My first English Teaching Experience

My first English teaching experience…..Since we are on a two week break from the summer school at San Ignacio the La Esperanza director, Pauline, decided this would be a good opportunity for the volunteers teach the ayudantes (local volunteers in the organization) English and computers. She asked us last week to sign up so she could match us one-on-one with an ayudante. I was immediately excited cause this would be a great test run for me to see first if I like teaching English, second what my teaching style is and third how difficult and/or responsive the learner will be.

Pauline scheduled the lessons for two hours a day, one hour of English lessons and one hour of computer lessons, three days this week and four days next week. She gave us an overall idea to walk around town pointing at objects and naming them in English. And for the computers she said to practice using the Internet, Word and Excel. At first it was kinda funny to me to think that people my same age don’t know how to use these the Internet, Word or Excel but I guess if you didn’t grow up with a computer in your house since the age of 10, like most Americans, then I guess you wouldn’t know how.

Anyways so I started my lessons with one of the ayudantes, Tatiana, on Monday (not the same girl we sponsored for high school. Tatiana is a popular name in Nicaragua). I prepared a little by writing down a list of objects I figured we would see around town: park, church, car, tree, horse etc. Walking around town we added to the list. We went to an office supply store which I figured would be good for objects at the school, clothing stores and the market for food names. After the English lesson we came back to my house to use the internet.

Our first lesson went really well. Tatiana knows a little English and has pretty good pronunciation which makes it a bit easier. By the end of our time together on Monday we were both excited about continuing lessons. I went and picked up flash cards later that afternoon for us to use on Tuesday. I wrote out cards in groups of 10 per subject translated in English and Spanish. For example 10 objects in a school, 10 in a restaurant, 10 in a bedroom, 10 animals, 10 articles and helping verbs, Who, What, Where, When, Why, How, etc. etc. Tuesday morning we repeatedly went over all the flash cards. At the end of the lesson I told Tatiana I made them for her to take home and study. It was so satisfying seeing the HUGE smile on her face when she realized I was giving them to her.

Wednesday morning she came back knowing almost all the words on the flashcards. This was a good sign!! Yeah. In Wednesday’s lesson I continued to use the list of words we have obtained so far to start making new flash cards with simple sentences. Then we uses translation program on the internet to translate these sentences. It was a good exercise for her to practice her typing and learn a new resource for learning English. As we walked around town I added more flash cards with sentences and vocabulary words but only in English. At the end of our lesson I told Tatiana her homework for is to translate the only English flashcards into Spanish and practice as much as she could. I am very confident in her and believe she will come back next Monday knowing almost all of the flashcards we made this week. I am also proud of myself for planning and carrying out my first English teaching to a foreign learner!

written by

ryan & debbrial on December 23, 2009 from Granada, Nicaragua

from the travel blog: Us Discovering the Latin Americas

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