Conversation Partner Activity Reflection 1

Conversation Partner Activity Reflection

Yini Chen

Colorado State University

Conversation Partner Activity Reflection 2

In the fall semester of 2018, I participated in the conversation partner activity of

INTO CSU. Each activity lasted for one hour, and I participated in six conversations

partner activities in total. My service object is a class of level-1academic English

class in INTO CSU. There are fourteen students in this class, seven male students and

seven female students. This class is very special, except for a woman from Taiwan, all

the students in the class are from Arab countries. The students in the class will enter

CSU for their undergraduate, master or PhD studies after completing their AE

courses. In each conversation partner activity, Sarita, the listening/speaking teacher of

this class, would provide a specific topic for discussion, and then divided four or three

people as a group for discussion, and each group will have a conversation partner.

One of the activities’ theme is about different social etiquette cultures in different

countries. Before the discussion, the teacher of this class used a projector to show the

class some social etiquette cultures of Japan, South Korea, India and other countries.

For example, in Japan, when two people meet for the first time, they will exchange

their business cards with each other when greeting each other, and when exchanging

business cards, they need to use both hands to take the business card by each other. In

the process of introduction, The Arab students in the class began to communicate

their Arab culture. For example, Arabs like to serve coffee to guests, in order to show

politeness guests had better not refuse. One of the things made me impressed is that

Arab women generally try to avoid contact with other male persons. This made me

understand that in the previous conversations partner activities, the Arab women in

the class only joined in the group of female conversation partner. After this
Conversation Partner Activity Reflection 3

discussion, I never encouraged any Arab women in our class to participate in a group

of male conversation partner.

In my opinion, as a language teacher, in addition to communicating with

language learners about the cultural background of the target language, we should

also respect the different cultural background of language learners as much as

possible. In that case, understanding audiences’ cultural background characteristics in

future language teaching activities may also help language learners in different

countries to acculturate.