I was talking to a young lady from a middle-class background, who was eager to improve her English. He problem was insufficient opportunity to practice (at her workplace in Hyderabad, only the senior people were fluent in English, the rest spoke Telugu for the most part. This pattern is pretty omnipresent). I got thinking and a simple structure that can have a lot of tangible and intangible impact occurred to me. It involves volunteering and solves some of the key challenges in effective volunteer-driven projects: that of consistency, time taken to travel to volunteering location, lack of a clear defined project for the volunteer, too much time invested in bringing them up to speed.
The structure is to have a weekly conference call of 45 minutes to an hour with upto 10 people who are interested in improving their English. The leader of the conference is any volunteer withe decent English. There are free conference calling services that are available. The important thing on the call would be to have trainees get an opportunity to speak. 3-4 people would get an opportunity to speak for 5 minutes on each call. So on a rotational basis each trainee could get to speak atleast once every 3 weeks. During the remaining time on the call you would get to hear others speak English, also something that is useful and scarce for many learners. There could be all kinds of other exercises on the call – a quiz on grammer, a discussion on some pre-decided topic, introducing new words, correcting common mistakes etc. Each week, the trainees would also get assignments to work on their English. That would keep the flow going through the rest of the week.
A format for the calls could be work out, with topics covered and exercises done for each call, that could last for say 3 months, which is a good duration for having an impact on somebody’s communication. So the volunteering commitment for one cycle is 3 months.
So why is this simple structure so effective:
1.) Its incredibly simple. No infrastructure, no travel for either the trainees or trainer. Essentially no expense except talk time.
2.) For the volunteer, the time commitment is just an hour of being on a call, plus some additional time during the week for preparation or followup. That’s really doable for most people
3.) It does really contribute tangibly to the trainees. They get exposure to a person speaking good English, that is often quite difficult to get. The trainer who is typically from a better-off background has a lot to share that will be of value to the trainees. It connects trainees to people who are a role-model of sorts, and people from underpriviledged background often sorely lack good role models.
It’s easy to build out on the skeleton of the idea above. Any organisation or person who is interested in the above can set up a group of volunteers doing this as a group to accommodate more people and to provide each other backup. Someone with a background in English training can easily come up with a standard format for the calls and share it.
Bhavishyath Counselling 