I observed the TRU conversation club on January 25th. It was a lot of fun. It was also a good learning experience to see how the instructor led the students through conversations and dealt with challenges. The instructor centered the conversation around Friends, a popular American situational comedy from the 1990’s. Friends was a great topic for engaging the students because it has a huge international audience. It is also an appropriate topic because, at least in my experience, many people naturally enjoy talking about their favourite TV shows and characters, so it is the kind of conversation that will likely have in their day-to-day lives. The main exercise was a discussion about the different characters of the show. Students were asked one by one to describe each character, and the instructor engaged each one in a dialogue, encouraging them to expand and assisting them with vocabulary where needed. The character discussion challenged students to generate a lot of varied language to capture the disparities among the characters. One challenge, which I think is most common in the online environment but likely occurs in the classroom as well, was that some students were reluctant to speak. In most cases, the instructor was able to gently encourage them to turn their microphones on. Students also spoke at different levels within the class, and the instructor was able to successfully adjust her approach depending on the needs of the individual student with whom she was working.