English Immersion Camp for English Teachers in Baojing County
31 July - 7 August 2008

Organized by Institute for Integrated Rural Development, Hong Kong
Supported by Baojing County, Western Hunan, China
Sponsored by Chan Deng Social Services Foundation

The writer︰Ruby (Hong Kong Volunteer)

On a sunny day in August, I set off with four local volunteers, three foreign volunteers and two IRD committee members for a trip to Baojing—a county in Western Hunan. We had all been looking forward to this day, so we were very excited.

Under the sponsorship of Chen Deng Social Service Foundation(陳登社會服務基金), we started a six-day English Immersion Camp for the English teachers in Baojing. 39 English teachers in Baojing took part in the program. All the volunteers, including myself, joined this trip for a common mission — to let the rural students enjoy a better English learning environment by improving and enhancing the English standard as well as the English teaching quality of their teachers.

The majority of the volunteers are English teachers. In order to design a better syllabus for the Baojing English teachers, we had several meetings to discuss and prepare the teaching materials for the camp. We sent questionnaires to the Baojing English teachers prior to our departure through the staff members of IRD in Baojing. They enabled us to better ascertain their actual learning needs and their expectations about what they would be getting out of the camp.

We spent a night in Zhangjiajie as the flight was a late one, and on the second day of the trip, we headed for our destination—Baojing. It took about four hours to get there. When we arrived at Baojing, we met the officials of the Baojing Education Bureau and the rural English teachers right away. We played ice-breaking games with them and had some group discussions with a view to further understand their needs and the difficulties they were experiencing in teaching English.

The next day, we went to a primary school in Shui Tin village to conduct Demo classes. We divided ourselves into three big groups and had three parallel lessons with 150 rural students there. We carried out a great variety of English activities with the students. The rural teachers observed the demo classes, helped in our games and activities and took notes during observation.
Through our demonstration, we shared with the rural teachers ways to conduct activities and to have more teacher-student interaction in classes with more than 50 students. Our demonstrations were activity-based and it seemed that our message that this is an effective teaching strategy came across to the participating teachers well.

One of the biggest challenges we had during the camp was that most of these rural teachers lacked confidence in using English as the medium of instruction. Also, they had difficulty pronouncing some words. We started with a ground rule that all communication during the camp would be in English. We also had a few phonics sessions and conducted a number of activities targetted at improving their pronunciation.
Our principal aim is to help the students through enhancing the capability of their teachers. After boosting the confidence of the teachers, we worked with them to raise their students’ incentive in English learning. We introduced methods of teaching English through songs, dramas, games and poems. We trust this will make it easier to get students involved and engaged in the lessons, and improve their learning. With better English, they are more likely to get better results in the public examination and more importantly be more confident in their future learning.

On the fourth day, there was an impressive scene in the camp. We gave the teachers a task —to conduct demo classes for a big group of students. It was a good chance for them to practise what they had learned about activity-based teaching and an interactive teaching approach. At first, they were very resistant. It was not because they were lazy but they didn’t have confidence in completing the task. They told us that they had joined the camp because they wanted to learn from us and they didn’t think they had learned enough to work on their own. However, we insisted that we would just gave them advice and support. They needed to prepare the whole lesson by themselves. The negotiation process took almost an hour before finally they started to discuss amongst themselves how to prepare games, songs, activities to teach the assigned topics. We were really pleased to see them trying their very best to design activities and prepare teaching aids to help students to be involved in groups, in pairs and in the whole class. The demo class turned out a really well done exercise. The teachers gave an enjoyable and fruitful class for the students. It also proved to them that they could all do what we were showing them. The exercise, which had initially been met with reluctance, was an enormous boost to the confidence of the teachers as well as to all the volunteers.

During the six-day camp, we couldn’t help but share all our teaching experiences with these rural teachers because of their real enthusiasm to learn and great involvement in the camp. They changed from timid teachers who recite textbooks and remain the sole speakers in the class to confident teachers who interact with students and allow each and every student a lot of opportunities to play, to interact and to have fun. Their improvement has been most amazing even though the tuition they received was for such a short period of time.
We believe that they set a good learner example for their students and are well equipped to arouse their students’ incentive to learn.

Reading the postcards we invited the participants to write to themselves and let us post to them from Hong Kong, and listening to their speeches in the graduation ceremony of the English Immersion Camp, we were so happy to know that many of them promised themselves to make good use of what they learnt to benefit their students. We feel it was a great start and hope it will carry on progressing. Helping rural students to be more motivated and have better incentive to learn is our next important goal. We, together with IRD, will continue to give support and encouragement to the rural teachers in the form of internet resources to support their English learning and teaching. We will also exchange emails with them. That’s why we told them the camp would go on after we left.
It is undoubted that education gives the poor children the chance to improve their prospects. However, while fewer and fewer children are being guaranteed a place in school, many rural children do not have teachers with proper training. The situation in Baojing is just the tip of the iceberg. We are lucky to have received a quality education; we feel an obligation to give a helping hand to provide others with some better learning and teaching support.