EIL Intercultural Learning

Headmaster Luo from a school in Shanghai has writen to explaining the positive impact Irish volunteers have had at his school and to offer advice for future ones:

Since last March of 2008, foreign volunteers from your organization assigned to help with the oral English courses in our school have yielded a great harvest for our educational region!

They have enhanced the interest of the students when they are learning English. First of all, the students are willing to approach the foreign teachers and try to learn more about them because they are curious. Second, compared with the somewhat severe atmosphere created by many Chinese teachers, the foreign teachers provide a cozy and comfortable environment for students so that the children can get more emotional and joyful experience than ever before. Moreover, the teaching methods used by foreign teachers in the English Corner sessions are mostly games and rhymes. Since children love games, this enhances the children's interest in learning.

The atmosphere for learning English has become richer and more closely approximates real life. Our Chinese teachers typically pay more attention to the tools, books, and grammatical exercises that have been designed in old ways, but the tools and methods of the foreign teachers are much richer. The pictures, songs and rhymes they provide are often more closely related to current life, keeping students interested and allowing them to acquire more knowledge about western culture indirectly, through colorful pictures and enjoyable songs.

The presence of the foreign volunteers gives our Chinese teachers a wonderful opportunity to communicate with foreign teachers in their daily routine. The English communication capability of our teachers is improved via chatting in daily life! Our teachers have more chances to hear pure oral English and amend their own. They also can discuss things like grammar and idioms to learn more about the language than they easily do through books.

We are deeply impressed by the foreign volunteers willingness to work hard at no profit to themselves to help us. Knowing that they have traveled a long way from their comfortable western homes, to work on our small island campus we are greatly moved by their generosity and they have our deep gratitude.

Let me also take this opportunity to express two suggestions for future foreign teachers.

Because of their lack of teaching experience, foreign volunteers have to spend some time to adapt and get familiar with the teaching methods here. For this reason, we give them a period of time to watch and learn from our teachers. This training time can take almost a week and reduces their productive classroom time. Once they start teaching, it often takes a week or two for them to learn to develop effective lesson plans and teaching techniques. Since many of them stay only about four weeks, they end up leaving their teaching when they just get accustomed to it! So I hope that future volunteer teachers can stay longer, like John, who stayed for three months last fall. When they have longer time to develop and deliver their lessons, the students have time to get to know their style and methods and their English benefits greatly.

Because of the rural location of our campus and the fact that our students are in the lower grades, the students here don't absorb knowledge as swiftly as those in city life or those from higher grades. So, the teachers are required to repeat what they teach again and again by different methods, especially for the young kids. For example, our teachers employ methods such as oral repetition, group reading, "rush-answering" according to questions or pictures, group contests, student-to-student conversations, and student-to-teacher conversations. Without using these multiple methods, we have seen that students often will not hold onto the lesson being taught. I would like the foreign teachers to be aware of this phenomenon so they can adjust their teaching styles accordingly.

In closing, let me say that we are very grateful that the foreign teachers add vitality and happiness to our campus. Our gate will always be wide open for them!!

Headmaster Luo, 12 December, 2008