Practising what we pre-teach
The Hands Up Project isn't really very good at 'teaching' language.After three years of running this project, I've come to the conclusion that with all the power cuts, the often weak internet connection and the lack of physical presence, working online like this is actually quite an ineffective way of teaching anybody anything at all.
The sound quality is nowhere near good enough for most kinds of pronunciation clarification, and it's really hard to know whether learners have understood any grammar or vocabulary focus that we might do, simply because we can't see enough of them at the same time to be able to gauge whether they are following us, or not.
But thankfully we don't need to worry about this too much. The children we work with in Gaza, the West Bank and Jordan have their own English classes at UNRWA, the Palestinian Ministry of Education, and Relief International. Their teachers generally have a high level of English, and are very experienced and proficient in teaching grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. The fact that these teachers know their own curriculums inside out, and speak fluent Arabic as well, means that they are probably much better equipped than we 'outsiders' are to know what to teach, and how to clarify meanings.
But anyone who has ever taught a language for any period of time will know that there is much more to language teaching than teaching language. What the Hands Up Project can offer is an opportunity for learners to use the language that they are being taught in their regular classes with someone in a different context - someone with whom Arabic wouldn't be the language of choice for communication. I think this can make their learning of English become more meaningful and motivating.
On Thursday I started a new connection with a new group of 50 grade four boys in a school in Gaza. Their teacher Ashraf, had been working with a unit in the coursebook called 'Let's make a cake' and he'd asked me if I could do some practice activities with them to activate some of the language he'd been teaching. In the video below you can see some of the activities that we did.