They Will Not Respect You...

Oleksandra Grishnykh, Ukraine

Oleksandra Grishnykh has finished Pedagogical college in Kiev and National Pedagogical university named after M. Drahomanov in Kiev, Ukraine. Her specialization is teacher of English language and literature. She used to work as a teacher in a centre for kids and youth and at school. Nowadays she works in Poland as a coordinator of EVS: European Voluntary Service. E-mail: FunnyMalvo@yandex.ru

“They will not respect you,”- these were the first words I heard before coming into the room with some foreign volunteers. I was a bit nervous but pretty confident. I teach the volunteers who comes to Poland on EVS projects. They are young, brave or shy, open minded or closed in their own world. Mostly youngsters have social problems or coming from the economically low level areas. These guys were not my first students, but they were first whom with I should work using only English and rely on their senses and logic. To begin I have to say that I don’t look like teacher ,more like teenager. Anyway the reason to not respect was deeper inside the culture: two of my volunteers were from Hungary from Gypsy community, for them the woman it’s only someone who cooks, cleans and gives the life. Strange but the ability of giving the life isn’t respected that much in their culture then in others. Other volunteers were from Germany and France . Also one can say “Paradox!-They all learn English at schools in Germany, their level is rather high!”. I will agree but will say “BUT”, my students are with fewer opportunities: for some there were no chances to go school at all, some didn’t want to study, some had not so good learning skills. So all these facts make my work a bit more difficult.

At my first lesson I integrate them what is important in group work to feel comfortable. I like one easy game which actually doesn’t need special knowledge. I write for them on the board one sentence “Do you have letter …?” Students stick on them a piece of paper tape and put as many lines as many letter there are in their names. I ask them to walk through the room and collect the letters from others. It’s quite easy way for integration.

The second steps were more complicated for me. I had to find the way of teaching the foreigner. There are such faculties at universities, where during 5 years smart professors explain you how to do it. But I have never been to such lections and had to find the way of teaching on my own. I tried to remember myself at primary school (it was English school) where I had almost all the subjects including Math and PE in English. Our teachers used the body language, highlighters and paper. T helped me a lot in work. At my lessons I use mostly pantomime and theatre tricks which are understandable for everyone. For example we play the game “What are you doing?”. For the first time I show some action and ask myself : “What are you doing?” and immediately give the answer (e.g. I am sleeping/ I am dancing/ I am eating). For sure we choose only the most useful phrases and practice them after the lessons as well. Once I brought some helpful staff with me, actually the things which the volunteers see and use every day: axe, spoon, fork, cup, pen, sunglasses. There is the well-known fact that visualization is the best way to memorize. And it works much better than the boring lections with writing some words and sentences, explaining the grammar. On the level of my students they don’t have to know how the grammar works, they have to communicate in.

One good thing which I discovered for me it’s using video in teaching speech. I have just seen on some popular Internet homepage video pieces from “Friends” series, where Joey says “How you doing?” in different situations with different intonations what teaches the phonetics of English well and make the lessons more exciting while everyone know these series and admire it. My students propose me to play it, so we did it adding the most useful answers for this question. And it became more or less like a competition in parody of an actor.

This is only small part of me experience which I can share with you but I hope it will be useful if you add to it your own creativity and my ideas will inspire you for something more! To finish I would like to say: I love my volunteers, I learn life with them and from them, I improve myself as psychologist, I discover new methodology.

Please check the Train the Trainer course at Pilgrims website.