English Club, Pham Van Dong University

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English Club

What a great group of students at Pham Van Dong! They are so eager to learn English that they come on Saturday morning to a hot classroom to enjoy speaking and reading English! It's a pleasure to see them -- they are so eager!

Each Saturday morning we enjoyed reading VietNews, a newspaper out of Ho Chi Minh City full of articles about people, culture, sports, and all those topics that are interesting to young people. We did one of my favorite activities which is a team competition -- each team chooses an article, writes some questions about the article, and then they ask the questions about their article. The team gets a point for each good question and a point for each answer. First person to raise their hand gets to answer! The students are good at this I discovered. They have had a lot of practice in scanning to find the answer to comprehension questions so that was not the challenge. The challenge lay in their speaking out loud enough so that everyone could hear the question, choosing someone to answer and communicating whether it was correct or not. There was a back and forth exchange in English among the students that distinguished this activity from the Teacher-Student interaction that typically takes place in answering comprehension questions in the classroom.

We also sang a some songs -- I of course chose something that I liked -- a song from the 70s -- I think that something more contemporary would have been better for these young students! But they were good sports and we had fun!

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