One of the first activities we did when we got to St Andrew’s Hall was to do a DISC profile. Obviously these sorts of tools are open to all kinds of abuse but for our group, it showed up something very interesting: almost all of us identified ‘I’ as either our primary or secondary function. Looking at our profiles, one lecturer said, “as a group, you’ll drop the ball on a few things but have a really good time doing it.” If you had to boil down what’s important to us to a word it would be FUN.

Enter ‘Community Meeting’, a weekly event primarily aimed at admin. Until now. Every week at our community meetings, we open with a ‘song of the week’, normally the most embarrassing or cringey effort someone could find on Youtube. We’re been Rickrolled, Shaq Attacked and endured Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday’. But today was my favourite: ‘Ken Lee’ from Bulgaria’s ‘Music Idol’.

Now, I doubt this woman knows English. This looks more like mimickry gone awry!

But I suspect one of the reasons I found this video so funny was how close to home it is. We’ve got some serious language learning coming up in the next few years and this is every language learner’s worst nightmare: that point where you think you get the language but what you’re hearing isn’t what everyone else is hearing, where you think you’re saying things clearly but it’s totally unintelligible!

Categories: Uncategorized Written by Tamie

Tagged as: Community Meeting DISC intercultural training language language learning

Tamie Davis

Tamie Davis is an Aussie living in Tanzania, writing at meetjesusatuni.com.