before the final exam

When I first came to the ETC, I had a little difficulty with communicating with the children.

Because I do not speak their language and they do not speak mine. it was a little bit hard to estimate the children level in English on the first few days for several reasons beside the language difference, the children are very shy and some of them have already been on such a program before.

The classes were in mixed levels as older children were attending on the younger children classes. this causes some confusion and misunderstanding to the teacher when they see some and sometimes most of the students can answer their questions and already know the material. In my opinion this confusion has limited the chance for the younger children to learn English from the scratch like the alphabets. Although most children know how to read and write the English letters for the fact that their native language have similar letters.

the children still have mistakes with pronouncing the English letters correctly. which is something I would like the people who would be on my place after I leave to focus on. As for the students, I think that they have a big potential to be fluent English speakers, because of their passion and determination in learning English. I think that they do realize that this language would open doors of opportunists for them and it would introduce a whole new world for them other than the world they are living in now.

I think one of the reasons that made the kids think like that is that their volunteer teachers "us" are not native English speakers. that helped the kids to understand that they do not have to be born as English speakers to be able to communicate, speak, read, or even teach English. the children have been very attached to us and started to have us as role-models. as they started to do almost everything we do, say, love,and hate. I came to Indonesia and joined this program to make an impact on other people's life. I hope that I have been a good role-model as a person and a good representative for my country. I wish that I could stay longer to see the progress of my students which I started to already see the enhancement on their English.