English Club

Wednesday was the first meeting of the English club that I am coordinating. At last! I was expecting to start about a month ago, but several things delayed the start of the club (most importantly, the fact that students were given two or three weeks off for Tet holidays...). The silver lining in all this is that I had lots of time to prepare activities for the students, and to recruit English students to help me out.

There are 43 students signed up, all from the Khmer culture class. The main goal of this club is to give Khmer students an opportunity to practise their English, and to boost their confidence in a third language (after Vietnamese and Khmer). Unfortunately, since I am only here for another month, I don't know how much I will be able to help these students...but it's a start.

As with many universities, TVU is suffering from a lack of classroom space. We were given a classroom in Campus III, which is all right (none of the campuses are very far from each other). I even have access to a projector, so I can use PowerPoint presentations. Wednesday night, we started with introductions (my name is...I have # brothers and sisters...I want to learn English because...and the most difficult one, my dream job would be...). I divided the group into 4 or 5 smaller groups so they could all have the opportunity to practise presenting themselves. Then we moved on to "2 truths and a lie" which turned out to be more difficult than I had anticipated. Most students were okay with composing two true sentences (such as "My name is..." "I have # number of brothers and sisters..." Two popular sentences!!) but coming up with an untrue sentence was more challenging.

I wanted to schedule two meetings per week, but tonight's meeting has just been cancelled (the students have an exam...how come I always find out about these things at the last minute?). Then I will be traveling the next two Fridays, so I'll only be able to hold meetings on Wednesdays. We'll probably only have four or five meetings before the end of my internship at TVU, which I know is not enough...but hopefully, someone (such as the English majors who have been helping me) can continue coordinating meetings. Being able to speak and understand English is an important skill if these students want to find higher-paying "white collar" jobs. It is especially important to promote English speaking skills for Khmer girls who seem to have fewer opportunities. To paraphrase a report I read recently (entitled "Equal opportunities and youth employment"): Gender discrimination can be subtle. Girls' occupations are often segregated from boys' occupations. This is known as gender tracking. One solution is to "address the bias that limits them [girls] to traditional skills, and train them in nontraditional sectors like welding, carpentry, plumbing, child care services, photography, personal services, and computer languages, rather than in sewing, weaving, embroidery or crafts".