Literacy Activities in the Jungle

In April, I taught ESL to a group of LIFE (Learners with Interrupted Formal Education) who were tour guides in the Amazon jungle. The curriculum, a wonderful progression of activities aimed at teaching the vocabulary and grammar that tour guides would need, was far too academic for most of my learners. With limited office supplies and no access to a photocopier or the internet, I had to be creative.

Instead of teaching the use of count and non-count nouns, I created a useful sentence stem activity with the word "your", thereby avoiding the necessity of count/ non-count distinctions. Learners could practice the new vocabulary (sunscreen, water, backpack, insect repellant, hat, long pants, etc) without having to understand count/non-count usage in English. On the chalkboard, I simply wrote, "You need your ______"  or "Do you have your ______?" and then the learners could pick up picture cards of these items (provided with the curriculum) and work in pairs practicing saying the sentence. I used subsititution exercises quite a bit as the learners seemed to find them easy to use and they required no supplies except a chalkboard.

Another very successful activity I did was to create mini dialogues and have the learners practice them. They liked this so much that we did one at the start of each day. They especially liked dialogues starring their community. Since making things personally relevant is a best practice for working with LIFE, I tried hard to make the dialogues contain grammar and vocabulary needed for tourism as well as something personally relevant. One phrase they asked me to include almost daily was "San Miguel is an indigenous community." They let me know that this phrase was very important to them and also difficult to pronounce. In order to provide many opportunities to say these words, I tried to include the phrase in most of our dialogues and everyone eventually mastered it. They never seemed to tire of practicing it. Since some learners had quite low reading skills, we practiced the daily dialogues chorally several times and then in pairs. Each pair performed the dialague for the class, thus providing much needed repetition. 

Like all literacy instructors, I varied the pace and changed activities often. One favourite game I introduced them to was hangman. They loved it and actually got quite good at it by the end of my month with them. 

For fun,I am including this photo which I took right outside the classroom one lazy afternoon.