Reflecting on the 2nd Meeting

This week my conversation circle met in Espresso Royale, but didn't necessarily utilize the reason why we were there. I had a hard time figuring out how to "teach" ordering coffee or tea, and when I tried to do it, it interrupted the flow of the conversation a little bit. But at the same time it allowed different people to have different conversations - the people who stayed vs the people who ordered drinks which felt nice and natural.

My group members have continued to have language questions for me so that was what we focused on a majority of the time. The conversation started with my new member asking about email etiquette and quickly turned into questions about classroom English vs conversational English. It took me some explanations to understand the discrepancy, but Kaio used the example that he and non-native english speakers that he knows often used the word "seldom" which his roommate (or friend, I forget who) said that native speakers very rarely use the word seldom. He said that American's often use two simpler words to convey the meaning of the vocabulary they learned in the classroom - much like I used very rarely in the sentence above instead of seldom.

This seemed to be a common experience among the members in my group and we agreed to all come to the next conversation with a couple of words to breakdown or fluff up depending on contexts. 

Other topics that came up were language change in general - for example the trend that's happening in American English right now that shortens words: Adorable -> adorbs, English text speak and acronyms like YOLO and lol.

Hiroki, one my my participants asked the group about teaching instruction in their respective countries and the US and I learned that in China, Japan and Taiwan that students are expected to listen to lecturers and not ask questions or participate. I hadn't realized that this might be a culture shock, and we talked about usually in what kinds of classrooms participation is expected more than others - ie a class with 30 people vs a 300 person lecture hall.

Overall I thought it went well, but there definitely is still a focus on me as a repository for knowledge rather than a general conversation. However like we talked about in class, I don't think that that's necessarily terrible. My group is always full of suggestions which is really helpful as a facilitator and I'm excited to have our next meeting outside and talk further about different registers of words!