betül, imren, gülseda, and zehra posing for the camera. note their excellent blue uniforms (with the added sweater and collar touch for individuality). welcome to turkish elementary school!
As a component to one of our classes, we have been teaching English to a class of fifth graders at Kestel Elementary, just 15 minutes outside Alanya, in a much less urban part of town. When we began, I was surprised to find myself relaxed, not nervous, as I thought I might be, and completely excited. I spent the past two years at Georgetown as a site coordinator for the DC Reads program, which offers literacy tutoring to children in grades 1-3 in low-income areas of DC. Having been a part of DC Reads so consistently, seeing my Thomas Elementary students twice a week regularly, they became a component of my life that I have, in being away from them and DC, missed a lot. So you can imagine my excitement at meeting the kids at Kestel.
At Georgetown, we use a structured curriculum full of organization and training, employing the “Reading Recovery” method, a system made up of leveled books and a lesson plan that includes varied components of literacy teaching. With the lesson plan, we engage children in reading familiar books, write sentences, and re-enforce new teaching using hands-on methods, and, finally, begin new books. We trained our tutors in the lesson plan, giving them the tools they would need to create their own lessons and use our on-site materials, like word games, art supplies, and other teaching tools, creatively and effectively.
I knew from the beginning that teaching here would differ completely from my DC Reads experience. The program here isn’t structured from outside, there's no literacy expert to guide us – we create it. We don’t have fancy teaching tools and pre-made games to choose from and, in fact, I’m not sure that the school itself uses many “props” in its general teaching method. I have never officially taught language classes; I have never been trained in it, and especially not in teaching English as a Second Language. I wasn’t sure how to go about it and, with the other women, began with a trail and error approach.
sitting in the classroom. we always walk in on math section, and are ultimately harrassed to go up to the board and show off our skills - competing with the students (and completely embarrassing ourselves)
We decided that the best way to make the most of our resources was to split the class into groups, thus increasing the one-on-one attention the students would receive. The first day of lessons, we had three stations and aimed to get a better grasp of what the children already know and need help with. They take English class in school, so, expecting that they would probably be comfortable with the lessons they have covered in their book (which is completely terrible, by the way, reinforcing age-old stereotypes of English-speakers while making no practical sense - but that's another story), we picked words and topics from there – adjectives, months and seasons, feelings. These were all very simplistic things to us, and we worried if they would be too easy for the children.
We quickly found that we had no need to worry; their English-speaking comfort zone was much smaller than we had anticipated. Despite previous school lessons and last year’s American teachers (from our program), few students knew more than blanket statements like, “My name is Arzu,” and questions like “Hello, how are you?” and had no context for these set phrases. Although this was a great start in my eyes, their lack of knowledge made even communicating how to do exercises and what I wanted students to do difficult. It has, however, been a great impetus for me to work harder in Turkish class.
one day, we planted a carob tree outside the school. here, hakan shows hilary how it's done.
Over the past few weeks, I have learned how to rely primarily on simple, clear English when speaking to the students, even when they don’t understand exactly what I mean. I repeat myself slowly and often, while occasionally translating in the bits of Turkish that I know, sandwiched between the English phrases. “Where is your eye?” I will ask a student during our face and body parts lesson, crouching to the level of their desk, “Where is your eye?” Then, if they look back completely bewildered, I’ll say, “Gözün nerede? Where is your eye?” hoping that, in repeating and using the English, they will become accustomed to the sounds of the language. I think that patience and repetition are key elements to teaching, regardless of the subject, and it has been working, however slowly, at Kestel. With review over this past week, the students have been finding the components of their English faces – eyes, eyebrows, noses, mouths, teeth, cheeks, lips, necks, hair – quite well, and claiming them as their own. “My face, my nose, my eye, my ear,” they exclaim, pointing. They love "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" as well as "The Hokey Pokey" (talk about making no sense! what a silly song! but the kids like it).
more planting. everyone's pretty enthralled. the teacher, ergin bey, is also the local head of TEMA, a prominent turkish environmental group. ah, the joy of trees.
We have found that overall, large lessons, like demonstrating and labeling parts of the body, are best introduced in the large group with one of us leading and the others milling around, engaging individual students. Some students I have engaged have even, through brief one-on-one encounters, learned unexpected grammatical lessons of plurality or possession. The student, for example, will have erroneously pointed in my direction, saying “My nose,” leading into a demonstration of “my” and “your” between the student and me until she or he understands.
Some students are more comfortable in English than others, for whatever reason, which makes it hard sometimes to keep everyone on the same page.
Many students are much less comfortable reading than others, and it seems that we need to help them realize that the Turkish and English alphabets and letter sounds aren’t very far apart.
These kids are afraid to be wrong. Many times, they fear taking chances to avoid makeing mistakes. Mistakes are okay. I'm still alive, and I make tons of 'em.
The language barrier makes this difficult to explain. It usually ends with me flailing my arms wildly, over-eggagerating words, and making tons of strange noises. I get lots of skrewed-up, laughing faces, but the students understand high-fives perfectly.
hakan and imren. probably laughing at me.
I guess there’s no simple formula for us here, no set lesson plan or structured trainings to attend – we just have to rely on our communal creativity and the ability to think on our feet.
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