6.5.2 Creating opportunities to meet native speakers

Organizing an event which throws students and native speakers together can pay dividends, but can also be time-consuming for the tutors involved. My own department has experimented with day-time gatherings on campus and evening events at an off-site venue (ie pub), and found the latter to be generally more successful. A labour-saving device is to recruit some enthusiastic second- or final-years to handle most of the organization. Another possibility is to facilitate the swapping of e-mail addresses - setting up a dedicated noticeboard and inviting postings is an admin-free option, but a semi-official intervention will ensure a greater success rate (collect lists of e-mail addresses and pair students up so that everyone has a contact). The difficulty with this scheme is that it depends on the efficiency of the relevant IT departments in setting up e-mail addresses for newly-arrived overseas students. The optimum answer for large numbers of students with different language requirements is to set up a centrally-organized exchange along the lines of that organized by the University of Birmingham's Centre for Modern Languages (see http://www.cml.bham.ac.uk/support/exchange.htm) or by Manchester University's Language Centre (see http://langcent.man.ac.uk/ill/colab.htm). In both of these, students fill in their contact details and language requirements, which are inputted to a database, so that students can be matched. The latter system has been extended so that there now exists a level 2 accredited module called Tandem, which two linked students can follow, producing a learning dossier based around a variety of language tasks (translation, discourse analysis, and so on) - see http://langcent.man.ac.uk/flp/tandem.htm).