DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

As a Language Helper, my responsibilities were to attend the various Global Launch activities held for students outside of their classes.

These included:

  • Reading Theater: An event with two sessions each week where students read a leveled reader of a story out loud and watched a portion of the corresponding movie. The director also provided conversation questions relating to the topics of the story that day for students to discuss. Often, a list of important or difficult vocabulary words were written on a whiteboard and gone over specifically. This session's stories were Les Miserables, for more basic students, and Star Wars for more advanced students. Later into this summer session, a special program of Iraqi teachers of English have come to their own special Reading Theater session in order to learn about the activity with Anne of Green Gables and Les Miserables so that they can apply it to their own schools. Near the end of my internship, a group of students and teachers from the Universidad de Guadalajara in Mexico also attended these special sessions. At these sessions, my task was to work in small groups and direct students in reading and conversation on related topics, while assisting with pronounciation and vocabulary. 
  • Reading Circles: An event with three sessions each week where students may come, select a book according to their designated level, and read out loud in small groups with Language Helpers. My task at these sessions was to help students in selecting an appropriate book, lead a small group in reading. While reading out loud, I helped students with unfamiliar vocabulary, pronounciation, and reading comprehension. 
  • Conversation Club: This event takes place once every week, and students of all levels within the program are encouraged to attend. Students sit in tables of five or six people, with one or two Language Helpers at each table. Conversation is meant to be natural and free-flowing, about whatever students prefer to discuss. Occasionally, the director will provide some specific question for students to focus on, but usually the conversation goes where the students direct it to, in order to help them practice speaking conversationally in English. My task at this event each week was to lead and encourage discussion between small groups of students, and to converse with them, while hopefully encouraging more quiet students to participate in practicing their English. The Iraqi program also had their own separate weekly conversation sessions which focused on discussing teaching techniques and how to implement them in a classroom. 
  • Conversation Groups: Each Language Helper was assigned a group of students to divide into Conversation Groups based on their levels and availability. These groups were around 2-4 students large, and met once every week. The purpose of these groups is to provide a space for students to practice speaking English conversationally in a smaller group setting than Conversation Club. This session I ran three regular Conversation Groups, though this was consolidated to two as the session finished. My role was to schedule these sessions, prepare topics for discussion and to stimulate conversations.
  • Activities: The program also arranged many cultural visits to sites around Arizona for the students, and I attended some of these within my role as Language Helper. These activities included visits to sporting events, cultural sites, and events like the Ringling Brothers Circus. As a Language Helper, my role was to help with the transportation of the students, the organizational roles required by the event, and to converse with them during the events about American cultural aspects they may have been unfamiliar with. 
DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.