We have two goals at the language café at the Oslo Public Library, Stovner branch. Firstly, we want to help the participants find a sense of belonging to the language café and their local community. This directly connects to the second goal which is to help them communicate their needs and express their ideas and personality in their new language; help them access their voice in their new language.
How to create a successful language café:
- Dedicated, enthusiastic and caring volunteers
- Create a welcoming and safe environment where participants can dare to make mistakes.
- A variety of structured activities that encourage (kindly force) participants to talk to each other.
- Give room to playfulness and seriousness.
- Set a language requirement – at Stovner the participants should already be able to communicate the basics in Norwegian.
- Throw out the textbooks! Get creative!
We also have three guidelines that we go over at the start of each café:
- We use the new language as our tool for communicating. Once in a while there are exceptions to this – but for the most part we keep explanations in the language we are learning or we draw or we use body language.
- Help each other
- Dare to ask – we are here to learn and we will only slow down our own language growth if we don’t dare to ask.