viernes, 4 de marzo de 2011

Building an improvisation

This morning I had my first individual with Rubén, a thirty-ish lower-int, who is also in one of my groups. He's preparing for a job interview in IT. This is what we did:



I got him to tell me as much as possible about the interview, the company and the position. He actually didn't know that much himself, and I don't know anything about the IT industry's interview techniques. What to do?

We decided to try a standard interview question - Tell us about one project you're particularly proud of.

I asked R to mentally rehearse an answer to this, taking the absolute minimum of notes, and gave him a couple of minutes of silence in which to do so - I went off to get a microphone. He had a couple of vocab questions to clear up, then he told me version 1. What he said was largely correct, but definitely needed tidying and fluency.

I then recorded myself, giving my (improvised) version, speaking as HIM. We then played it back, and sorted out his queries.

We repeated this cycle twice more:

- His version unrecorded*; mine recorded; listen and queries.

By the time we'd got to version 3, he was fairly confident and accurate in his  version, but still genuinely improvising. I uploaded the audio files to Google docs and shared with him.

Have you tried anything like this? How did it go?

*I've discovered that hearing your own voice speaking a foreign language can be a horrible shock. And that's not what you need 4 days before a job interview!

3 comentarios:

  1. A theoretically sound activity, with a definite goal in mind, alternating between input and output. Just who is this masked crusader?

    ResponderEliminar
  2. I'd love you to grow an interview plant.

    ResponderEliminar
  3. How and why did you record yourself? Do you mean speaking or singing?

    ResponderEliminar