Woohoooo… My 3rd « Atelier Anglais » (English Workshop, come on guys)

So yesterday afternoon I took my third workshop and all alone this time.  I am really pleased with how it went and I feel that the 4 people who attended really benefited.  Finally, I managed to get them to interact more and talk to each other in English… and to respond to me!  Seeing as I have still been trying to establish their levels of English, I have to be really careful in the way I explain things.  And for the first time today, I kept thinking in French and getting myself all confused can u believe.  I couldn’t pronounce the word “signification” in English, only in French! What is that all about!?

I started the workshop with the brilliant game “Who am I?”.  I’m sure most people will know this game in some form or another.  You have a name of a person stuck to your head or your back and you don’t know who it is.  You must ask everyone questions to try and guess the famous person.  I joined in the game yesterday (Yves did me the courtesy of sticking the post-its on our heads and glasses hehe).  Guess what - I didn’t win!!!  I had even written the list in the first place and I came 4^th out of 5 people.  It was a good laugh and everyone got involved and they were really trying hard to think of questions in English.

"Who Am I?" - Everyone getting involved

I started an interesting discussion afterwards about “The Secrets of Success”.  It was very intriguing talking about different people’s definitions of success and types of success there can be.  A couple of the males decided that success is based on money and that way you will be happy.  On the contrary, the others believed that happiness is the key to success.  One person also thought that you are only successful if you are famous, which generated an interesting discussion.  Each person was talking equally as I was monitoring it and everyone had something to say.  We even talked about dreams.  On one hand you have the dream of having a good salary and your own house and to be happy, on the other is the dream to rule the world… Each to their own!!!

After this discussion I moved on to work on the booklet I have prepared for the preparation for Leonardo participants.  We worked through the introductory material, practised reading aloud for pronunciation work and started some motivation work.  Meanwhile we were also having general conversation in English about various things and every time someone tried speaking French, I asked them to translate it into English.  It’s so easy and great to do with small groups!!

Finally in the workshop, I did a sample presentation in English about myself… I hope that this can give the future volunteers ideas on how to present themselves and what kind of information to include.  I had information about myself, my home country, my sending organisation, my welcoming organisation and my programme, “Youth in Action” within the European Voluntary Service.  It was definitely the best workshop so far!

Today I have finished my first full draft of the leaflet (having edited it and made it prettier J) ready to start working through it properly with the Leonardo young people.  I’m really pleased with it and I’m hoping that it can be really beneficial to everyone.

Finally, this afternoon I was with Yves in a meeting to promote the EVS to a few young people who are interested in the programme.  I answered questions about the EVS and they asked me things such as how easy it was to make friends with the locals when I arrived.  I had to be honest… it wasn’t.  This was purely because not only was I scared to talk to French people, they were also scared to talk to me as they couldn’t speak English.  But it’s great as bit by bit you begin to realise that you are breaking those barriers down and communicating more and more effectively each day. I won’t lie… it’s hard and can be extremely tiring, but at the end of the day when you know you have made progress, you can feel so proud and certainly sleep well at night!!! Before coming to France, I thought it was good to be able to hold a conversation in French for 15 minutes.  Now I do it for hours on end and I love it!!!