Portuguese Chat Club

I created the Facebook group "European Portuguese Resource Sharing in 2017 when I was studying for the CIPLE exam. There were starting to be a few YouTube channels for European Portuguese, but they were not well known, so I created the group as a place to share videos and posts to help people learning Portuguese, with a specific focus on European, rather than Brazilian Portuguese. 

It has grown steadily and has become an established resource for students and teachers alike. 

However, I found it was difficult to encourage people to interact in the group, and from the questions asked when people joined I noted there was a need for more opportunities for speaking practice. I created the Chat Club in 2021 as a place to have supportive conversations in Portuguese. There is no teacher, and they are not lessons but there is a benefit to just speaking in the language you are learning, practicing formulating sentences and responding in a real-life conversational environment. It turns out that a lot of people lack confidence to use the Portuguese they learn in classes and therefore find it hard to retain what they have learned. Chat Club attempts to address these issues.

The format of Chat Club is that Tuesday sessions are themed and Friday sessions are open conversation. The Tuesday themes are decided by the members themselves, everyone having an input into the topics covered and taking turns to prepare sessions. The first Friday is a new member Q&A session where new people can find out about how it works before jumping into a session, the last Friday each month is a planning session where we collectively decide on the sessions for the following month. Other Fridays we just converse either in one group or in smaller groups.

We use Google Classroom to share documents relating to the themed sessions and this has become quite an extensive resource in itself. We also have a Quizlet Class containing flashcards based on vocabulary from some of the sessions. We now have a WhatsApp group to share information about upcoming sessions and to chat in between sessions and the registration links to book onto sessions can be found there.