatively with others? For context, asking on behalf of a first-time facilitator for a group of Spanish-speaking adults (Mexico), intermediate, learning English. Not nominally a teaching situation, just conversation.

posted by bricoleur to Writing & Language (4 answers total)

Best answer: This is from taking online group classes with a teacher rather than conversation groups, but - the first section of our class is always when the teacher asks us what we’ve done that week, if we have a highlight or a “lowlight” (I assume that’s actually a word in German, since she uses it!).

Because you know it’s going to happen every week, you can take a bit of time before class to check out the vocab you need to talk about something that happened that week; you end up learning vocab that’s relevant to your life; sometimes things recur so you get the chance to practice them (we all really learned the word for squirrel when one of my fellow students had an infestation of them in his loft!).

The only time it didn’t work was once when I did one-to-one online classes during lockdown and my teacher (who lived in a non-locked down country) just couldn’t get her head around the reality of lockdown and kept asking me what I’d done that week and the answer was literally only ever “Did some work, went for a walk,” and after a couple of months of that, it got really hard to continue.
posted by penguin pie at 9:07 AM on June 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

Best answer: My favorite experience:

I was taking a class with a teacher for beginners. We had studied vocabulary about food. The class met in the evening, and when we got to class there was a sandwich bar set up. The students took turns serving each other, but you could only get whatever you could ask for correctly in the target language - so if you remembered "lettuce" and "tomato" but not "bread," you were getting a salad...
posted by epanalepsis at 9:42 AM on June 26, 2023 [5 favorites]

Best answer: My Irish speakers hangout group, which is all levels, plays 20 Questions a lot, about Irish history and culture. So, everybody has to listen a lot, to understand what yes/no questions every other player has asked that round’s question leader, and then remember the person’s characteristics (20th century, dead, political, female, no train station, etc), before you can hopefully put it all together and ask “an bhfuil tú Constance Markievics” or whatever.

Everyone gets a turn, so they try to leave the really famous people to those of us who grew up elsewhere, and folks try to push themselves into an appropriate level of difficulty. So, like, the guy who grew up in Belfast and sometimes leads the class doesn't pick, say, Van Morrison or Seamus Heaney, or if a newbie picks those, he doesn’t solve too fast. It’s really fun and you cram a lot of vocabulary pretty fast.
posted by toodleydoodley at 12:26 PM on June 26, 2023

Best answer: Make sure it isn't in a loud place, because it is extra hard to understand someone talking in a foreign language.
posted by catquas at 1:06 PM on June 26, 2023 [1 favorite]