In the
summer of 1997 I taught Primary Level ESOL courses at the Jamaica Plain
Adult Learning Program (now called the Adult
Literacy Resource Institute) located at the English High School
in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. The sessions lasted for ten weeks.
Students were awarded a certificate upon its completion.
Student
Body
The students
were mixed. Most were women and most were over the age of thirty. All
were recent immigrants to the United States. Some of them were not literate
in their own language, which made teaching them English especially challenging.
The students came from countries like Somalia, Ethiopia, Haiti, the
Dominican Republic, Uruguay, and Peru.
Curriculum
Although
I did teach some writing, I concentrated mostly on spoken English and
vocal sentence construction. Many of my exercises involved students
getting up and performing "social situations" with each other, instances
like meeting and greeting, or asking for and giving directions to a
specific location.
I also
integrated vocabulary-building exercises into larger ones emphasizing
basic sentence construction. For example, we'd learn the names of primary
colors and of certain colorful objects. Using the verb "be" as a connector,
students would formulate sentences like: "The apple is red" and "The
dog is old." Adjectives and adverbs would then be introduced and the
sentences made longer and a bit more complex: "The ripe apple is very
red" and "The brown dog is extremely old."
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