Course in Workplace English, Feb.–May, 2014

SELI's next intensive Course in Workplace English will be offered at the Sentinel English Language Institute in Tengbeh Town from 10th February to 23rd May 2014.

This intensive English-for-Special-Purposes course meets the needs of beginning-proficiency English language learners who have pursued tertiary education in another language than English but need the communication skills expected in a professional English-speaking workplace. Students about to enter university who embrace this goal can also be accommodated.

CWE applicants are assumed to be non-English speakers. The course develops basic-user level competencies in speaking, listening, reading, writing and presenting in English. Classes meet mornings only, fifteen hours a week for fourteen-week terms. There are still 15 places available in the coming term. Sessions are participatory and interactive, requiring prompt and regular attendance.

SELI's Course in Workplace English helps to make SELI's charitable work possible. Please contact us for enrolment information.

Yay! Certificates!

SELI's first intensive ESOL Course in Workplace English came to a close today with a certificate ceremony.

This beginning proficiency class was very rewarding to teach. All the participants were university students or working professionals from francophone West Africa who feel that English will give them an advantage in the workplace in their own countries. The class met three hours a day, five days a week for fourteen weeks at the SELI facility in Tengbeh Town. Nearly all the participants were in Sierra Leone specifically to take the course, so attended promply, regularly and actively; as such, significant progress took place.

SELI developed the curriculum for the Course in Workplace English in real time throughout the fourteen weeks. The director used *. 

interactions with the class and formative assessments to pace activities and adjust the scope and sequence of lessons. Although this is an English for Special Purposes course, it could also be said to cover competencies described in CEF's Basic User level (A1 and A2). We would be pleased to hear in the future of some of the participants taking advanced degrees in English; opportunities to do this are rapidly increasing in continental European universities.

Registration is now taking place at SELI for the next session of the Course in Workplace English scheduled to begin 10 February 2013.

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* The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages

Adult Mother-Tongue Literacy Class

The Dankawalie Secondary School Library (in Dankawalie, Sengbe Chiefdom, Koinadugu District in the Northern Province of Sierra Leone) is a community library. One of its community services is offering an adult mother tongue literacy class in Kuranko.

I was glad to have the opportunity to meet with 7/10 of the class this week. Just for me, they gathered at the odd hour of 8 am on Monday morning before they headed out to their farms where they are harvesting rice and planting groundnuts. Although most of the class members have had a Koranic education (and can therefore read and write in Arabic) they have had no formal schooling so cannot read and write in the Roman script. Their days are already full with all the work they do.

Although Kuranko is not one of the mother-tongue languages The Institute of Sierra Leone Languages is currently working with, SELI arranged for two teachers from DSS to be included in TISLL's literacy-teacher training workshop in May, 2013. In June, the class began, and you can see from these short videos here that there have been results! TISLL monitors and certificates the program, and is a wonderful collaborative partner.

This SELI Heritage Writers program is expanding and needs your support. The current members keep pointing out that the materials (originally written in the '70's and revised in the '90s) are outdated and would like to revise them. New members of the community want to join the class as beginners. Some current members are ready to go on to Book Two. Although the members pay, by installment, a cost price for the books, the supplies need to be bought and brought to the village.  The two teachers have been doing this work without any stipend at all as encouragement. When class members have completed Book Two we would like to a) encourage those interested to go on to second language learning in Krio or English, and b) start them into a writing workshop where they can record their stories, which will become Kuranko readers to add to the DSS Library collection if we can pay to have them printed. The two teachers, Mr. Balla M. Kargbo and Mr. Alusine H. Kamara, would like to see the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology accept appeals for new Sierra Leonean languages to be added to the current four examination languages at junior secondary level.

If you are able to make a small contribution toward this Heritage Writers project, please click on the DONATE button to the right!

Update on Dankawalie School Library

SELI spent this weekend in Dankawalie, where the Dankawalie Secondary School Library still has many more books to catalog. One of the two librarians, Amara K. Tarawallie, began entering books this time, interacting with me about the decisions that need to be made about each book, such as:

Is this book fiction or nonfiction—folklore or biography?
Is this an "Easy" book or a transitional, middle level book?
Is this the name of the title, or of the series?
Did this author write the original, or this adapted version?
Does this book have an author at all?

Meanwhile, two students were helping another teacher, Ishmael K. Mansaray, to stamp the books and put pockets and cards in them in preparation for entering them. These particular books were donated by Books for Africa.

I also took a peek through the window into the new library building, which was brought to near-completion last year thanks to a grant from the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives. It is built in the same circular shape as the classrooms in the school. As soon as everyone is satisfied that it is as secure as it needs to be for a library, the collection, furniture, etc. will be moved from its temporary quarters in a classroom into this building.

During June and July of 2013, four university students from the U.S. were in Dankawalie doing community service. One of the students, Ariana Lutterman, elicited library rules from Dankawalie teachers and students, to develop this poster, which we love! Armed with these new rules, the librarians have agreed to resume circulation of the books, which they had suspended at the end of the last school year. The DSS Library thanks you, Ariana!

Stands for a solar array are being erected outside the library, the adult mother-tongue literacy class has been going on since June, and more books are waiting to be catalogued—the DSS Library is showing all the signs of growing into a truly vibrant community/school library. If Dankawalie weren't eight hours of hard riding on very rough roads from Freetown, I would spend a great deal more time there, myself!

My Prized Possession

SELI's 14-week Course in Workplace English for beginning English language learners is now about 80% complete. This week was presentation week, during which everyone prepared a 3-minute presentation on "My Prized Possession." It was an exciting day for all of us!

Here are the opening segments of Fanta's and Mohamed's presentations. We all thought they did beautifully—do you? Everyone learned a new expression today—butterflies in your stomach. They thought it was a very apt description of how they felt!

On the Freetown Peninsula

Mohamed Samking is the sole facilitator of the SELI Young Writers club at Goderich Comprehensive Junior Secondary School in Funima, in the hills of the rural Freetown Peninsula.

I always enjoy the way the members of this club are fully engaged. The students hold all their content conferences with the entire group, and good discussion takes place. All the materials are out for all the members to use and everyone knows the writing process well.

Here, Mr. Samking is showing the students the My Life booklets they will prepare, and be able to take away with them, as soon as they have completed five final drafts of personal experiences.Two students from this club earned My Life books in the 2012-2013 school year.

We appreciate the dedication of such facilitators of SELI's afterschool Young Writers clubs. The MacEwan Global Education Fund has been covering stipends for these facilitators. We need your contribution to continue! 

TGIF

Here's how we spend the end of our Friday classes now in our Course in Workplace English at SELI: playing Scrabble!

The members of the class are all avid bilingual dictionary users (we allow the use of dictionaries, since doing so makes it a learning activity in this beginning-proficiency class). At first I gave some support to the lower performing students but they, themselves, stopped me—everyone's too competitive to tolerate that!

The whole session is taken up with discussions about new words and what they mean. Since the words remain on the board throughout the game, participants repeatedly revisit them and recall their meanings.

This is a noun, isn't it, and not a verb? He's trying to add -ing to it!  That's an uncountable noun—you can't put an -s on it!

Conferencing at LPK Memorial JSS

I enjoyed my visit to the SELI Young Writers club at Lady Patricia Kabba Memorial JSS in Goderich today.

The students all made a great effort to write nonstop for ten minutes on the topic of whether they like or don't like Nigerian movies. Then two volunteers, one for each opinion, read their work aloud. Our emphasis was on content, as always with first drafts. Later, in responding to their journals, I saw that despite all their errors in mechanics and expression, everyone had good reasons to back up whatever they chose to say.

The students all went on to whatever they were doing next: peer editing, self editing, starting a first draft, writing a second draft, teacher editing, and content conferencing.

This content conference group was particularly good. Several of the participants were new members of the group who had drawn up a list of topics to write on, but had not yet done first drafts. They didn't really understand during the first reading during the conference that each one of them was going to have to draw up content questions. So they requested this second reading, and notice how attentive they are to the reader (with her back to us)! Their questions were the type that provoked discussion. They all enjoyed the session, and the authors got help for their second drafts.

Thanks, LPKM JSS Young Writers! And thank you to the MacEwan Global Education Fund, which has been covering SRWP facilitator stipends for the past two years. The project needs your help to continue!

It's a Mystery

I'm one of millions of readers of mysteries. We don't passively absorb books. We interact actively from the first page. We use nuanced clues to keep changing our hypotheses. At the end we weigh the resolution against alternatives we'd been considering.

It's never surprised me how much the kids up our street like to play soccer, because starting a game is like opening a new mystery. So that's why I'm finding reading Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World odd, because neither in the book nor in Amy Gonzalez's National Writing Project review at http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/3654 , is game playing compared to mystery reading.

Yet McGonigal's defining features of a game are so characteristic of the experience of mystery reading: a goal which is often redefined as you go, and is enhanced by a good story; limitations (cultural, subplot- or information-based, etc.) imposed on ways the goal can be achieved stimulating you to stretch your thinking; a feedback system that lets you know your progress; and voluntary participation, meaning we agree to the goal, limitations and feedback system we're given.

I wish we could develop a whole set of quality children's mysteries in Sierra Leone.

Why Teaching is Fun

"This is the email Carla sent," I told my beginning-proficiency Workplace English adult class.

Our lesson was about emailing, and attaching, and the various kinds of attachments there can be. The students were not only getting lost in the new vocabulary in Carla's list of documents—a bar chart of stocks in the warehouse, a graph of products for last month—they also had had little experience with computers. One fellow looked particularly bewildered.

I realized that Carla was naming five documents in her email. Impulsively, I took off my necklace and handed it to him. "This is the email Carla sent," I said. "She sent it to Tim just as I am handing this to you."

"The main necklace of handmade glass beads is the email, and you can see the five attachments. Name them for me."

Using the necklace forced the class together to isolate the five items in the text, and to see how they all moved together with the main email to the recipient when they were sent. Using concrete objects is common in ESL classes, but in addition I have learned that I'm not alone among adults in needing concrete objects to make the abstract clear, and this is just one more example. Barbara Tuchman said it very clearly:

History written in abstract terms communicates nothing to me. I cannot comprehend the abstract, and since a writer tends to create the reader in his own image, I assume my reader cannot comprehend it either. No doubt I underestimate him. Certainly many serious thinkers write in the abstract and many people read them with interest and profit and even, I suppose, pleasure. I respect this ability, but I am unable to emulate it.

Tuchman, B. (1982). Practicing History. New York: Ballantine/Random House, p. 37.