English conversation is about connection. That is the purpose of English conversation– to connect with people around the world. We want to connect personally and emotionally. We want to connect with business partners, clients, and customers. We want to connect with professional peers. We want to connect with new friends.
While this is obvious, I feel that many students forget the ultimate reason they are learning. In traditional English conversation classes it’s easy to get too focused on tests, textbooks, grades, and “levels”. After some time, the student is so worried about these artificial measurements that they forget their ultimate purpose for study.
At the deepest level, English conversation is about community- building and sustaining meaningful connections between people.
Tomoe and I have been discussing this subject a lot. Our ultimate goal is to use our seminars and lessons and forums as a way to create strong communities. We want to help people connect and communicate in positive and meaningful ways– and help them stay connected.
The seminars are a first step. The seminars are designed to bring people together for an amazing learning experience.
But we have even bigger ambitions. In the future, we hope to use the seminars as a starting point– and then continue to build several local Effortless English communities. One possible way to do this is to create English conversation communities in each city that hosts a seminar. After a seminar, we would train volunteer teachers and community leaders and help them create a “conversation club” or volunteer Effortless English program. Members of the conversation club would continue to meet regularly throughout the year. Perhaps a volunteer teacher would teach a lesson sometimes. At other times, the club would function mostly as a positive, fun, meaningful social place where people meet and communicate and make friends– using English as their means of communication.
The next step would be to connect these local Effortless English Conversation groups with each other– to create an international web of conversation clubs. Perhaps at that point we would host a big annual international conference for all the club members around the world.
The purpose of this goes beyond just English learning. We want to use English learning as a tool for a deeper purpose– to create meaningful and supportive communities of people around the world.
