Workshop

 

How might we create a fun and supportive environment to learn a new language?

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As a native English speaker, taking on a new language in my late 20’s was a very daunting task. Learning a second language in the British schooling system allowed for 2 hours a week ,which will not make you fluent in 5 years or more.

 

There are many apps that myself and others have used but none of them have the longevity of working for multiple reasons e.g self discipline, cost. From many other users that I have spoken to in the beginning, use these apps often as a starting point but for many the users don’t see enough progress and eventually give in. My hypothesis is that these apps do not inspire confidence; the main issue is that there is no one practising speaking the language with you. 

 

My second hypothesis is that when starting a language most of the basis is around the grammar and how to write the language. For most this is an essential part of the language but the most valuable aspect is learning to speak as this is our first point of interaction. 

 

The activities in this workshop is to see if working within a group can create confidence between other users of the same level to try and understand the language.

 

After my first run through, I quickly realised that it is a hard task to keep the group moving through the workshop and not to veer off course which happened on occasion. Originally I had planned to do 2 activities but with the 30 minutes time restriction, one was plenty. Part of my workshop was to have the users work as a group but an issue I found was that I had created separate user boxes which limited the amount of discussion. If I was to run the workshop again I would remove the separate segments for the participants to write in and try to drive the group discussion more. Overall my users expressed that they had a lot of fun with the workshop and took away 2 new spanish words.