In the Studio

When we arrived in Ukarumpa, I discovered that there was a need for English as a Second Language tutors, which is one of the subjects I minored in at college. I decided to devote my mornings to working in the English Assistance department, which offers tutoring for non-native English speakers, and spend my afternoons teaching social studies at the primary campus. Currently, I have four adult students I work with in the mornings: two Korean translators, a construction worker from the Netherlands, and one national woman.

In addition to tutoring, I am also working as part of a team that is developing mobile apps to be used in PNG classrooms to help students learn English. Once students in PNG reach third grade, all of their instruction is in English, but not all schools have the resources they need to teach English.

We are just in the beginning stages of designing a series of apps to progress students toward fluency. One of the apps that has already been designed is a listening library. We have a collection of illustrated short stories which you can listen to as the words are highlighted on the screen. Some of the stories have been recorded already, but several more still need to be recorded and added to the library.

I had the opportunity recently to record five of the stories that will be added to the library. We have a recording studio here (often used for recording the Bible in various languages), and I was set up with a mic and headphones in a soundproof room, looking through a window at the people who were recording me on the other side. It was a bit intimidating!

Since then, we’ve started using an Australian English speaker to record the stories, because Australian pronunciation and accent is the standard for English in PNG. It’s neat to think, though, that someday kids in a classroom in PNG may be listening to my voice as they learn English!