LCFS Adult Education

Our adult education program here at Lutheran Children and Family Service depends upon the faithful service of our volunteer teachers and tutors. These volunteers come with varying amounts of experience and training, and there is much we can learn from each other. I am creating this blog as a format where our volunteers can raise concerns and questions, which I can address. I also invite each of you to add your own ideas, suggestions, and insights.

A secondary purpose for this blog is to present teaching materials which can be used, or links to other websites with useful materials. I will try to have some suggestions each month, and I invite each of the volunteers to make their own suggestions.

I recently received an Email from one of our volunteer teachers, KH, who is doing a project for her ESL teaching course at UPenn. For my first entry, I will list her questions and my responses.

KH: I heard that you are in charge of this immigrant program. What are your goal or mission, belief for this? (the more specific, the better ) Do you have your own philosophy in teaching overall?

Our mission, very broadly, is to benefit the lives of the students by helping them become more independent and acculturated to American society. Many of the students have valuable work skills that they have developed in their native culture, which they are unable to use here until they have sufficient language proficiency to use them.

You asked me about my philosophy of teaching. I would say that rather than a single overarching philosophy of teaching, I teach according to a set of principles. It is impossible to list them all here, but I will try to list a couple that may be helpful.

• To the degree that it is possible, try to apply all vocabulary and grammatical concepts to students own lives. Give them plenty of chances to use the vocabulary to talk about themselves, their family, and their classmates.

For example, if I had the vocabulary item, "afraid," I might first act out the feeling of fear. I next might write an example sentence on the board, "I am afraid of rats." I would give a couple other sentences with slight variations, and ask if any other students are afraid of the same thing. "My friend is afraid of high places," (demonstrating this by standing on a chair and acting afraid) "Are any of you afraid of heights? "Finally I would choose a few students and ask, "Oscar, what are you afraid of?"

Later in the class, or in the following class, I might refer back to the item. I might write on the board, "What were you afraid of when you were little? Tell about a time you were afraid," and give students a chance to discuss these questions with a partner, along with several other questions.

• Notice in the above example, I do not just focus on a single word vocabulary item, but rather helped to demonstrate collocations or words that go together -- (be) afraid of.

• When reading a dialogue in a text book, be dramatic. Act out the situation as if you were really there. This will help students to relate it to a real situation. Later, when students have had practice with a particular dialogue, it is good to force them to get their eyes off the page and act it out themselves without the text. Always remind them that they will not have the book to refer to when they are really in that situation. The goal of all of this is to make the language come alive for them, so that when they are in a situation, they will not just do what they have done previously, but rather they will think, "Hey, how did I say that when I was in English class?"

KH There are diversities such as different age, very different proficiency and different nationality in class. To me, to meet students’ different need to learn English is the most demanding factor. So what should be the mainstream to approach the diversity? I mean , what should be considered as priority? Do we have to follow the majority of the group?I've heard that you have taught English in Taiwan. Have you confronted similar situation? Then how did you handle it? What is the most important factor to concern about dealing with diversity?

Diversity is present in all kinds of ESOL teaching situations, but it is much more an issue when teaching with immigrants, than when teaching in an EFL situations.

I find dealing with students from many different nationalities preferable to teaching students from one language background. When they need to do communicative activities in English, there is less danger of them using their first language instead of English. Also, it is realer for them, because English really is the only way they can communicate with each other. It is a better situation for teaching an aspect of culture, because it is possible to compare and contrast a variety of cultural norms, which may help them get past the question of which is the right way to do something, but rather see that there are a variety of equally valid cultural views and behaviors.

Diversity of levels is more tricky. First, I will say that if someone seems to have a far higher level of English than others in the group, it is okay to refer them to the higher level classes. The testing system is not perfect and some students would be better off in a higher level. I trust your judgement on this.

When there are differences in level, it is good to have students work cooperatively in small groups or pairs. When a language concept is introduced, it may be totally new for one student and may be a review for another student. That is okay. One of the best ways to really fix a concept in someones mind so that they do not forget it is to have them explain it to someone else. 16 years ago, I learned a few Japanese phrases, so that I could teach them to a group of other students as a part of a language teaching simulation. I have never had need to use those phrases since then, but I can still remember them fairly well today.

KH: What do you expect from them after joining this class other than learning English?

Of course the primary focus of the class is language learning, but there are a number of side benefits. A major goal for them to better understand American culture. For example, in the previous unit you may have discussed what is expected of parents when interacting with the American school system.

Another purpose is to open their eyes to possibilities. Maybe they never really thought about buying a house, and by discussing the process, they may decide they are ready to. Once when I was teaching a unit on food, we discussed the food nutrition labels. We then took a trip to the supermarket, and looked for food with certain nutritional requirements (soup with low sodium, low fat milk, 100% juice, etc.) One of the students came up to me later and said, "You have opened my eyes." We allowed her to see something that was always there before her, but she never took advantage of it.