Teacher Discussion Forums

Hi all,

I am a new ESL teacher teaching in a Peruvian bilingual (well, aiming to be bilingual) school. I have one grade 8 class that has two students who have come in from the USA and so speak English.

I wonder if anyone on the forum has had a similar experience and could give me some advice.

I would like to find some way of getting the two English speakers to get involved in teaching the other students. They are not challenged by the English learning tasks and when given a chance to flex their English language muscle (with written task and debates for example) they do just as much as they need to and no more.

Any thoughts on this would be greatly accepted.

Have fun

Russell

Also posted in Bilingual Education

We intentionally did this in Mongolia. We invited a family with children of various ages and two parents who were teachers. It was an enormous success as the children learned Mongolian but also taught the others English. We arranged for a lot of activities the students could do together - visit the local mine, play computer games at the local Internet cafe and horseback riding, of course. There were parties and holiday celebrations and on and on.

Of course, you might not be able to arrange these things outside of your classroom but you could do some projects within the classroom where the US students were team leaders.


The students usually like mild competition so if you pit them against each other with half the class, it might liven things up.

Or you could make a special group in the corner with resources and students can take turns joining the student lead groups.

Of course, you have to pay them if they are teaching your class so you can think about ways to do that that is acceptable to the school, parents and students. It doesn't have to be in money but should be something substantial.

Thanks for the reply Sally. The Mongolia trip sounds pretty great!

I was not thinking of them taking on a teachers role in terns of a job (I need that role to pay the rent!) but more of a leaders roles like you suggest in the project context.

I want them to gain something from the classes and give them a chance to challenge their English skills too

I have been thinking about starting a pupil blog with the class, maybe they could be the editors. And also I a planing a collaboration with some schools in England which they could take a lead on too...

Thanks for you post, got the old grey matter moving now...