Notes from teaching English:
I taught English to a small class in February of 2017 at Timbaktu Collective (www.timbaktu.org) in Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh. This was part of the new career I'm carving out in skilling and training.
The trainees was employees of Timbaktu. They were either senior staff, for whom improved knowledge of English had become important over time, in addition to their domain understanding, and office staff who had more need of English usage. They varied in level but in general had trouble speaking English. They had a certain level of understanding of the language. They knew the alphabet, They had quite good domain-specific English vocabulary in NGO work and their domain.
My interest was particularly in seeing if I could do 'breakthrough' teaching of some sort (inspired by my participation in Landmark courses) ie. enable people to go beyond some barrier that they might have had. I wasn't so interested in incremental teaching of the language like improving their grammer. In any case, once I started, I found that as far as incremental teaching of the language went, I mysef was quite at sea. I went to grammer textbooks and found the whole thing horribly confusing. It was rather discouraging and I started feeling like learning English is actually very difficult. Which is somewhat of a disempowering position from which to teach! So I didn't go down that path much.
The class was structured as 4 one-hour sessions that happened during consecutive weeks. So actually the class time was very limited. There were challenges in logistics, particularly in having people keep coming back to the class week on week, as their schedules were unpredictable and this class was not so directly relevant to them. I started with 10 trainees, and was down to
5 by the end.
I did some things that have promise as English training tools and so sharing about them.
My fundamental premise was that people can speak/communicate in English at whatever level of mastery of grammer and vocabulary they currently are. What's holding them back is more a confidence/lack of practice/shyness/worry about making mistakes. So I was primarily interested in addressing this. And my experience with these students bore this out - they were able to communicate a lot and get their thoughts out. Good grammer and vocabulary is secondary for this purpose of communication.
So my approach was - how far can you go in speaking English , with exactly your current level of skill in the language, by just working on mental barriers instead.
1.) Getting people to speak as much as possible is crucial.I believe this is very important and finding effective ways to do this can be a challenge.
Having people speak only in English in the class, is a well-known technique and I used it.
I got people to do an introduction of themselves in English at the beginning of the first class.
As assignment, I asked people to prepare and do a better introduction of themselves at the second class. I believe the improvement they saw for themselves between the first and second classes was a positive reinforcement.
Another important practice was dividing them into pairs and having the pair have a conversation. This is something that could be done in every class if enough good topics are there that people are interested in conversing in. Some of the topics we used were:
- someone calls the organisation asking for more information about the organisation or wanting to visit
- a job interview
- talking to your vegetable vendor
- having an argument with your spouse :-)
2.) One new idea I came up with was as follows. It was to schedule a half hour slot individually with each of the class participants and speak English 1-1 with each of them continuously for that half hour. None of them have had to have a conversation in English for that duration in the past. So my hypothesis was that doing the conversation would build their confidence in their ability to speak English. Having such a conversation can be difficult for the trainer - you have to find something that the trainee is interested in talking about or the conversation peters away. Ideally also, you need to have the trainee very present and focussed in the conversation - they need to be just talking, talking, talking, not thinking or having their attention wander. Done well, at the end the trainee is amazed by his/her ability to speak the language.
3.) A third idea I had was to have them prepare a poem or song or other performance piece and deliver it to the class. I did this over two rounds of practice, ie. they delivered it once and then prepared and delivered it again at a succeeding class. The idea here is that with enough preparation they can deliver it pretty fluently and that gives you an emotional high and builds your confidence and leaves you with a positive feeling about the language, which is important for any later progress to happen. "When I can speak a particular English poem or song like a pro, then I should be able to talk English in general like a pro, right?" I give them a choice of pieces, pop songs, poems, things that might strike a chord with them and also let them pick anything else that they might want to do. I videotaped the final performance so that they would have it to keep with them. Another way of doing it might be to do it in front of an audience of their peers, which would heighten the emotional impact.
4.) I experimented with playing songs from the internet (YouTube) with subtitles. Example: "Everything at Once" by Lenka ,"Its a Wonderful Life". The idea was to communicate to them a certain joy and fun in the languge. I don't think it worked very well this time, but fundamentally I think its a good idea, and I need to find the context in which it would be more effective.
5.) Ashok Ganguly, one of the people at Timbaktu is enthusiastic about English teaching and I had good discussions with him. At one of the classes he made a presentation of some more useful points and ideas around speaking English..roots of words, how languages evolved, how much of a vocabulary the trainees already had etc. I think this was a good interlude, and done well, can add value.
6.) I found one very interesting mobile application called "Hello English". I don't know how effective it is in practice, but was designed very well with lots of games and tools as part of the learning process. There were some videos on YouTube though nothing that was a game-changer.
I taught English to a small class in February of 2017 at Timbaktu Collective (www.timbaktu.org) in Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh. This was part of the new career I'm carving out in skilling and training.
The trainees was employees of Timbaktu. They were either senior staff, for whom improved knowledge of English had become important over time, in addition to their domain understanding, and office staff who had more need of English usage. They varied in level but in general had trouble speaking English. They had a certain level of understanding of the language. They knew the alphabet, They had quite good domain-specific English vocabulary in NGO work and their domain.
My interest was particularly in seeing if I could do 'breakthrough' teaching of some sort (inspired by my participation in Landmark courses) ie. enable people to go beyond some barrier that they might have had. I wasn't so interested in incremental teaching of the language like improving their grammer. In any case, once I started, I found that as far as incremental teaching of the language went, I mysef was quite at sea. I went to grammer textbooks and found the whole thing horribly confusing. It was rather discouraging and I started feeling like learning English is actually very difficult. Which is somewhat of a disempowering position from which to teach! So I didn't go down that path much.
The class was structured as 4 one-hour sessions that happened during consecutive weeks. So actually the class time was very limited. There were challenges in logistics, particularly in having people keep coming back to the class week on week, as their schedules were unpredictable and this class was not so directly relevant to them. I started with 10 trainees, and was down to
5 by the end.
I did some things that have promise as English training tools and so sharing about them.
My fundamental premise was that people can speak/communicate in English at whatever level of mastery of grammer and vocabulary they currently are. What's holding them back is more a confidence/lack of practice/shyness/worry about making mistakes. So I was primarily interested in addressing this. And my experience with these students bore this out - they were able to communicate a lot and get their thoughts out. Good grammer and vocabulary is secondary for this purpose of communication.
So my approach was - how far can you go in speaking English , with exactly your current level of skill in the language, by just working on mental barriers instead.
1.) Getting people to speak as much as possible is crucial.I believe this is very important and finding effective ways to do this can be a challenge.
Having people speak only in English in the class, is a well-known technique and I used it.
I got people to do an introduction of themselves in English at the beginning of the first class.
As assignment, I asked people to prepare and do a better introduction of themselves at the second class. I believe the improvement they saw for themselves between the first and second classes was a positive reinforcement.
Another important practice was dividing them into pairs and having the pair have a conversation. This is something that could be done in every class if enough good topics are there that people are interested in conversing in. Some of the topics we used were:
- someone calls the organisation asking for more information about the organisation or wanting to visit
- a job interview
- talking to your vegetable vendor
- having an argument with your spouse :-)
2.) One new idea I came up with was as follows. It was to schedule a half hour slot individually with each of the class participants and speak English 1-1 with each of them continuously for that half hour. None of them have had to have a conversation in English for that duration in the past. So my hypothesis was that doing the conversation would build their confidence in their ability to speak English. Having such a conversation can be difficult for the trainer - you have to find something that the trainee is interested in talking about or the conversation peters away. Ideally also, you need to have the trainee very present and focussed in the conversation - they need to be just talking, talking, talking, not thinking or having their attention wander. Done well, at the end the trainee is amazed by his/her ability to speak the language.
3.) A third idea I had was to have them prepare a poem or song or other performance piece and deliver it to the class. I did this over two rounds of practice, ie. they delivered it once and then prepared and delivered it again at a succeeding class. The idea here is that with enough preparation they can deliver it pretty fluently and that gives you an emotional high and builds your confidence and leaves you with a positive feeling about the language, which is important for any later progress to happen. "When I can speak a particular English poem or song like a pro, then I should be able to talk English in general like a pro, right?" I give them a choice of pieces, pop songs, poems, things that might strike a chord with them and also let them pick anything else that they might want to do. I videotaped the final performance so that they would have it to keep with them. Another way of doing it might be to do it in front of an audience of their peers, which would heighten the emotional impact.
4.) I experimented with playing songs from the internet (YouTube) with subtitles. Example: "Everything at Once" by Lenka ,"Its a Wonderful Life". The idea was to communicate to them a certain joy and fun in the languge. I don't think it worked very well this time, but fundamentally I think its a good idea, and I need to find the context in which it would be more effective.
5.) Ashok Ganguly, one of the people at Timbaktu is enthusiastic about English teaching and I had good discussions with him. At one of the classes he made a presentation of some more useful points and ideas around speaking English..roots of words, how languages evolved, how much of a vocabulary the trainees already had etc. I think this was a good interlude, and done well, can add value.
6.) I found one very interesting mobile application called "Hello English". I don't know how effective it is in practice, but was designed very well with lots of games and tools as part of the learning process. There were some videos on YouTube though nothing that was a game-changer.
