Culture Sharing at CENTRAM

 Happy Halloween!

It has now been four weeks since school started up at CENTRAM, and it feels like time has flown by. CENTRAM is the school where I teach English from 4-6pm Monday to Friday. There are 8 levels of classes (Beginner 1 & 2, Intermediate Low 1 & 2, Intermediate High 1 & 2, and Advanced 1 & 2).

I teach Intermediate High 1 & 2 and I have eight students in my Intermediate High 1 class and two students in my Intermediate High 2 class. We use a workbook called ‘English for the Sahel’. I believe that it is a good book to learn English from for a couple reasons:

1) It provides practice in Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking with exercises in Reading Comprehension, Listening skills, Grammar, Pronunciation, Writing, and Translation. This allows students to learn using a variety of methods.

2) It is written by the people of the Sahel with an American editor.This allows for it to be culturally appropriate. It uses names like Fati and Ali, and also culturally relevant situations like fixing a bicycle, or how to make tea. I feel that it is rare to find books that properly incorporate the African culture.

The use of the book is not perfect however because there is a lot to cover in the 3 months. I calculated that there were 8 chapters that needed to be covered which would mean that every 3 days I needed to move to another chapter. This makes it difficult for me to add my own activities yet from time to time I will create an additional exercise, or have pronunciation sentences to practice. (For example: Ruth thinks it’s silly to throw a sloth through the window!- Let’s practice those TH’s that are so difficult for French speakers.)

My favourite teaching time is every Friday when I have ‘lab’. This means that both Intermediate High 1 and 2 are together, and I do not work from the textbook. The other exciting part of lab is that there is a newly bought projector that can be used (however if you are reading this and you know anything about connecting MacBook Airs to a projector let me know. I was able to successfully connect it the first time I tried, but since then, when I plug in the cords, my computer does not recognize that I’m plugged into the projector. Any help would be appreciated.) I have done a variety of things with my students. We have played games, practiced pronunciation, watched short clips like commercials, and listened to audio clips. Students also had the opportunity to think about and then discuss topics that I give (e.g. Village vs. City life, What is the best way to learn English etc.) and I have learned pieces of their culture through this.

I have also had the privilege of sharing pieces of my Canadian culture with my class. For Thanksgiving, we created a Thanksgiving tree where students wrote things they were thankful for. Today, we are going to discuss Halloween (which does not exist here) and I will give them candies at the end of the class. It is great to learn about their culture and share aspects of my own, all the while teaching English!