1st Place Winner
Post 1:聽
I am in the Adult partner SWAP program with the IEC and my partner is Yahya, and he is from Libya. I have gotten into contact with him over the phone to talk about meeting up as soon as I received the email that we were paired yesterday. We have plans to meet tomorrow at 3pm!! We had tried to meet tonight over zoom so that I would have completed a meeting before the deadline of the blog post but it didn't end up working out as it was last minute and a Friday night. His language background is Arabic. I'm excited to hear some Arabic as well as it is such a beautiful language and I know very little about it. He is pretty good at English and i'm excited to help him improve. Our goals that we have talked about are working on English conversation, so that he finds it easier to talk to people and make friends, but also he has the goal of professional speaking and submitting applications for programs. So far we have not had the time to talk about his interests, as we only just got paired up. He is from the IEC and is a Level 7/8. Some goals are to increase confidence in speaking so that he finds it more comfortable and supported in speaking. I think the best way to achieve this progress would be to have him speak a lot during our meetings, and outside of them. The more conversations we have the more vocabulary will grow and stick as well. We are thinking to do phone calls as well as in person meeting on campus. That way we can talk a lot while still making sure that time is balanced, while still practicing in person, face-to-face. Im definelty excited too for the opportunity I think its going to open my mind more to experience first hand a completely different view on the life that is so normal and easy for me and make me grateful as well.
Post 2:
聽聽 聽I am participating in the SWAP program. This most recent session, Yahya and I spoke about different goals in mind. We also talked a lot about his different strengths and weaknesses and made a list of things that I feel like he does well, and then also things that I feel like we could work on together. We recognized that his writing and grammar are harder for him and that he has great confidence in speaking and spelling. It was hard for us to think of very many specific activities that would help to improve with this but I offered to work through some of the Ielts standardized test writing section questions with him. We talked about how it would be nice to have a few goals that we set up before, or in the beginning of our meeting of different things we were going to do in our hour together. What I have noticed that we are very good at is having interesting and continuous conversation. It is never a case of if someone is going to say something or what topic we should discuss, there is always something. To work on his problems with writing, I am thinking to work through worksheets together and offer tips. If needed I can also contact Abigail for resources on teaching writing grammar. Overall our conversation on where we should go from here was very successful.聽
Post 3:
聽聽 聽Since the beginning of the semester, I was able to gain what I had hoped I would get from this program, learning a lot about perspective of language and culture. When I started, I had never thought about what it would mean to not be able to speak fluently in the language necessary for getting a job, getting into higher education, and interacting with the general population easily. I can see how lucky I am to have been able to grow up speaking English, an arguably very difficult to learn language. I have the privilege that I can go nearly anywhere in the world, and I will be able to get my point across with someone, as my language is the farthest spread. This was my first semester聽 in the LING 1900 program. I hope that through my sessions with Yahya through the SWAP program, he was able to gain lots of confidence in speaking english, and that he was able to grow. I hope that he also was able to learn more about common English sayings. On another level, I believe that spending that much time with someone was so different from me allowed my to open my mind and give me more empathy and understanding of how people from somewhere very different live. Some concerns I noticed was that my authority as a women is just less understood from many cultures in the Middle East and so a few times I felt as though I was pressure for giving more of my help and time then I could. I addressed this by being very strong and clear on what I needed, much more than I would have usually. I have grown a lot, and I really am grateful for my time, more than I had expected I would.