Nguyen Tat Thanh School (English Teaching Assistance)

Upon request of teachers, volunteers run the activities in the class. They are asked to help students develop speaking and listening skills.

Vietnamese schools traditionally favor ‘passive learning’ – the teacher standing in front and lecturing. This does not help students to gain confidence in speaking. The pronunciation of the English teachers is not excellent so the children have little opportunity to hear English as it is really spoken. Moreover, English levels of students are very different. Some are very outstanding in terms of pronunciation and performances meanwhile, some are very shy to speak out.

Volunteers can think about games or interactive activities to let all students get involved in the lessons.

Working as a local teacher: Each class is run by an English-speaking Vietnamese teacher who teaches according to the governmental English books. The volunteers will join one lesson of the teacher to know how they teach, after that the volunteers will prepare activities and games to practice pronunciation and communication skills with the students. The teacher will let the volunteers lead the class the whole time, during 45’. The volunteers can prepare the lessons freely, choosing the topics, activities, discussions or games they prefer. They do not have to follow the governmental book.

Assisting a local teacher: Some teachers prefer volunteers support them. In this case, volunteer should assist the teacher while doing exercises, correcting the pronunciation, keeping them in silence or helping the teacher in any activity required. If the volunteer does not feel confident he/she can start supporting the teacher, with the possibility to teach alone after some weeks.

Each class has one local English-teacher with 30 to 40 students, depending on the class. Each period lasts for 45 minutes.

The volunteer participates in different classes per day, working from Monday to Friday. The general time frame at school is from 7:50 to 17:20. The lunch break is between 11:15 and 1:05 o’clock. Depending on volunteers’ schedule, he/she has different beginning and ending time.