 This is my first library presentation and I'm so nervous. So, Mountain View's ESL Conversation Club is fairly young. We started about a year ago. We just had our birthday party. All of the pictures on the slides are from our birthday party. So Mountain View, like the rest of Silicon Valley, is increasingly international. I just saw an article in Business Week which said in the Silicon Valley 51% of people speak a language other than English at home. That's compared to 21% in the rest of the country. So there really is that need for ESL and there's also, our patrons were asking. So when patrons ask, you answer, right? So the way that we started ours, we got a student from the UC Santa Cruz extension program. He was a teaching English to speakers of other languages student and he did it for his practicum project. He designed the flyer and led the first six clubs. Since then I've been leading and prepping and doing most of them. Occasionally I go away so I've had a couple subs. So we meet Wednesdays from five to six p.m. And we have an average attendance of between 30 and 40 people each week. Some people have been coming since day one. Some people come every couple months. Some people come to just one or two and then they don't come back. Our main concentration is on building confidence rather than building skills. So our rules are very simple. The rule is have fun and encourage others to speak. We're very permissive. We let people come late. We let people leave early. If there's a topic, you don't have to talk about the topic. We're different from a lot of clubs in that we allow children. Normally this means they'll be a mom with a baby on her lap or in the stroller. But sometimes this means that we've had eight-year-olds sit in on conversation or 13-year-olds come and they participate. So we really mean everyone is welcome. So the reason we allow children is child care is generally is often an issue for people that are new to the country. You may not have the connections. You may not have family. So allowing people to bring their children means that a lot of people who couldn't come can come. It's not really an issue because the nature of the club is so chaotic. People talking to each other generates a lot of noise. So if there's a child running around the room making airplane noises, it's just part of the chaos. And it also gives people something to chat about. People talk about being parents. They talk about the things that the kids are doing. So it's really a positive. We remember the cardinal rule of children's programming, which is always have crayons. So we use a couple different formats. We experiment with trying new things all the time. The most common thing we do is we meet in groups of about six. Each table group will generally have a native speaker. I'll put together a topic sheet that will have a few conversations start our questions, some idioms to talk about, maybe something local that's coming up. But we also do things like sometimes we meet in the speed-dating format. So people have short seven-minute conversations and they rotate around the room and people really enjoy that. Recently we tried, due to somebody misspeaking, we tried speed double-dating, which is a lot of fun. So we had table groups of four and then two people moved, I think we did like 14 minutes. But we've also done things like photo scavenger hunts. I put people in groups and send them around the library to take pictures with a staff member making a funny face or I ask them, what books would you find in 428.24, just ESL books? But basically any icebreaker game is workable. So another thing I've done is I've had them choose pairs of opposites like day or night or summer and winter. And then at the end we've gotten together as a group and had people stand, have you ever done that? In a big group you stand on the line and if you like summer you go over here and if you like winter you go over here and if you like them both equally you stand in the middle and you see where you stand on a different issue. So we've done that. We played card games, I taught them all how to play Go Fish. And then they taught us their card games and quarterly we've had potlucks. And I just have to tell you that an ESL potluck is the best potluck you will ever go to. I've been like somebody held me on and said you must try kvass, try kvass. Don't ever try it, it's gross but it was a good experience to have. And I've had really excellent pierogies and fabulous sushi, like really good food. And our potlucks we play human bingo. So I give them each a bingo card, I have to explain how you play bingo to a lot of people which is fun. And then I say things like find somebody with a tattoo or find somebody who's been to five different countries and they go around and meet each other and write each other's names down. So the topics that are most successful for our club have been food and American culture. And so for food you talk about questions like what foods do you miss from home or what foods have you tried here or you say where are the best ramen restaurants? And you'll get lots of good advice. American culture you try to think about what experiences that are sort of universally American that you have as kids like for example in this photo we're making hand print turkeys and you try to give them that experience. So if they say, you know, if you're there in a situation where people are talking about hand print turkeys they can say oh yes I've made one of those, I know what that is. The holidays are always a good topic and we're actually coming up with a fantastic time, it's a fantastic time to have an ESL club right now because the holidays right now are blam blam blam blam. So like you talk about Halloween, you talk about Veterans Day, you talk about Thanksgiving, lots of stuff to talk about. Local knowledge is another good one. So things like how do you stay cool in summer, those sort of things that you may not know. Anything where you would tell a tourist in that information. So our native speakers, so some of you who work in San Jose may know the woman on the left, she's an ardent library supporter, she's also an ESL teacher and she has been with us since the first day, she volunteers and is a native speaker. So we treat our native, our volunteers or our native speakers a little differently. We consider them to be program participants, so we don't ask them to commit. We just, if they come, we sort of give them a few guidelines like try to make other people speak more than you speak and they participate in the conversations just like everybody else. So that allows two things, it gives us a way to offer people that want to help at your library, a way that's very easy, that's a low commitment or no commitment way. And it also, and don't tell my boss, but it allows us to circumvent our very strict volunteering process. We send our volunteers through background checks, they have to fill out an application, they have to log in and log out. So this is a way that they don't have to do that. We generally have between three and eight volunteers. Another plus is a lot of our volunteers are people who are also wanting conversation practice. So it's an opportunity to sit and have a nice conversation with people no matter what your native language is. So just finally, my last slide, I just want to say. So the theme of this library futures is fostering communities and it really does that. It allows people who have just moved to the area to meet others, to find friends, to learn how they can get involved with the community. We've had a lot of our participants who have said, oh I want to volunteer, how do I volunteer at your library or can I apply for this page job. So they have started to get more involved both with the community and with the library. And for us it's just such a positive experience to be able to take an hour each week, have really nice pleasant conversations with our patrons, figure out what they want, what services we need to provide. It's really just been very eye-opening and a positive experience. Thank you.