Language Exchange

At 2pm on a sunny Saturday morning in August Polish and English people welcomed people from NCBI Nottinghamshire for a language exchange. The diverse Nottinghamshire team include people from Sri Lanka, Iraq, Korea and Afghanistan. Food was shared (Korean pancakes; Asian sweetmeats; Polish traditional cakes and English sausage rolls and pastries) Then the language exchange began!

We learnt to say our names in Arabic, Kurdish, Korean and Tamil. We wrote our names in the different scripts and we learnt what it was like to be someone for whom English was not a first language and prejudice experienced from People from the host community who think everyone should just speak English.

The afternoon was not long enough, we wanted to know more about each other’s cultures and get to know each other better.

Karolina Kowalczyk said, “It was so rich spending time with so many people from diverse backgrounds. I wanted to get to know each and every one of them.”

Ian Chamberlain who organised the event as part of the TAK project said, “TAK has worked with predominantly Polish people, it was interesting to hear the shared experience of people from very different backgrounds. It was good for our students to see that other nationalities also experienced similar prejudice.”