Ensuring Success: What's Next?
Since leaving Puno, I feel like I’ve become removed from the work that I participated in. The English classes that I offered are only taught by the ISSLP students who go, and our work with the Centro de Idiomas was something that was arranged through my host father in Puno, not a collaboration that the Notre Dame ISSLP team participated in. Since it was difficult to get in touch with the director of the Centro in Puno, I haven’t even tried now that I’ve left. Now that I’m not in Puno, it seems like there’s not much that I can do to keep helping them directly.
What I’ve concluded is that the most important contribution that I made as a volunteer, and what future volunteers can contribute to help the people of Puno, is my knowledge as a native English speaker. So right now, I think that my focus should be on the role that I will play next semester in serving as a resource for the ISSLP team who will go to Puno this coming summer, helping them prepare. My advice to future ISSLP students who go to Puno would be to continue working with the Centro de Idiomas. Developing a curriculum that they can use with the teachers there to improve some of their most common mistakes would be an important and necessary contribution to the people of Puno.
I feel that the work Elizabeth and I did at the Centro de Idiomas has potential to be of lasting value to the community of Puno, and necessary for progress of the development of the tourism industry. English in Puno almost exists in an academic bubble, where errors in grammar and pronunciation have been inherited, are shared among teachers, and passed on to students. Being able to burst that bubble and remedy even some of these perpetuated errors would be a huge benefit to English education.
I would like to encourage NGOs that place native speakers in schools to consider developing programs lasting approximately one year in Puno. Non-native speaking teachers can be helpful mediators for students as they navigate both the technical and cultural aspects of their language learning. Nuttall writes about the benefits of that shared cultural experience among the K’iche women she worked with; similarly, teachers can use that commonality to relate with their students in teaching the language, joking about how words sound funny or are difficult to pronounce, or how the grammar doesn’t make sense to them, or how a word had an unexpectedly inappropriate second meaning that they said unintentionally. They can also speak candidly about the difficulty they encountered when trying to learn a particularly challenging grammar concept, and what strategies they used to practice and understand it better. Having these experiences can help make the task of learning a foreign language seem much less daunting to students. That is why I recommend that instead of replacing non-native speaking teachers with native English speakers, those teachers who only lack refinement before being able to boast fluency should be given the opportunity to work with native speakers to remediate the errors they continue to make.
What I’ve concluded is that the most important contribution that I made as a volunteer, and what future volunteers can contribute to help the people of Puno, is my knowledge as a native English speaker. So right now, I think that my focus should be on the role that I will play next semester in serving as a resource for the ISSLP team who will go to Puno this coming summer, helping them prepare. My advice to future ISSLP students who go to Puno would be to continue working with the Centro de Idiomas. Developing a curriculum that they can use with the teachers there to improve some of their most common mistakes would be an important and necessary contribution to the people of Puno.
I feel that the work Elizabeth and I did at the Centro de Idiomas has potential to be of lasting value to the community of Puno, and necessary for progress of the development of the tourism industry. English in Puno almost exists in an academic bubble, where errors in grammar and pronunciation have been inherited, are shared among teachers, and passed on to students. Being able to burst that bubble and remedy even some of these perpetuated errors would be a huge benefit to English education.
I would like to encourage NGOs that place native speakers in schools to consider developing programs lasting approximately one year in Puno. Non-native speaking teachers can be helpful mediators for students as they navigate both the technical and cultural aspects of their language learning. Nuttall writes about the benefits of that shared cultural experience among the K’iche women she worked with; similarly, teachers can use that commonality to relate with their students in teaching the language, joking about how words sound funny or are difficult to pronounce, or how the grammar doesn’t make sense to them, or how a word had an unexpectedly inappropriate second meaning that they said unintentionally. They can also speak candidly about the difficulty they encountered when trying to learn a particularly challenging grammar concept, and what strategies they used to practice and understand it better. Having these experiences can help make the task of learning a foreign language seem much less daunting to students. That is why I recommend that instead of replacing non-native speaking teachers with native English speakers, those teachers who only lack refinement before being able to boast fluency should be given the opportunity to work with native speakers to remediate the errors they continue to make.