Teaching English to Guatemalan Refugees

Every Friday I teach English in the Guatemalan refugee community. There are 4-5 students that are ages 8-13. These students know how to speak Spanish and minimal English. Starting out was difficult because of the language barrier and difference in levels. Some students knew more than others. The 13 year old girl knew the numbers, but the 8 year old different. This is natural and expected because of the age difference.

At the end of my first lesson, I was able to gauge how much English they knew. They knew how to read, but they did not know what the words meant. From this, I know that I have to teach them some vocabulary words for the next lesson. Grammar and sentence structure is another thing I want to get to. I am pretty excited for teaching them English because I am very interested in languages. However, I am not too sure on what approach I should take. From a linguistics standpoint, I could teach them about the sentence structure and the word classes(noun, verb, adjective, etc.). Or..I could teach them new words to expand their vocabulary.

There are a lot of things to think about when making a lesson plan. The first lesson, I did not come in with a set lesson plan because that was an introductory lesson. I used the time to get to know the students and see how much everyone knew. As I was teaching them, it was hard for my mind to not go to linguistics and start thinking about the morphemes and constituent phrases(haha my fellow linguists understand).

For the next lesson, I plan on taking on a 'Duolingo' approach and teaching them new vocabulary words. During the school year I hope to recruit some volunteers from my own school to help me teach the children English. I think this will be a fun volunteer project for everyone. This is what I plan to do in the linguistics club at my school.

Stay tuned for new posts! I will keep you guys updated. Thanks for reading and feel free to reach out if you have any questions or comments.