|
|
Lee, Raymond (李駿文)
Travelling to Taiwan has been on my 'to do list' ever since I graduated from my chinese class a few years ago. It was at the Fo Guang Shan temple in Auckland so the teaching materials and the teacher was from Taiwan. So when I heard about the AID summer programme, I decided to go despite it overlapping with the start of semester 2 for university.
Upon arriving at Taoyuan international airport, I was picked up by grey shirt councillor Eva. There was a little miscommunication as me and some other students went over to Terminal 1 as per instuctions on the website. We were apparently expected to stay at Terminal 2. It must have been tough for the councillors to hold signs up for close to 2 hours.
Consequently, I arrived at ChienTan towards the end of the icebreaker. There was a quick meet-up with group members before heading up to the dormitories. We had 6 people in the room with bunk beds. I hadn't experienced anything like this since camp back in Year 9. The most memorable part must have been the many times we were locked outside without a key. Lectures during the next few days were very theory intensive but not particularly useful practically.
The school my group was assigned to was Mu Dan Junior High in Ping Tung. Me and my partner were in charge of the 8th graders. There were around 16 regular students and another who turned up once in a while. Many of the students were enthusiastic about learning english. However, there was a large discrepancy in english ability. Some students already knew most of the vocabulary we introduced to them while others struggled with the alphabet. After discussing with other groups, a possible improvement would be to groups students by their english proficiency rather than their age.
Elaborating on the students' enthusiasm, one example was them taking the initiative in english learning. We expected them to use a small set of words to fill in the blanks for a particular sentence structure. One student modified the sentence structure to fit words from previous lessons. Others incorporated other vocabulary that they remembered from previous years of english class. Another example was a student who had a diagram of a plane with different parts labelled in chinese. The student asked if we could give him the corresponding terms in english.
After teaching hours, the teachers and volunteer teachers took us to various places around Ping Tung. A particularly memorable event was riding the bus with students back to their homes. Many of the students lived far away from the school so they lived in dormitories at the school during the week. It was humbling to learn that they travelled such distances to come to school.
Other than teaching, the central tour so far has also been very interesting. I am looking forward to the rest of the tour before I go back to Australia for university.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
|