GCL: Teaching (and learning) language

Our Global Community Leadership (GCL) team partnered with Utah State University to award participants with upper-division college credit upon the completion of a 5-month long hybrid curriculum and a two-week learning experience in Cambodia. Read about their experiences and learning developments below. Click here to learn more about GCL.

As I was teaching Navajo to the Khmer children, it was very interesting how fast the kids caught on to our native language. It was nice to see the kids engaging to the lesson I had planned for them. Along with the activity that I did outside of the library. It’s still interesting to see that Navajo and Khmer have similar dialects that structures both language.

Teaching English to Cambodian Children is THE BEST! They are so much fun. I love that we can come here and teach something so simple but something that will help them much more than we might ever know. Here in Cambodia speaking English is top of the list for every business man or woman. Anybody who can speak English will always be higher sooner that someone who can’t.

For my English lesson, I was teaching parts of the planes. I was also having them build their own planes and decorated it. It was super fun! I told the kids what the purpose of the plane was and what kind of planes there was. They were shocked when I told them that that’s what I rode to get here and how long it took. I also told them that the little things you see zooming by in the sky are airplanes. I also explained how plane was able to stay in the sky. It was beautiful. They were super happy to have a plane of their own. The children were more excited to take it home to show their parents.

I taught an English lesson about numbers. I was nervous about the lesson both because I’m not comfortable teaching the kids and because I didn’t know whether they would already know the material. It turns out they definitely did already know how to count in English, but we played a numbers game so it turned out ok. I also had them help me learn to count in Khmer, which I hoped would make the lesson more engaging. The kids at this school all seem really enthusiastic about going to class—when I walked into one of the classrooms, they all stood and greeted me in unison. I felt like I was not teaching a good enough lesson for the class to be standing to greet me, but I think they liked the game we played and I’m slowly getting more comfortable teaching kids.