This morning I finally met my conversation partner, Carol,
for the 1st time after having many struggles finding a time that
would work for both of us. Carol is from
Brazil and has been in the United States since July. She expressed that she was not too nervous
when she first arrived here as she has visited many times before to see her
aunt who she is now living with. Carol
and I discussed each of our plans for the future and why we chose to come to
TCU. While she is here to improve her
English, Carol’s ultimate plan is to study psychology possibly returning to
Brazil to do so.
One part of our conversation that I
think we both found particularly interesting was a discussion about learning
new languages. I told her that, while my
mom was born in the Czech Republic and speaks three languages, I have never
enjoyed learning new languages and stopped as soon as I could in high
school. Carol found it fascinating that
my mom knows so many languages and yet my sister and I only know English. She also described to me how, having attended
an English school in Brazil, she assumed that she would arrive here being able
to understand the language fairly well.
However, this was not the case.
She realized pretty quickly that her proficiency in reading English and
speaking it with Brazilians did not translate well to speaking it with native
speakers. I was able to connect to this
story since I have watched my mom speak German and Czech fluently to her
parents for my whole life, but also seen her struggle when strangers attempt to
speak these languages with her.
In addition, Carol talked about how
different it is to speak English with people from other countries and those who
are used to talking with non-native speakers like the Intensive English Program
(IEP) students and teachers than it is to speak with other native English
Speakers. Since Carol lives with her
Brazilian aunt and is otherwise always around IEP students, she says that she
has had little opportunity to interact with other TCU students. In a way, I feel like IEP keeps her from
being exposed to American culture in the same way that international students
not in IEP are. She said that she has
never been to a football game and did not seem to be aware of many of the other
sporting and social events that TCU offers.
This was surprising to me because my experience with international
students in the past has always been that there are too many opportunities for them
to get involved rather than not enough.
They are invited to events constantly and find themselves exhausted from
the many new experiences. The fact that
Carol does not live close to TCU and lives with family causes her to miss out
on many of these fun events.
Overall, I found our time together
to be quite informative. While we had a
few moments of awkward silence, Carol and I always managed to quickly find new
things to talk about that kept us learning from each other. I think we both appreciated the opportunity
to meet someone with a new and different life experience from our own.
I did not include the fact that my partner kept to mostly the people in IEP like you did in this post. Now that I think about it, that is very true of my partner. All of her friends are in IEP. Her boyfriend is in IEP. She always talks about IEP. I think it is a great program, as well, that allows them to learn English better, but, as you said, I feel that it is a clique in some ways. Whenever Elle and I would suggest places to go for dinner they would always ask what type of food that restaurant served. Most of the time, we would suggest places just on university. So how had that not been there before? Now that I think about it, that proves your point of they stick to a lot of their culture because of the people in their IEP programs.
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