ESL in Chorkor, Ghana - Jenna Kimak

This most recent summer, I spent a month from June 21st to July 21st studying abroad in Ghana, Africa. The program that I took part in was called Social Work and Development in Education: Perspectives from Ghana. While partaking in this experience, four days a week, my study abroad group worked at a non-governmental organization called B.A.S.I.C.S International (www.basicsinternational.org if you want to check it out!) that served as both a transition program and an after-school program for children in a small fishing community called Chorkor. In Ghana, the national language is English, but many different languages are spoken throughout the different regions of the country. In Chorkor in particular, the language native to the area that all Ghanians living there speak is called Twi, and children are raised speaking in Twi until they start school, when they often times know very little English.

The goal of the transition program at BASICS International was to help children from the area who had never been enrolled in school, or who had attended but had to drop out due to other circumstances, to enroll into public school. Within the transition group at BASICS, there was roughly three different skill levels: level one, where children could not identify numbers or letters and spoke little to no English; level 2, where kids knew the alphabet and most numbers, but lacked skills in reading and mathematics; and level 3, where children were just about ready to take the school-entry exam. While working at BASICS, I was in charge on implementing two hours worth of lesson plans for these students, and I found it the most challenging by far to implement my lesson plan as I had hoped with the level one students because of the language barrier. In order to help these students to understand, I found myself being very theatrical in gestures so that children would relate the gestures to what they were learning. I also found it helpful to demonstrate while I was explaining so that the children could connect the words and actions. I did have a translator there on rare occasion which was helpful, but it was exciting to watch the children grow in that short period of time. By the end of the month. There were children in level 1 that were recognizing and sounding out letters that they could not previously identify. It was a challenging first experience with teaching ESL students, but also extremely rewarding.