Alexandra CP 3

CONVERSATION PARTNER 3 – Conversation Club at the Globe, Meeting 7

Since had been one previous session of the Globe’s conversation club which occurred some time ago and which I had forgotten to record, I will use this more recent event to count as my 3rd Conversation Partner meeting.
Yesterday’s Conversation Club was quite entertaining. I arrived to find Dongsoek, Lulu and a new member already engrossed in conversation. The new member was Vildan, a bright young girl from Turkey working on her dissertation in the intersection of Information technology and cognitive functions. Vildan arrived only recently to the US, at most about a week ago. Having already worked with Lulu and Dongsoek several times before, despite some small issues, I have full confidence in their communicative abilities so while it remained important as ever to keep them involved and maintain an appropriate level of complexity for them, the mission of the day was to try and evaluate what Vildan’s hopes for the group were as well as what errors might be evident in her speaking. At first I think I underestimated Vildan’s English abilities, because though I could understand the general gist of her statements, her enunciation of syllables was fairly cloudy and therefore confusing. After our Conversation Partner session in the Globe, during which we all conversed about zodiac symbols, geography, and the nature of alphabet characters in each person’s language, I took Dongsoek and Vildan home to Alumni Village since the busses had already stopped running for the day. When it came to her turn, Vildan asked me to come join her for some Turkish coffee. We spoke on her porch for several hours until her very nice, but blunt and humorous roommate came home.
In retrospect, I can see that the clarity of Vildan’s speaking had dramatically improved from when I was first introduced to her, likely due to having overcome her shyness with me. It was really a very remarkable transition though, and showed me just how much impact shyness can have on one’s perception of another’s ability. Vildan has a very unique ability to be able to talk around her significant deficiencies in vocabulary, because though I would very often have to help her find words, her grammar showed no overt errors and her meaning on some very complex topics was almost always perfectly clear. There are one or two consistent errors I will point out to her next time we meet.
Vildan is great conversation and a lot of fun, so I hope to help her make the most of the short time she will be here, which will be about six months. I also hope to be able to more fluidly integrate her into the Conversation table more seamlessly next time now that I know abilities. I’m glad that Lulu, Dongsoek, and some of the other regulars are so open and friendly that I can count on the fact that they will be great assets in this process.