I am very excited to meet new people through the Chat Cafe, as well as share and discuss different cultures. After studying abroad in France this summer, and living and taking classes in a foreign language, I feel that I have an interesting perspective going into this. I'm excited to share cool things about Ann Arbor with my groups, such as restaurants and the Arb, as well as to learn about cultural differences between their home countries and the United States. I always found discussions like this my host family in France very interesting, and there's always so much to learn from other people! Of course, that is not all that I am excited to talk about. It will also be fun to talk about things like books, TV, food, and classes. All of these things, particularly the opportunity to meet new people and share new and exciting ideas, are what motivate me to be a Chat Cafe leader. I love to meet new people and learn from them, so Chat Cafe seems like an awesome opportunity to do that, all while helping to create a safe space for international students to practice their English.
On the other hand, I am nervous about having a very shy group, or having one person who really dominates the conversation. I really want everyone to be comfortable, both with me and with the other members of the group. Having a very shy group would be difficult because it would be very important for me to keep the conversation going and ask a lot of questions; however, I am confident that they would eventually warm up. Having one person always dominating the conversation would be a different challenge, but I think that my first approach to remedying that would be to ask direct questions to other members of the group who weren't talking as much. Despite these concerns, I am overwhelmingly excited to meet my groups and get started!
No comments:
Post a Comment