Serena CP#3

Date/Time: September 8th 7:00-8:00pm

Location: Starbucks

Topic discussed: family, studies, background, culture

 

Cultural and/or linguistic topics you and your partner learned: I met with Deniz, my second conversation partner, for the first time. I was surprised to learn that he was not apart of the CIES class. He told me that he is here from Turkey and he is here at FSU getting his PhD in Biomath. His area of focus is on biofilms, though he hopes to go back to Turkey one day to be a professor at a University. He explained that his country is paying for his studies here. He told me that even though he has been in the US for 3 and a half years he hasn't been able to improve his English to the extent he wants to. The reason for this is that he spends almost all his time with his Turkish friends so he doesn't have to use his English much. He was very motivated to improve his English skills and was open to meeting multiple times each week just to get practice through conversations. I felt like his speaking skills were pretty good, he kept the conversation going pretty well and seemed to understand most of what I was saying. He would take longer at times to think of the write word or expression to use but still he does well for the amount of English he's really practiced.