Hello All,

I would like some advice.

Here at the soon to open Melbourne Museum we are beginning to recruit and train volunteers. Volunteers will play a large role in taking visitors on regularly scheduled guided tours of the exhibitions. We would like to offer these in languages other than English on a fortnightly basis. Melbourne is home to a diverse range of second language speakers and we expect that a number of our volunteers will be capable of taking tours in say, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Italian or Greek.

Question is, how does one go about testing the proficiency of a volunteer who states that they can take tours in a language other than English without spending massive amounts of money on 'message testing'.

Any advice based on previous experience would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Colleen Boyle
Education & Visitor Programs Officer
Melbourne Museum
Phone: +61 3 8341 7335
Fax: +61 3 8341 7210