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A Look at the Conversation Partner Program

4 Pages 1063 Words June 2018

The Conversation Partners Program is one of the most common programs in colleges and universities in America, which is also a program at Pierce College where international students get paired up with native English speaking students to meet and talk for one hour a week. The purpose of this program is for the students to not only get to know about each other, but to also learn about each other’s countries and cultures. All the while, the international student is getting extra practice with their conversational English skills. Although it seems to be a high-quality program to enroll, there are still several cons involved in joining the program.
One of the major worries of some people, when they hear about a program like this, is, ‘who is paying for all these international students and programs like this?’ According to Steve Kelly, a former doctorate student at Louisianan State University, “public and government entities have a vested interest in the impact cost the visiting, non-tax paying international students to introduce to the community.” However, to debunk that worry, According to the National Association of Foreign Student Advisers or, NAFSA, their latest analysis finds that the 1,043,839 international students studying at U.S. colleges and universities contributed $32.8 billion and supported more than 400,000 jobs to the U.S. economy during the 2015-2016 academic year alone. Although, I did meet with Julia Woodworth, the head of the conversation partner program, and she told me it does take a lot of her personal time and resources that one could argue would be better spent elsewhere. Another con that participants could experience, according to Christina Smith, an author at The Odyssey Online, is the fact that there might be a language barrier. However, all the international students here have basic English skills because they are either a member of the Intensive English Program here at the college, or they have alread...

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