Last Spring, I volunteered as a teaching assistant in a class of advanced English students who were international research fellows at Massachusetts General Hospital. Once a week, we met -- sometimes in person, more often on Zoom -- to practice pronunciation of both technical and conversational English that the students used for professional presentations and social interactions with co-workers and neighbors.
A few weeks after the class ended in June, I received a WhatsApp message from Marco, a PhD nurse with serious research credentials. Marco hails from Porto Alegre, Brazil, the city near the southern tip of the country where it borders with Uruguay. After his two-year internship at MGH ended, he returned to Brazil, though he's still working on a research project -- and the published results -- with a team from the hospital here in Boston.
"Would you like to have English conversation for an hour a week?" he asked. "I'd like to keep practicing." I thought about it for 30 seconds or so. "What would you want to talk about?" I wrote back.
And so our weekly meetings got underway, with absolutely no agenda but a goal to have fun and share experiences and questions about our lives and work. And travel. And food. And what's new in the world. And soccer. (The goalkeeper for my Liverpool team is from Porto Alegre and began his career playing for the local team.) Sometimes, if Marco has a professional presentation coming up and wants to practice it in English, we do that, to make sure his pronunciation is correct. Sometimes I'll review written material he'd like me to check. Mostly, though, we laugh and compare notes on how we spent our week, and what's coming up.
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