English Club- over

19:00 26 August 2008

Adding to last night’s drama, I found out this morning that my host sister had been sent over to the other family to tell them not to make me work any more and that I wouldn’t be eating over. I was a little offended that they spoke for me, but I get along well with them otherwise, so I won’t have a cow over it. I hope now family feuds start in my last weeks living in this village.

Today was an odd day schedule-wise. Normally, our language classes are in the morning and after lunch we travel somewhere for technical or cultural lessons. Today, we attended a conference for the English Teacher’s Association of Kyrgyzstan. It very interesting to meet teachers that will be similar to our counter-parts and it was interesting to see their levels of English knowledge. The Soviet system really affects the Kyrgyz educational system of language learning, and these teachers demonstrated that perfectly. Speaking and listening are not the focus of the Soviet learning, reading and translation combined with intensive grammar instruction were the mainstay of Soviet language learning. Therefore, despite decades of teaching experience and reasonably good writing and reading, many of these teachers struggled when trying to hold a basic conversation, even though the volunteers were asked to speak slowly and clearly.

While it’s a shame that many of these teacher’s didn’t have a great command of the language in its spoken form, it really makes it obvious how much of a help we volunteers can be. As native speakers, we have unparalleled ability to teach fluidity and demonstrate actual use of the language outside of formulaic artificial classroom situations. We were told that one of the biggest benefits we will have (and undoubtedly one of the more sustainable ones) is simply speaking consistently with our counterparts and other English faculty. Improving their conversational skills will allow them better to teach the most useful aspects of English to their students.
After lunch we had a short language class and then our last English club. Today, we had decided to make it a fun activity rather than a structured lesson. Well, we were successful in making it not structured, but our attempts at corralling the kids to play English themed games were relatively unsuccessful. Red-light/Green-light worked somewhat, but English word freeze tag didn’t and it ended up with just the trainees in my village just horsing around with the kids for an hour- not that this was at all bad. The kids were happy to play with us, and I think overall they enjoyed the club. Even if the only thing that they learned was that Americans can be cool and that English can be fun, I will leave that project believing it was a success