English Village

Four hours a week, each ETA works at one of the four major English Villages in Kaohsiung. While many schools have their own small English Village (which may only have one or two stations), these main EVs have 4-8 large stations (you'll remember I showed you pictures of our visits to them all in an earlier entry). I work with Bekah at the Sanmin Elementary School EV on Monday and Friday mornings.


Two different classes can visit the EV at the same time, so we have somewhere between 60-70 students in a morning. The children cycle through stations in groups of around eight students. They are supposed to run through the dialogues with us for eight minutes before moving on to the next station.

Each fifth grade class in Kaohsiung visits one of the EVs once a semester. Therefore, EV is more like a fun field-trip for them rather than useful English instruction. For me, it feels like English summer camp all over again, twice a week. The students are not really learning that much English while visiting the EV; instead it is helping them to use whatever English they have in a fun, interactive setting, giving them the chance to speak English to foreigners (Bekah and I) in a semi-real-life environment. The biggest problem which I have noticed so far is that most of the students who come do not have the base level English skills necessary to do the role-playing. Either I was doing most of the talking for them, or I would have to have them read off their lines from a posterboard. In the latter case, the kids were not understanding what they were saying and were merely repeating after me. After talking to some of the other ETAs about their EV experiences, I think that I was trying to do too much. The other ETAs said they had entirely scrapped the role-playing, and were instead teaching the children vocabulary (ie: colors and clothing items in the department store) and then playing games to help the children memorize the words.


At the end of EV, Bekah and I "reviewed" with the students, something fairly difficult to do when they had not really understood what they were doing the first time around. Then we counted up the points for each group (we stamp the kids' "passports" and give out points to each group based on their behavior and effort as they go through each station). The winning group received super-awesome "Sanmin English Village" pins, which Bekah and I had the great honor of pinning onto each student, while the rest of the kids hummed a congratulations song.