Thursday, March 6, 2014

On The Flip Side

Today, I worked with the English as a Second Language students at Amigos en Cristos. It was a new experience to teach English to students who either speak Creole or Spanish. I was assigned to work with an elderly student who was illiterate in her own language of Creol. I went over the letters of the alphabet and worked with the very basics of the written language. She did not understand any spoken English. I also met a 23 year old student who spoke in English with great confidence even though he did not know proper grammer or basic vocabulary. Talking with the young man, reminded me of the experiences that I had while on my one month visitation to India. I spoke to the people in India with broken ill grammered Hindi. I struggled to speak basic words in Hindi to get my Ideas across. I did not understand how to speak proper grammer and stopped at every sentence to conjugate verbs. Through this expereince of teaching the the ESL students, I understood the difficulties that these students undergo in getting thier ideas across on a daily bases. Being on the flip side of knowing how to speak the language of the the majority and being the teacher while I am usually the student was a rewarding endevor.                                     

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