English Classes get the Thumbs Up in Hillston

Tommy (Jihoon Kim), Jenny Moran, Roma Cashmere and Andrew (also Jihoon Kim)
 enjoy English lessons together each week with Sue Chapman.

Every Monday before the night shift starts at the cotton gin, Andrew,who is a musician in Korea and Tommy,who is a trained mechanic, join fellow class mate,Yoko,who works at the local motel and Roma, Jenny and Sue, for Conversation Group to practise their English. We have met for several months and are now friends, despite the age differences, such is the graciousness of the Koreans and Japanese, and the generosity of the Australians.

Conversation Group aims to give an opportunity for those in town wanting to improve their English to practise speaking with native speakers. And speak we do!

(Our Korean and Japanese is improving slowly and their English is improving rapidly.)

We have a lot of fun together in the hour we share - playing word games such as "Scattegories", "Animal,Vegetable, Mineral", finding out about each others countries, language and culture during conversation time and doing more brain work during vocab extension time.

                 Yoko tells Jenny and Roma about Japan.

The Innovations grant from Unitingcare Aging, which you have heard about before on the blog,

has provided us with the funds to hire an experienced ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher to run a workshop in town  for all our volunteer Conversation Group native speakers.

We aim to increase our knowledge and resources to so we can better provide this great service to our visitors from other countries and to non-native speaking locals in our own community..

The gin contracts only last a few more weeks and once all the cotton is ginned our friends will have to move on to other parts of Australia or back home.  It will be .....
" Farewell. We hope to see ya later,." 
"Sayonara"
 and "An nyung ha say yo" for all of us.
They will be missed!

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