The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology
Issue link: https://thelinguist.uberflip.com/i/832824
thelinguist.uberflip.com JUNE/JULY 2017 The Linguist 17 FEATURES a language expert, who will help with the language teaching and learning development. We have 30 trained conversation partners. They speak a wide variety of languages including Arabic, Farsi, Dari, Korean, French, Swahili, Lingala, Turkish, Hindi, Urdu, Amharic, Kurdish, Spanish, Chinese – so a very wide variety of languages and growing. Q. What is your background? A. I studied economics and that gave me an appreciation of the fact that, living in a market society, we only value things that have a market value. So trying to find marketable skills really comes from my economics background. After university I was on the Year Here programme – an applied masters in social entrepreneurship and innovation. I studied Spanish at school, and I speak some Persian, but I didn't do a degree in a language, so the on-the-job learning has been about the language pedagogy – really falling in love with language and understanding how fundamental they are to society. I am now learning French, Arabic and Chinese. It comes with the territory. Q. How do you promote Chatterbox? A. At the moment it's mainly through word of mouth. We have four or five inquiries every week from refugees who have heard about us and want to apply, or customers who come to the service. Q. Tell us about the pilot at SOAS? A. SOAS purchased 400 hours of conversation practice for their students, who can make on-demand use of those hours. Via the online platform, they schedule a one-hour face-to-face or online conversation class with one of our tutors. It's entirely student led – a co-curricular educational experience where students curate their experiences with a native speaker. It exceeded my own expectations and those of SOAS. The students are adamant we return next year. They say they learnt a lot about the cultures behind the languages they're learning, they feel that they are more confident speaking the language, and they've learnt more useful vocabulary. Q. Talk us through your average day? A. I wake up around 7am and check my emails, and then I make my way to our office. Bethnal Green Ventures have very kindly let us stay on, so it's a really stimulating environment with lots of 'tech for good' initiatives at different stages of development. Chatterbox is fundamentally about people, so I have lots of meetings. On different days I take on different roles, so on the last day of the tax year I do a lot of accounting, the next day I might put on my 'impact measurement' hat and do interviews with students and tutors, or my tech hat and design or update our website. Q. What are your plans for the future? A. The aim is, by the end of this year, to have a more sophisticated teacher training programme. We're looking at partnerships with City Lit college – the country-leading adult education institution – and we just received some funding from Nesta. With the teacher training programme and the curriculum that we're developing, we'll be able to offer complete academic level tuition – grammar, vocabulary, writing. I'm interested in finding innovative, engaging ways for people to learn languages through Chatterbox. Our style is very communicative; it's about learning a language in the most natural way possible by getting to know a native speaker. We are also building a seamless and beautiful platform so that anyone, from anywhere in the UK, can book an in-person or online language class through our website. I'm very conscious that most of the world's refugee population does not reside in the UK and I'm keen to get refugees on our platform from other countries over the next few years. Chatterbox's survival depends on the level of demand for our services so we need to find language learning institutions and workplaces who are interested in trying our services. wearechatterbox.org CONVERSATION PRACTICE Eiad, a refugee dentist from Syria, with Arabic student Francis (left); and Arabic tutor Hekma, a human rights lawyer from Sudan (right) IMAGES BY LENA GARRETT © CHATTERBOX 2016