As everyone is quarantined at home, the East Cobb Branch of AYLUS is thinking of ways to take this unique situation and turn it into an opportunity to help out the community. They came up with the idea of having volunteers teach English to the elderly who may not speak English well or don’t know how to speak it. This is a task that can be done at home through video conferences, and is perfect for the East Cobb Branch due to a large number of the volunteers being bilingual in English and Chinese, and there being lots of asian elderly who would love to learn more English near our area.
On 5/23, Brian Kuang from the East Cobb Branch participated in the English Tutoring Program and tutored for 50 minutes.
My experience took place through a Zoom meeting which lasted about 1 hour. We used a mobile app called ‘English Speaking for Beginners’. The app contained multiple dialogue examples and had a voiceover for the dialogue as well. We read through the dialogue as if having a conversation, and switched roles. After reading through each time, I would correct her on things such as pronunciation. We would then implement alternate sentences into the dialogue that she could use in real life. For example, if in the example dialogue one of the sentences was “I’m from California”, instead she would say “I’m from China”. We went through a couple different dialogue situations during the time we had.
It was encouraging seeing someone who was so wise yet so motivated to learn more. I’m grateful for the experience and am looking forward to the upcoming weeks and seeing her English improve. I’m also able to build my teaching skills and patience.
Reported by Brian Kuang
Participants: Brian Kuang(1 hour), Stanley Lu(2 hours), Richard Huang (2 hours), Emily Yang (1 hour), Michael D Fu (1 hour), Jeffrey Kuang(1 hour), Jay Pan(2 hours), Terrence Xia (2 hours), Susanna Huang (6 hours), David Kan (8 hours), Jack Xu (1 hour), Sophia Fang (1 hour), Cynthia Ruan (2 hours), Emily Sun (1 hour)
