After meeting with Hugo this semester I have learned a lot about him. He is a motivated student who actively seeks out information. If he hears a word used in a conversation and isn't sure of its definition he takes a mental note to discuss the word in our time together. Hugo is a fine English speaker and I am glad I got to work with him. I can see him striving for his dreams. He wants to own his own farm one day with many animals. He is working hard in Boulder to provide himself a better life later down the road.
He has talked about the novelas he watches and how they interact with American culture within these short series. I was excited to hear that he watches English television and listens to English radio quite frequently. Hugo I believe has learned and retained a lot from our short time together, and this is quite fulfilling for me. I plan to continue to work with him this summer outside of the program if we can coordinate our schedules. This is due in part to the fact we were assigned to each other fairly late in the semester, and mostly because we both enjoy the experience.
Overall I hope Hugo takes my use of technology in our course and implements it into his own life. He sees how easy it is to simply Google the answer to common questions he might have. He was wondering about fruit flies and how they are formed and we simply Googled it and he read the article and comprehended it. The goal for me is to give him the ability to carry on this active search for information in the future, and be able to gain the knowledge he desires. A simple thing I showed him was the online thesaurus, and this has enabled him to find words that are outside of his typical vocabulary. He now has the ability to find extremely intellectual lexemes, and use them in his day to day conversations.
As a student I would recommend the SWAP program to any student who wants to gain a meaningful experience, and make a difference in someone's life. The impact may seem small, but the conversations had with the staff at C4C help students gain insight into other cultures and common problems immigrants have with language. The goal isn't to make them perfectly fluent in English, it is to make them feel welcome in the community at CU, and to show staff members the appreciation we do have for them. You get a credit, you get cultured, and you can help make someone's move to the US a little bit easier.
