Meet-up tips

There are many things that language learners can do in their Language Exchange meetings in order to maximise their learning. One of the most important things is to identify as clearly as possible the language areas you want to develop. Once you have done this, you can work with your partner to choose activities that will help you both to meet your individual goals.

Remember that you can be creative and you can discuss together ways of varying your sessions and making them useful, interesting and fun. Below you will find some examples of activities that other language learners have used and which may give you ideas:

Improving your pronunciation

Read a section of the newspaper and ask your partner to correct your accent.

Choose several words that have sounds you sometimes confuse (e.g. ‘b’ and ‘v’). Read the words and ask your partner to correct you.

Make sentences with words you find hard to pronounce.

Ask your partner to say words with similar sounds, and then you repeat them. Next, say some of the words and ask your partner to tell you which ones they heard.

Improving your vocabulary

When speaking in your own language, make a note of words that you don't know in the foreign language and check them with your partner later.

Pick a topic and search for the vocabulary before the meeting. When you meet your partner, tell them about that topic in order to use the vocabulary.

Read a newspaper article and ask your partner to explain the new vocabulary.

Work together to find the names of all the things in different pictures in both languages.

Pretend you are in different places, such as the hairdresser's, brainstorm some vocabulary and do role plays.

Improving your grammar

Think about the area of grammar you want to practise, then use it in your speaking. For example, you could tell a story in order to use past tenses.

Do grammar exercises from books in the Language Zone. Your partner could translate them into your language so you can both practise together.

For part of the meeting, ask your partner to correct all your mistakes and discuss them. At other times, try to explain something without stopping to fix mistakes.

Talk to your partner about their experience of learning grammar so you can try some of their ways of studying.

Improving your fluency

Ask your partner for tongue twisters to help improve the speed and accuracy of your speaking. (It's difficult and tiring, so a short time is enough!)

Try to talk about unusual topics, because it forces you to learn words that you don't normally use.

Try to be confident and talk for longer each time. Ask lots of questions if you need to practice them.

Make sure that you're using new vocabulary and expressions, so that you can learn to produce them more quickly.

Improving your accuracy

For about ten minutes, summarise a newspaper article you have read previously. Then ask your partner to correct you.

For a limited period of time, ask your partner to write down all your mistakes. Then go through them at the end. (This can be less stressful than if they were always stopping you.)

During the conversation, ask your partner if the word you used was right in that context, whenever you have doubts.

Try to say something as correctly as possible, then ask your partner how many mistakes there were, and you try to figure out where you went wrong.