E - ESL at John Wesley

For those of you who may not know, I live in Vietnam. Before coming to Vietnam, I spent two years in Beijing, China. I have lived in these countries because of my job. I teach English to non-English-speaking people. I actually have a Master's Degree in TESOL.

Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

I have done a lot with this degree, but it didn't start out that way.

Working on the degree, I obviously had a lot of classes to take and papers to write. However, the most challenging part was getting my practicum hours accomplished. I had to complete 120 hours of instruction myself before getting the actual degree.

Unfortunately, I lived in a small town that didn't have many opportunities for me to be able to teach English. I checked around everywhere and could not find anything. The closest I came was the local high school. They had a 16-year-old boy who had recently moved there from India. He spoke a regional Indian dialect and had no knowledge of English at all. I went to the school and offered my services to teach the boy English since no one there was qualified in this type of education. They thanked me profusely and said they had been worried about what they were going to do with the boy. However, the background checks and legal hoops required to allow me to go through the school were quite extensive and the school really drug its feet on getting things done on their end.

I eventually moved to Indianapolis to have more opportunities. I even found an apartment in the middle of their unofficial Mexican district. This part of the city had so many Spanish-speaking immigrants that many of the street signs were in Spanish rather than English.  I figured this would be the perfect place to find what I needed.

The day after I unpacked I walked into a community center to see if they knew any place where a person could go to learn English. A woman there told me "I think the church up the road used to do something like that." So I headed up there to check it out.

I pulled into the parking lot at John Wesley Free Methodist Church and stepped inside. I met the Associate Pastor and explained to him what I was looking for. He broke into a huge smile and invited me to sit down so he could explain their English Outreach program.

They taught English once a week right there in the church. Every Wednesday night and the next session of classes would be starting in only two weeks. He was thrilled to see me because they were still a few teachers short. He gave me the books they would be teaching out of and asked me to come back the next week to help with the registration of students.

I was thrilled to have found a place to meet my hours so soon, but I knew it would not be enough. Teaching a two-hour class once a week would not add up very quickly. I contacted my academic advisor to let her know that I had finally found a place to teach but would need to find another also. She told me that preparation time counted as well as teaching. Awesome. That would add a bit more time, but I would still need more.

After two weeks of teaching, I realized there was a major problem with the church's entire English-teaching system. The church had six different classes being offered at three different English proficiency levels. There were one or two teachers in each class, but every teacher was just a well-meaning volunteer who had no actual idea of how to teach language acquisition. Plus, the book that was provided was basically just a nice picture dictionary. It was not a textbook and offered no guidance for a classroom setting.

This meant that there was no lesson structure provided. Each teacher just did the best they could from the book. For myself, I was writing up complete lesson plans for each week. Soon it was discovered that all of the teachers could use a lesson plan. Over the course of the next month, this program was basically turned over to me and I redesigned the entire thing. I put together lesson plans, worksheets, computer files, and instructional materials for each of the age groups and proficiency levels while also convincing the church to change to a different book for the classroom. I also taught a few classes to the teachers of the classes to help them know better how to teach this subject. It was amazing.

What had started as a search for a place to teach evolved into an opportunity to use much more of my education. I was doing program management, curriculum development, language assessments, and teacher training. It was a lot of work, but all this extra work meant that I met the hours needed for my degree very quickly. Plus, it gave me a lot of hands-on experience in a volunteer setting before actually entering into the professional workforce.

ESL is an intimidating field and I was quite nervous about how my career was going to work out. I am so thankful for having landed at John Wesley. They did not pay me for my services. This was a volunteer ministry, but they did thank me publicly several times. They wrote me glowing recommendation letters. They gave me some fantastic experience. And most importantly, they provided me with a safe environment where I could develop my confidence and learn that I really could do this.

So much of the awesome life I live today is due to the opportunity that church gave to me and being willing to take a chance on the stranger who just wandered through their doors one afternoon.

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This month, I am participating in the A to Z Challenge. Each day this month, people around the world are writing blog posts and working their way through the alphabet. Each person decides their own personal theme. I am writing about people who have affected my life.