Broadening Learning Experience: Faculty of Letters’ Students Assist in Teaching at Thailand’s Schools
Department of English
Ulya Amiqotul Husna
25th June 2024
Learning and Students’ Activity
SDG 4
As it has been held many times, Faculty of Letter, Universitas Negeri Malang conducted their special program called International Teaching Assistance in Thailand, open for all the highly motivated students in Faculty of Letter. This year, it is collaboration between Faculty of Letter and Faculty of Education in Universitas Negeri Malang to send their students for a teaching assistance in Thailand.
The program run for 28 days, starting from 25th May to 22nd June 2024. There are 24 students of the whole participants in the program, 19 students from Faculty of Letter and 5 from Faculty of Education. This teaching assistance program in Thailand aims for fulfilling more international interaction and cooperation within schools and as an enrichment of cultural and teaching experience for the awardees across the country.
The awardees were spread out around Krabi and Satun in Thailand, to teach schools in their own ways. The level of education varied, starting from kindergarten, primary school, junior high school, to high school. Each school received 1 to 3 awardees to teach any intended subjects or lessons. For myself, I was placed in Eakkapapsasanawich Islamic Boarding School, with two other awardees as well. There, we generally were required to give lessons of English.
I myself was given the schedule and the classes that I would be teaching to. It was Class 1/2, Class 2/2, Class 5/3, and Class 6/2. The main topics were different in each grade. It was English for Daily Routine for Class 1/2 and Class 2/2, and English for Communication and Tourism for the high school ones (Class 5/3 and Class 6/2). The students reacted enthusiastically and were very welcome for the materials that I had provided to them. The whole points about this align with the true purpose of Sustainable Development Goals number 4, the quality of education, which encourages any action and activity involving the enrichment experience in education field.
This is me teaching at Class 1/2 the basic vocabularies of English daily routine. It used the ‘repeat after me’ method to pronounce the vocabularies and then we played a team game surrounding the topic of it. Each team consisted of 4-5 students, according to the line they were sitting. It was kind of a relay game that the teacher showed a vocabulary on a piece of paper to the person standing far away from the board and then they would whisper the vocabulary to the person before them until it came to the person who was nearest to whiteboard. The last person had to write the vocabulary in a correct spelling.
The second picture is me teaching at Class 5/3 in our last meeting. In this occasion, I thought I would like to introduce a bit of Indonesian culture through flashcards. So there were the flashcards contained the variety of Indonesia’s traditional clothes and some stickers as gifts for the students. The last meeting ran for so short yet fun and more vibrant. We ended the session by taking a photo together.