After an in-school discussion, we decided that teaching English in NCID will help them communicate better while selling the products and will helpfully make it easier for volunteers to communicate with English-speaking customers. We started the lessons by doing a grammar writing pre-test, to their proficiency level. After the test, we found that the skills vary, from beginner to low intermediate. The following session, we prepared a lesson on past and present tense, as we felt that it was the most misunderstood concept amongst the volunteer. (Lo 5) They had notebooks and stationary prepared with them and we used their whiteboard to teach. As they did not understand English and none of our service group members does not speak/understand Mandarin, two of our members taught in Bahasa Indonesia as they are fluent in it. However, there are some problems with using Bahasa Indonesia to teach, as the volunteers mostly understand Malay or Mandarin, but the problem isn’t major and did not interfere a lot with the lessons.
Overall, the teaching went well, especially when they provided support for each other when they did not understand something. We made sure to ask whether they don’t understand something once in a while as the volunteers are quite shy due to the communication barriers. It’s also a very lively class and we had quite a fun time doing it. After the first session, we asked for feedback as to what we can do to improve and whether they understood the class. We received positive feedback but the volunteers requested that we do more worksheets. With the feedback in mind, we prepared some interesting worksheets for them, which we got from an online website. The worksheets, we believe, was really fun to do as it was multiple choice questions and is based on well-known songs (e.g. Beatles or Bruno Mars) (Lo1). However, we have never got the chance to use the worksheets as in the following sessions, as the lessons were done too late in the day and most volunteers had to do and take care of other personal things. However, if the lessons were to continue and done on an earlier time, we believe that it would be a valuable lesson for the volunteers to learn and use English for volunteering (selling) or even their personal use.
