My name is Endre, I am an exchange student from the HZ University in Netherlands, and I am very excited to share with you my experience about this particular activity “English 4 Fun”, which was organised by the Rangsit University, located in Pathum Thani where I am completing and enjoying my exchange semester.
What I find amazing is that I can meet many international people in here thanks to the size of the University, which I would describe as “enormous”. These international students are different than the ones I met in the Netherlands as they are mainly from Asia, from countries like Bhutan, Nepal, China, Vietnam, or Cambodia.
The international department at the Rangsit University asked the international students to participate in the English4Fun activity. Surprisingly, I was the only exchange student who was able to attend this activity. I was lucky to do this project with the full-time international students. It was an amazing experience to meet people from these exotic countries as their culture and perspective is totally different than ours.
The purpose of the activity was to teach English to the children while we are having fun! My group was consisting of eight students. There were four Nepalese girls, two Chinese students, and one Nigerian student. Our course coordinator created our group according to our cultural background and English level to make the team more vivid and interesting, which I found very feasible as each team member was complementing each other with their skills.
To begin with, we had to come up with different ideas of how we would like to teach English in a fun way to these children. Then, we shared our ideas with our group members.
Finally, we came up we a plan, which we thought would be a great way to engage the students in learning English. To gain their attention and interest we decided the best strategy would be to reward them by giving them a small symbolic toy. This required a quick ”toy shopping”.
One week before the activity, we had two meetings. On the first one we thoroughly discussed the specific activities we would like to do as well as created a backup plan in case we finish all the games before the time is over. Then on the second meeting, we discussed and demonstrated our plan to our student coordinator, who was very happy with the result.
We had an amazing two days with the children as we really enjoyed playing various games with them and I believe they loved our classes. At the beginning they were shy but after the first ten minutes, they really engaged in the games. Even though, the winners received presents we made sure that there was no children left without a presents. I strongly believe that we helped the children to become more confident to talk in English as they saw that our international group talked English to each other. I think they were really happy to have a class with me as the majority of these children have not met and talked to a white person before. I hope this could contribute to their future success as nowadays English language is used everywhere around the world.
Ultimately, the local media were very interested in our project and they offered me to do an interview with them, which would nicely complement the articles they wrote about our project in two different magazines.
Link to the articles: (if you open them with Chrome, where you can see the translated version)
This project helped me to contribute to the following SDGs: No Poverty (Goal 1), Zero Hunger (Goal 2), Good health and wellbeing (Goal 3), Decent Work and Economic Growth (Goal 8), Reduced Inequalities (Goal 10).
