Benefits of Interviewing People

I take speaking III in this semester. Mrs. Salwa as my lecturer said that Speaking III deals with public speaking. Public speaking is commonly understood as a kind of face-to-face speaking between individuals and audience for the purpose of communication. There are so many challenging activities in my Speaking III class. One of them is interviewing people. My lecturer asks the students to interview English lecturer. And I have an interview with one of my English lecturers. I think interviewing people is a good activity for the students, especially for English students. The interviewer and the interviewee are affected to have a good interview. That statement is supported by John L. Lipp’s opinion in “The Idiot’s Guide to Recruiting and Managing Volunteers. He said that the quality of an interview depends on both the interviewer and the person being interviewed. Interviewing English lecturer has advantages for the students such as improving speaking skill, getting many information from the interviewee, and learning anything from the interviewee’s experience. First, by interviewing English lecturer, the students are able to improve their speaking skill. The students have face to face interaction with the lecturer. So they must speak grammatically and fluently. Before the students have an interview with the lecturer, they have to prepare the questions. I think preparation is very important in interviewing people. According to Nicholas James‘s opinion, preparation is the key of a good interview, go into the interview with everything planned and organized. After preparing anything, the students are able to speak grammatically and fluently, and have a good pronunciation when they have one-on-one interview. As a result, the students can improve their speaking skill. In addition to improve speaking skill, the students can get many information from the lecturer. In this occasion, the students can ask many aspects such as about the education, life, hobby, family, etc. By asking many things, they will have a relationship with the lecturer. Gyutae Park said that you develop a relationship with the interviewee, which is good to have and can help you later on. There is a comment from Tevin Anderson on Gyutae Park’s article, “I love interviews such a great way to build relationships, and establish yourself as the expert in your niche”. The article that written by Gyutae Park and Tevin Anderson’s comment is supported my opinion. Based on my experience, by interviewing the lecturer the students may get new knowledge from the lecturer. For example, the students ask about the life of their lecturer that they don’t know before. From the answer of the lecturer, the students will know about it. Finally, they get information which is very useful. The last advantage by interviewing English lecturer is the students can learn many things from the lecturer’s experience. That statement is supported by David Chew’s opinion in a website that he had posted on January 7, 2008. He said that you learn from the experiences and skills of others by asking the questions you are most interested in. The students are able to take some good values from interviewing the lecturer. For example, when they ask about the education, the lecturer will explain his/her education from elementary school until he/she graduated from the university. In addition, the lecturer usually tells about the successful story of being English lecturer. From the lecturer’s explanation, they can take some good values. It is possible that the students being more spirit in learning English. After explain about the experience, the lecturer usually give some tips to the students. According to my experience last week, I got some tips from my lecturer that I had interviewed. One of the tips that I think it is very good for me is “study routinely”. The meaning of my lecturer’s tip is “study in 1 hour and routine is better than study hard study 6 hours in one week”. In brief, interviewing people is a good activity in speaking course. There are three advantages of interviewing English lecturer for the students such as to improve speaking skill, get many information from the lecturer, and learn anything from the lecturer’s experience. The interviewing process would bring many benefits since interviewers will be able to achieve knowledge about the interviewee’s life as well as their own life.