This report is written by an exchange student who took part in the Language Campus school visit programme.
The 4th of October I took part in a ”Café lingua” at the Jyväskylän Lyseon Lukio, an upper secondary school founded in 1858 where students can learn several foreign languages, namely English, German, French, Spanish, Latin, Russian and Swedish. This activity was organized so that students aged between 15 and 18 years old can practice the foreign languages they are learning with native speakers.
The activity was carried out in the following way. There were several language classrooms, each one with some native speaker. When the activity started, the students went to different classrooms by their own. There, they talked with the corresponding natives for fifteen minutes. After that time, the students went to another classroom and they started talking with other language native speaker for another fifteen minutes. The activity finished when all the students had visited six languages. The languages presented at the “Café lingua” were: English, Swedish, Spanish, Chinese, German, French and Russian.
In general, the students were quite shy at the beginning, but after the presentations and some jokes, they were more relaxed and it was easier for them to take part. The teenagers were motivated for the activity and they took part actively, showing their language skills and speaking with dynamism.
In the Spanish classroom were four natives, and each native worked by our own with different students. During this experience, I could see that the students were used to understand better the neutral Spanish accent than regional accents. Could be interesting for the students to practice in class with other accents, like for example throughout listening’s. Then, they will be used to listen other pronunciations and they could understand much better other accents.