Adults hailing from all over the world come to Talk Time to learn English.
The weekly group session is organized by the Estevan Area Literacy Group (EALG) and is meant to help those with varying degrees of fluency become more proficient in the local tongue. During the sitting on Monday evening at the library, 13 adults attended, originally from China, Germany, Mexico, Pakistan, Â鶹´«Ã½AV Korea and Ukraine. They are now all living and working in the area, though some need to improve their English skills to help acquire jobs, or move up in their work.
Kathryn Roberton, EALG co-ordinator, said the meetings are about learning about the community as much as they are about mastering the language.
During the Monday meeting, the group dealt with transportation, going over the keywords and how questions and answers about traveling are structured. They also covered local things like where they can find bus stops in Estevan and how many cab companies service the city.
"One of the reasons a lot of them don't know some of the words is they haven't used the service," said Roberton. "Some of them didn't know where the bus station was in Estevan. If they knew that there was a way to Regina without a car, that could be very helpful to some of them."
She said that's why they slip in what she calls "settlement information," which is meant to help these people, who often are fairly recent immigrants to the country, become adjusted to the area more quickly. Giving a real-world example of the language also helps with memory.
"Things like that help people remember better, if you have something solid to connect it to."
That means a lot of the words they learn are ones that will help them immediately in day-to-day conversation.
Roberton said she finds out exactly what certain students need to learn, for their jobs or in their lives. She noted that they had just finished one section before a German family joined the group. The mother is training to be a school-bus driver, and so the section on transportation is an important one to help her get a job. She said the driving skills are there, but she needed the vocabulary skills necessary to communicate with the children.
"It's useful to the other students too, but it's a subject we picked because one of the students needed it really, really badly."
The students had a simple conversation to carry on with their neighbours in the group, in the form of a question and answer. One would ask a pair of questions, while the other replied with the answers. The questions asked where they were going this weekend and how they were getting there. The answers gave each student the leeway to come up with their own destination and form of transportation.
"If you talk to them individually, (that's) something that intimidates a lot of them, especially having those conversations with other Canadians. If I get them started here, even if it's something basic, it gets them building up confidence."
The Monday group is for beginners in English, where Roberton said she does a lot of "practical" language, but she also heads a group on Thursdays for more advanced students.
The Thursday-afternoon group allows her to do more basic grammar, she said. Many of the more advanced students are working jobs that don't always allow them the time to get to a meeting, so she's added a Tuesday evening drop-in session for those who are more able to work on their own.
"(It's the) people that I can send off to a table to work by themselves, and then they can come back and I can correct what they've done. There are a lot of advanced students in Estevan who say, 'I want to prepare for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL),' or 'I need to really improve my English so that I can write better reports and try to move up in my job.'"
She said their English is generally pretty good and understandable to most Canadians, but it maybe isn't quite where they need it to be in order to get to where they want to go. Often Roberton's students begin as fairly recent immigrants to the country, but she said she does have "success" stories of some of her students, who came into her classes early on, moving on to other things.
