Yesterday I finished my first session with two Mandarin native bilinguals because I haven’t heard from any of the English native ones. Starting with running experiments with them was still workable because we still can collect data about testing bilingual’s memory of their conversation in both languages.

In my session, participants were asking questions more than I thought but everything was clear after the questions. This session took us about 2 hr and 45 mins to finish probably because I was switching back and forth between breakout rooms and it took me time to make sure I open the correct files or PowerPoint for each participant. Also, there was something I need to do next time that is to cut off the time for my participants if they pass the time limit of certain task. This would not only make the whole session take longer, but also give the other participant nothing to do but wait and get bored. That’s something I need to improve for the next sessions.

This first session really gave me heads up about how a real session is going to be like. It helped me to get more prepared and confident about running experiments. The only thing that we need to look at next was about if I need to change my target participants to Mandarin native bilinguals, because it’s really hard to find English native ones.