Even though we didn’t formally “teach” anything during this meeting, we realised afterwards that we had still learned a lot, just it wasn’t the conventional, classroom-type sense. By sharing our personal stories, university experience, and for examples our reasons for coming here to Erasmus, we practised spontaneous speaking and active listening. We both became more comfortable expressing ourselves in another language because none of us is native so we didn’t feel judge at all. We also realised that explaining our habits, traditions and experiences gave each other new expressions and phrases of our native language, that is Spanish. The teaching happened indirectly through storytelling.
What made this session different from others, is that there was no pressure to perform or to reach any specific linguistic goal. I think that our plan helped a lot to reduce the typical self-consciousness that appears when you “have” to speak a foreign language or talk with someone that you don’t know. At first, we felt that maybe we should have been more productive, but later we understood that this informal start laid a strong foundation. We were both excited and curious and we feel that from this moment we connected straightaway and started building the trust that we needed to develop our level of English and French on the next sessions that we have had.
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