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Last Day of the 1st Semester 2012

16/2/2012

Hi everyone,

We finished up our last teaching day for the first semester of the 2011-12 school year, and we all made it through the 104 teaching days! The BEA kids will be on their "spring" vacation for the next three weeks while Shally and I head to Phnom Penh for the CamTESOL conference, and then start revising the curriculum for the second semester and taking care of building repairs. The break will still keep both of us quite busy.

Awards Ceremony:
One of the traditions we've started at BEA is to hold a small awards ceremony on the last day of the first semester. Student who received top marks in their courses, as well as those with perfect attendance, are presented with prizes for their outstanding effort during the semester, such as dictionaries and notebooks. However, we had to expand our prize pool to include grammar textbooks and graded readers The reason is that some students in their courses last year placed in the top three, and had already had dictionaries. In total, we gave out 20 prizes this semester. I'm still amazed that six of the BEA kids got perfect attendance prizes, especially since they go to public school, work part-time and have household responsibilities. Such dedication and determination for such young adults. I've never been prouder of them, and especially proud of Shally. Despite the endless challenges he has to go through each and every day, he's been an incredible inspiration for the BEA kids, and to me as well. At times, there is just so much despair in this job, but days like today really make up for all those tears.

Graduation Ceremony:
At the end of our awards ceremony, we also had our certificate ceremony for those students who passed their courses for the 2010-11 school year. BEA received accreditation as an educational institutions from the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport (MoEYS) and the Ministry of Interior last year in August, which means we can issue our own certificates for our English language and teacher training programs. There's always a waiting period for government-approved certificates, but we finally got them! The BEA kids were just beaming when they got their certificates. They put in an incredible amount of work to pass their course, so their certificate really means something to them. I had no trouble at all getting them to smile for their photos with Shally.

CamTESOL:
Now that we're on a break, I have time to starting preparing our presentation for the CamTESOL conference next week. The CamTESOL conference series started in 2005, and is an international conference to foster the professional development of English language teachers in Cambodia. The theme of this year's conference is Language and Development, and will be held on February 25-26 with over 350 invited speakers.

Rather than doing individual workshops as we did last year, Shally and I will be presenting a paper together on BEA's curriculum. In our presentation, we will explain how to adapt the Communicative Approach (CA) and Task-Based Learning (TBL) in the Cambodian classroom. Both of these are different types of teaching methodologies used in teaching English as a foreign language (EFL). Before we head to Phnom Penh, I'll upload our presentation to the website. I'm also hoping to get this paper published in one of the bigger journals on teaching EFL in Asia.

Onwards to CamTESOL...

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an accredited NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

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Valentine's Day 2012

15/2/2012

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Hi everyone!

Happy Valentine's Day from the BEA kids and staff! It was another busy day at BEA today, especially since it was Valentine's Day and the start of student conferences.

Valentine's Day Activities:
This year, I spent a lot more time planning our holiday lessons, which took almost 6 hours this morning! The planning itself wasn't that challenging, it was all the color printing of flashcards that took forever. Regardless of the holiday, I always find these types of lesson to be the most challenging because of the culture content. Many of the activities I found online was mostly reading or worksheet-type activities that don't give students a lot of speaking time. I love working with flashcards, and the students like playing card-type games, so I decided to make a Valentine's vocabulary lesson.

In the first part of our lesson, the kids had to write their names down on paper hearts for a chocolate raffle at the end of the class. I told them that there were only two chocolate hearts for each class, so they had to enter a raffle for them, but of course, I got chocolate for all of them. We then moved onto some vocabulary drill with flashcards focusing on Valentine's Day related terms. The Basic and Pre-Intermediate courses learned noun-verb expressions, such as give a box of chocolates, write a Valentine, and get a red roses. The vocabulary for the Intermediate course was idiomatic, such as I'm in love, She's love struck and We're crazy in love. Students then got to practice their new vocabulary in a game of concentration. Rather than having the kids just turn the cards over, they had to say the word for the picture on the card and then a make a sentence for it. If students didn't use the word correctly (even if they had a pair), they had to turn the cards back over. For the Pre-Intermediate and Intermediate courses, we also had a Valentine's Rhyming Game. Students worked in groups and completed a worksheet. They had to read a series of clues and then find a Valentine's Day word that rhymed with the clue. This was quite an effective activity because it helped students with their pronunciation. Cambodian students have a tendency to drop the final consonants on words, so this really helped them to pay more attention to those final consonants.For the last part of class, all the BEA kids got their chocolate and wished my a Happy Valentine's Day! I even got a few hand-made paper roses from some of the students. If any of you are interested, the Valentine's Day Rhyming activity is in an embedded document at the end of today's blog entry.

Student Conferences:
Shally was also very busy today as well with student conferences. He managed to talk with almost half of the students in each of our courses. The purpose of these conferences is to give students their first semester grades, and to give them advice on how to improve their English language skills. This also gives the kids a chance to ask Shally questions about their studies, as well as other issues in their lives. In most cases, Shally is often the only person in their lives that they can confide in about personal issues.

Spring Break 2012:
Tomorrow is the last day of our first semester, so the BEA kids will be on their spring break for three weeks. However, we'll be back to classes on March 12. Although the kids will have break, Shally and I will be busy as usual. We'll be preparing for our CamTESOL presentation on Sunday, February 26 and revising the curriculum for the second semester.

Back to the books ...

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

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Writing Workshops 2012

13/2/2012

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Hi everyone,

Sorry it’s been such a long time since our last BEA blog posting. I’ve been back in Siem Reap since mid-January, and it’s been non-stop for both Shally and I. The end of the semester is always the hardest mainly because we don’t have enough staff to over part of our workload. What I wouldn’t do to hire a full-time test-marker and a website manager! Anyways, we’ve been making regular updates on our Facebook page, so that’s another way you can keep up with everything that’s been going on at BEA.

Writing Workshops: Teacher & Student Challenges
I wasn’t able to blog daily about the writing classes this year because most of my time was spent revising our workshops from last year, and marking first and final drafts. However, I think we’ll be able to produce our own writing textbook for next year’s writing workshop for the Basic and Pre-Intermediate courses.

Rather than having two writing tasks this year, we decided to have just one, but spent more time on classroom instruction. One of the biggest challenges students had last year, as well as this year, was logically connecting their ideas and details in their paragraphs. Although we spent four lessons on paragraph structure, this still wasn’t enough time for the students to fully understand the structure of writing in English. For next year’s lessons, students definitely need more classroom practice on differentiating between supporting ideas and details, as well as choosing appropriate details for ideas. This was a challenge for students in all of our courses. One of the reasons for this is that most of the students are not taught writing in their own language in public school. Most writing classes end at the end of primary school. As a result, this becomes quite challenging for the kids since they have to use critical thinking skills for the first time, and in a second language!

Regardless, the majority of the students were able to produce a well-written paragraph. Some of their writings will be uploaded to the Journals and Writing Workshops on the website in the next few weeks. I’m also hoping to make the lessons and materials from the Basic and Pre-Intermediate courses available on the site for other Cambodian teachers. The Intermediate lessons won’t be available until next year since they need to be revised and re-tested in the classroom so that all the kinks can be worked out.

Writing Workshops: Teacher Training
During last year’s writing workshops, I taught almost all the classes. However, for this year’s workshops, Shally taught the majority of the lessons. This is part of Shally’s on-going teacher training program as part of his professional development. We have set up a system in which I plan his writing lessons, as well as the lessons in the Intermediate course, and he teaches them using my plans. We have found this to be an effective training technique because these model lessons help him with his own lesson planning. Since writing is the most challenging to teach out of the four skills, this was a challenge for him. Although it was his first time teaching writing, he did an amazing job, especially in his explanations of paragraph structure. One of his strengths is that he’s able to give concise examples to get the point across to the students – all in English. Even the students in our Basic course, who were complete beginners at the start of the school year, were able to follow in English-only instruction. In the end, most of students did indeed use correct paragraph structure and wrote on topic for their tasks.

End of the Semester:
The end of the first semester is coming to an end this week for the BEA kids and staff. We’ll be holding student conferences, as well as having semester wrap-up activities in class. Since lesson planning won’t be as demanding this week, I’ll be able to blog a bit more about what we’re up to before our break.

In the meantime, it’s back to the books…

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

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Last Day of the 1st Semester 2012

Valentine's Day 2012

Writing Workshops 2012

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