I want to connect my class, but it's soooo hard...

Every year I think about how to compel my students to want to speak in French and every year I think the best way to do it is to connect them with the outside world- meaning native speakers their age.  Of course, this is often easier said than done, as there are a whole host of challenges and frustrations that come with this type of project.  This post will help address these obstacles and maybe give you more confidence when it comes to finding a class and setting up a relationship.

Challenge 1
Finding someone who is interested and follows through...
This is perhaps the most frustrating part of the whole thing; so many people either are not interested when approached or say they are interested, but don't really want all the extra work that goes into it. Either that, or their schedules simply don't allow for the time to commit to it- or so they think.

My advice will sound obvious: keep trying until you find someone who really values the relationship enough to burst the obstacle bubble and give it a try.  It might take a while, but it is well worth the wait. You might also think about finding curricular ties for them so they see this as beneficial.  Sometimes it's a matter of thinking that this is extra to what they are trying to accomplish.  If their program want students to speak at all, then find ways to help them understand that this may help students to improve speaking more than they could if they were doing a lesson in the classroom.

Challenge 2
Navigating complicated schedules...
Once the impossible happens and you find that perfect fit, your schedule decides that there is no time when you can actually connect.

Here, my advice is to be creative and to find solutions that still necessitate interaction, but maybe not live.  Have students make short videos in the target language and upload them to Youtube.  Then share the links with your partner class.  Or, have students use Google Hangout and leave voice messages for their partners and then return them.  Ask the teacher of the partner school if they can ever stay after school or do an early morning session, or consider doing this yourself.  Have your students snapchat with the other students.  Create a Google presentation and leave comments on Google voice.  Any of these things will be better than not doing anything.

Challenge 3
Compromising on what the interactions will be between the students and how much time will be spent in L1 and L2...
All culture and countries have different ways that they see education; some teachers have complete control over their curriculum and some are beholden to a centralized bureaucracy that makes them choose to do one thing over another for fear of not preparing their students for the end of the year tests and the end of the program exams to get into college.

Have a Skype meeting with the teacher (yes, you should skype first so you know what your students are going through) and suss out what the two of you would like to accomplish with the exchange. After a brainstorming and writing down of all of the ideal outcomes, decide which ones are feasible and then find a couple that each would like to have happen.  Then, backward design your exchange. Sometimes I just give my students suggestions for questions and topics and let them go at it with no goal in mind other than to have them listen to and speak with native speakers in the L2.  I find that this often leads to richer conversations because they are not trying to role play with canned dialogue. This also allows for them to see how many topics they can talk about.

Challenge 4
Getting a regular thing going because drive-by education doesn't really do what we want it to do...
After the first session, even if it doesn't go like we thought it would, there should be a feeling of elation that you connected your students with native speakers- and students their age to boot. But, how do you make this a regular thing so your students (and you too!) can benefit from the cultural and linguistic knowledge and skills you can gain from this type of exchange?

One way to do this, is to choose maybe two times per semester to skype; this is manageable and also tells students that you will do this four times per year, letting them know that it's not just a


Challenge 5
Making this a physical exchange...
This is perhaps the biggest challenge of all; taking that step to meet in person can be a very daunting task.  All of the logistics and organization can make an already over worked teacher run away screaming!  But, if you take it one step at a time and take your time, knowing that perhaps it will be two or three years before anyone actually steps out of a plane, you can minimize the stress.  Make a timeline and accomplish each task according to the timeline.  Make sure that you have talked to all administrators and asked about risk management which is a big deal right now, especially with terrorist attacks and other things like zika.

As teachers and world travelers, we know that life is not 100% safe and that not taking the risk diminishes not only our linguistic potential, but our ability to interact with and understand in a deep way other cultures with other ways of seeing the world.

Our school just recently had consultants come in to talk about risk management and recommendations for our trips; one of these was to hire a company to lead the tours.  I whole-heartedly disagree with this method unless you don't know anything about the country you are traveling to.

Let's take for example our French exchange with the Lycée de l'Iroise in Brest, Brittany.  Because I had lived in France and knew about Breton culture and had enough connections to start talking about what we might do and where we might go, I wanted to have control over the programming.  Often, for a company, you are just another school, and even if they try very hard to personalize it, there is nothing like actual personal connections to deepen the learning and immerse students in the target language.

One example, is that we always program a day of service working with a community center that we have formed a relationship with.  The first time, we weighed and parsed out organic veggies that were subsidized buy the government for mainly low income people (although anyone could take part) and handed them the bags, collecting the money on the bill.  We have also surveyed people on the street in a low income neighborhood to see how what their internet usage; this data was used by the community center in a grant to get subsidized internet for the whole neighborhood.  Of course, both of these activities were all in French, as the residents did not speak English.  We also had our students interviewed on a community radio show about being Americans and their impressions of Brittany. Before you say that students need to be super advanced to do this, just know that even our novice speakers were able to communicate things.

For me, this is why I teach students language; it is a tool to interact with people and is a means to an end, not an end in itself.  It is extremely gratifying to see the students use whatever language they have acquired to accomplish tasks in a place where people actually live in the language the students have been acquiring.

So, what is the point of this article?  It is to drive home the point that it could seem superfluous to teach a language if we don't allow students access to native speakers of the language in order to see the reasons why they study it in the first place.