Speak Shop’s lesson on the transformative power of the web
Article printed in Good Four Business, Monthly CSReport, Issue 11, November, 2005.
Opportunity meets community, in two places at once
When most international businesses apply voice and video conferencing, it’s for their own benefit. At Speak Shop, that’s one small part of the story. This Portland, Oregon-based company puts Web technologies to use in world-changing ways. And it works out well for everyone.
For Spanish language learners all over the world, Speak Shop provides an appealing alternative to cost- and time-prohibitive immersion studies. For experienced, native-language tutors, the approach delivers fair trade wages, an empowering form of employment and free access to a global supply of students.
Here’s how: Students sign on as members and receive everything they need to learn. From downloadable materials to an online conjugator and translator, it’s much of what you might expect. But Speak Shop takes it an important step further—allowing students to choose an experienced tutor whom they can work with, face-to-face, to create lesson plans and get answers to questions, as well as immediate feedback on grammar and accent. Simply put, the student has the opportunity to choose when and what they learn, while the tutor has the chance to share what they know. Both parties, of course, benefit equally from cross-cultural interaction.
Headed by Clay and Cindy Cooper, a husband and wife team, Speak Shop took root in 1998 when Clay traveled to Guatemala to study Spanish. There, he learned that—despite the Guatemalan Spanish immersion industry being world-renowned—many tutors lived in poverty, due to an oversupply of tutors and a short tourism season. On coming back home, he devised the plan at work today.
It’s a small operation so far, but Speak Shop aims to grow its Spanish language capacity, and to expand to new languages and countries soon. Needless to say, you’d be wise to check it out for yourself, pronto.
