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| Invigilating students in the semester exam at my school, 2020 |
When I jumped into my classroom for the first time at a high school in the remote area of Cambodia's Banteay Meanchey, it made me shocked and surprised. When I was attending teacher training in Phnom Penh, I thought my student could speak English in the classroom. Things turned away, I started to speak English to my students, but none replied back when speaking English. They looked at me with surprise and seemed I was different from them. What should I do? Where should I start? I was thinking for a while about starting another word.
"Teacher, you should use Khmer, so we all could understand you. We don't understand when you do it in English." student said, opening his eyes very big.
I changed myself completely from using the English classroom to the local language 'Khmer". I knew to do it for students, not for the lessons. If students failed to understand me, I failed to lead them to other lessons. When I came back home, I revisited my lesson plans and course outlines where I started preparing the easy classroom language to help my students. Things are getting better a little bit then.
My students could read the text in their coursebook, but 10% understood the meaning and 50% [25 of 50 students per class] could read. I supposed [before entering the classroom] they understood the text well after reading and could handle the comprehension questions. It was quite hard to explain the meaning of difficult words in English, thus I had to translate the difficult words to Khmer language (L1) before jumping into the text - taking more time on dealing with vocabulary and less time for other free practice tasks in the classroom.
8 of 10 students had problems with writing skills. When I asked them to write an essay writing format with the assigned topic, they wrote a paragraph writing format. 60% of their writing was about themselves and their family, not about the topic. Students in the remote area rarely had a free writing resource to access and no resources available in the school library. So, we had to start from the beginning to help students familiarize themselves with the writing format and brainstorming ideas to help them move.
"Finding the idea to brainstorm their idea and guiding them step-by-step in writing is not an easy way. It needs patience and effort."
I planned plenty of activities to help students and to engage students' interaction in the classroom in all learning activities involved. In the real classroom, the heavy wooden tables were hard to move and the classroom didn't have enough space to help with group activity. I, sometimes, brought students out to the school yard and held a group activity - at least they could interact with classmates. Some classroom techniques were blocked and unable to be done in the classroom. Moreover, things had to be changed to help them.
My students were friendly and warmly welcome when I jumped into their classroom. They felt why to talk at the beginning and then got better. They seemed delighted to discuss their learning progress and ways to help them improve their English language proficiency during the class. Things never went well as planned and we met lots of obstacles. My students always gave a warm friendly smile when I met them both in the classroom and outside.
"Their smile could cure my nervousness and tiredness of preparing lessons and guiding them in the class".
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