Teaching Survival English Training

Last Thursday we held our first Teaching Survival English training for volunteers. It was very successful thanks to the three ESL teachers who shared strategies and tips for teaching English to refugees.  

Our first volunteer ESL teacher, Danielle, has worked with the Somali Bantu community for more than five years. She spoke about how bewildering but ultimately rewarding volunteering with a family can be. She went on to suggest some great resources for beginning teachers including conversation-starters like Where Children Sleep by James Mollison--a great collection of pictures of children and the places they call home (you can see a few of those pictures here. Danielle also advised new teachers to be flexible and to go with what the student asks for—even if that means changing tactics or topics from week to week.

Our second volunteer ESL teacher, Debbie, offered three “strategies” for structuring lessons and conversations with pre-literate adults. In all of these strategies she advises that volunteers keep in mind the “hierarchy of skills”—i.e., building from simple nouns and adjective identification to making inferences and drawing conclusions. She emphasized not overwhelming the student with written words in the beginning because it will only distract them from the vocabulary. 

This is a good example of a "conversation
-starting" photo from National Geographic

The first strategy, called “postcards from the edge” suggests that teachers bring in postcards or pictures for students to practice identifying colors, numbers, simple objects, etc. For pre-literate students she recommends that teachers bring “yes” and “no” cards for the student to hold up in answer to simple questions (e.g., “is there an animal in your picture?”) in order to start building the association between written and spoken words. Her second strategy uses the concept of family photos and stories to start a conversation. She advises that a teacher brings a family photo (refugee students tend to respond very positively to these) to start teaching about relationships and the concept of a family story.  Her third strategy uses photos and maps from around the world to start conversations about locations, what people eat, how people work, etc. With all of these strategies she urges teachers to use their intuition as to what seems to work and what doesn’t with your students—stay open and flexible!

For those of you who are looking for a place to start, our third volunteer ESL teacher, Jennifer, handed out a great list of Survival English topics from The Oxford Picture Dictionary: Monolingual. Here are just a few of the topics from that list:

·         -Giving personal information

·         -Posing and answering “wh-“ questions

·        - Being able to use a telephone, especially in the case of emergencies

·         -Understanding and using money

·         -Going shopping

·        - Recognizing places in town

Here is another photo from Nat'l Geographic's
online gallery.

·        - Identifying household items

 The Oxford Picture Dictionary is a good source of “conversation starting” pictures. So is National Geographic’s “picture of the day” galleries (available here). The BBC News’  “in pictures” section is also a good resource—particularly the “your pictures” section which gives themes like “cooking” or “spring” to contestants who enter their best photos. When you are looking for photos try to find diverse groups of people that your students might be better-able to relate to.

Thanks again to everybody who came to our training. We are planning to hold another one of these training sessions, which will be mandatory for new volunteers, so we will let you know when and where it will be.