This
was my third summer working for the worldwide renowned summer school, Education
First or rather, EF. This is a company with language schools all over the world
including California and Ecuador, but I was once again in sunny England’s
Oxford office. Yes office, this year they had finally given me a desk job and a
title: Homestay Coordinator. I was now senior staff! While this sounds fancy
(or it does at least to me) my job was pretty simple, I was in charge of
running a small scale 3 week courses for students who not only wanted English
lessons and to experience English culture but who also wanted to act.
The
course wanted to encourage students to ‘have the time of [their] life and learn
a language’. Every week day was broken down into 3 hours of lessons and 3
activities, with half of the lessons being given by a professional actor. The
lessons were designed to give students the vocabulary and confidence to speak
English, the activities the students did – bowling, the cinema, trips to London
and Bath – were in place not only so the students had an enjoyable visit but so
they could practise their new language skills. Finally the students put on a
performance in English as proof of their improvement over the three week course.
The
students are a mix from all over Europe and Asia which means there are so many
interesting cultures from which I leant a lot. The students stay in touch with
each other (and when I’ve had students to look after), me! It’s incredible how
three weeks bond a group together and you end up making friends of different
walks of life.
This
is an incredibly rewarding course for the students as they feel they’ve
achieved something and if I wanted to learn a language then this is an
empowering way of doing it, as well as being enjoyable.
I’ll
leave you with something from the summer which I found particularly amusing.
One Chinese student spent a good week attempting to think up a good ‘English’
name. After days of asking him if he’d thought of one and him looking
incredibly pensive, he finally answered: ‘My name will be ... Monkey!’
