A hurdle some PCVs in Ecuador face is low English fluency throughout their school and speaking timidity across grade levels and among their teachers. Ecuador TEFL PCV Shaun Nesheim shares a strategy that works in his site.
Since Ecuadorian TEFL PCVs co-teach and co-plan with local counterparts, Shaun first approached his counterpart high school teachers with a plan to address the students’ reluctance to speak.
Presentation
At the weekly Thursday English teachers’ meeting, the group creates a list of three common conversation questions and responses that their mostly basic level students could easily understand and use. The teachers theme the questions so that a conversation will flow naturally from the interaction with the students. For example, Shaun and his teachers posed the following questions over three weeks:
Week 1: What is your name? How are you doing? How old are you?
Week 2: Where do you live (town, province, city)? Where are you from (birthplace)? What’s your address?
Week 3: What’s your hobby? What sport can you play? What is your favorite type of music?
Production
The questions and a range of responses are taught in each classroom on Friday or the following Monday. Students practice speaking the week’s three questions and possible responses and write the questions in their notebooks. Students then may approach any teacher during recess to start a conversation using the week’s questions and responses. This is a back-and-forth activity, that is, the student initiates the conversation and works through the three questions, to which the teacher responds. Then it’s the teacher’s turn to ask the student, who must respond. Since the activity is voluntary and done outside class time, the teachers decided to give the students an incentive to participate. If the student successfully completes the activity with the teacher, the teacher notes the student’s name and passes it on to the homeroom teacher, who will reward the student with a point toward the English grade. Moreover, teachers give successful participants a candy. Sweet! And wholesale candy is inexpensive in Shaun’s town.
Clearly, this activity works with higher language levels by modifying the questions and responses. We like the whole-school strategy because it brings the English area teachers together in a Community of Practice (CoP) to work to improve English fluency in their school.
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