Conversation #4

Today I met with my conversation partner for the fourth time. I was not sure whether I would actually meet with her again because she dropped out of the language program at TCU. Naturally the first thing I asked her was why she had decided to leave the program. She told me that recently she had started working part time and that the time commitment of the TCU program on top of a job was too much for her to handle. This surprised me because I would have thought that to her learning English would be more advantageous to her in the long run than the money she would get from a job. In response to this she told me, while the TCU program is a helpful way to advance her English skills, it is not the only way. In response to this I asked her the other ways in which she planned to advance her education of English.

She said there are many opportunities to learn the language; she just has to take advantage of them. For example, recently she had started to watch “American television” instead of stations that broadcast in Spanish. She also said that listening to more music in English helped her recognize words and slang terms better than when she was in class. While I recognized that these were ways to listen to and understand English, I wondered how they would help her to improve her conversation skills in the language. She said that her entire family, which he is living with, is fluent in English and she has asked them to try and speak some English in the house rather than Spanish exclusively.

The notion of talking to my family in a language other than our native English seemed strange to me. While my entire family can speak Spanish somewhat, I would never imagine us using it to talk at home about anything. Even if we lived in a Spanish speaking country, I think we would still use English in our home. I imagine that using a non-native language to converse with your family would lead to a loss of conversational intimacy. I asked her whether she had started to talk at home in English already and whether she had encountered any problems with it.

She told me that speaking in English at home turned out to be more difficult than she originally had imagined. At first, she thought that speaking English at home would have been easier than in public because she knew her family better than she did strangers so, they would be able to understand her better. However, she said talking to her family in English brought about a whole new set of problems. The primary difficulty of talking to your family in a different language turned out to be simply reverting to Spanish when the conversation got to difficult. Obviously this is not an option when speaking to strangers and, would not be a problem. The other major dilemma when talking to your family in your nonnative language turned out to be the differences in skill level. Since my conversation partner knew the least amount of English in her family she would often be the one who had to be corrected by the others on her speech. She said that constantly being corrected by her family members made her feel somewhat inferior to the other members of her family. She also said that her family was much more critical of her English that anyone else because of the closeness of their relationships. “Sometimes it even feels like I am being talked to like an infant.” These were problems I had never even considered when talking to a family member in a different language.

Talking to my conversation partner about speaking English in a family environment made me realize how impractical it is. Even if it helps you learn English a little better, the tradeoff of tension in conversation does not seem to me worth it. I encouraged her to continue to try and advance her English skills in a classroom or public setting, even though not at TCU. She said that our conversations helped and would like to continue having them.