Monday, July 13, 2009
Language Barrier
I just wanted to mention what I picked up when we were conversing with one of the residents interested in participating in the ESL course we were planning. From his tone of voice it was clear that he was a little bit frustrated. We were asking him what he wanted to learn and it only seemed to upset him a little more. The fact of the matter was that there were many individuals who were interested in actually learning English, it just had to be organized. By organized, not only do I mean schedule-wise, but I also mean structured, with some sort of curriculum; we need a place to begin and an idea of what direction we're headed in. Other than that, it appears that this opportunity could be an excellent learning experience for both student and teacher.
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If there are a lot of people coming to the center who are interested in learning English we should try to actually organize a schedule for next semester's class to follow and actually have a syllabus laid out for different topics, almost like a real English course at the beginner level. We could hang this schedule and syllabus at the center and hand it out to residents as well so that they could come everyday or only on the days which offered topics they wanted to improve/expand upon. It would be great if we could contact teachers at a local elementary or middle school who work with children whose first language isn't English to figure out a way to structure the lessons. I have taken multiple Spanish courses at UNC and they structure the courses the same way with a syllabus where different topics are covered on different days - for example, on Monday we would cover present tense verbs and how to conjugate, Tuesday could be vocabulary on different subjects (Food, tools, outdoors, common phrases/greetings, medical terms, holidays/celebrations, workplace, transportation, etc..., Wednesday would be past tense, Thursday future tense, Friday more vocab. It would also be nice if we could find some materials to give to the participants for practice at home that they could bring in for us to check at their next visit, like a real tutoring service. Does anyone know a teacher or have any contacts that could help us out with a schedule and materials?
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