TEAMS

We, a group of young motivated graduates believe that English is an essential key to open higher education and to participate in activities or works conducted by international community or global community. This belief encourages us to set up a small program called TEAMS (Teaching English Association for Monastic Schools) which can give mutual benefit between our group and rural communities. High school students or even graduates from rural areas of Myanmar are not able to use English although they have studied English for ten or more years at school. Most importantly, even most teachers who teach English are unable to converse in English or to write English essays. The cause of this problem is that teachers do not teach English as foreign language, instead they teach it as a school subject: memorizing vocabularies, reciting paragraphs, and practicing questions and answers. This teaching method makes students to be unfamiliar with English in reality. If using such teaching technique is continued, it is highly possible students are less to access higher education, and to integrate with people from English speaking countries. To address this problem, we, six young people, who are good at English, who has five years of teaching experiences and who are active working for communities’ education development would like to share our skills, knowledge and experiences.
o We will develop our own curriculum
o Collect training resources ( videos, short English stories books, Listening work books and other stationeries)
o Collect detailed background information of the schools
o Conduct English Language Teaching Training ( Teacher Training)
o Co-teaching with local teachers
We mainly focus on Monastic schools which don’t get opportunities to learn English as a second learner. In Myanmar, most of the monastic schools don’t get the supports from Government. They have to rely on Local and Foreign Organizations. Most of the monastic schools are primary school. If the students want to continue secondary, they have to go to city. Mostly they don’t continue their secondary level because they can’t afford to attend. The people in rural areas are not educated because they don’t continue their school. They don’t get any supports from Government. As well as, the monastic school teachers don’t get any training from Government. So we decided to do that program for Monastic School. As we are youth, we have ideas and would like to volunteer.