How it Works:
The Niche in the Market: There are many people in Duhok who have a decent academic grasp of English, but very little experience speaking it. And they are prepared to pay good money to get practice. But I can only provide IELTS preparation courses in the evenings. Some are asking for Saturday classes. That's the opening for a whole-day experience. No one amongst the hundreds of expat English teachers in Kurdistan seems to have offered this kind of immersion experience.
- Walk round the office, and the coach gives you instructions in the target language: Knock on the door, Shuffle the Cards. In English OR Kurdish. He marks you out of, say 100, for how many actions you correctly performed first time.
- Watch the video of these actions, and repeat after the video.
- You walk round with your coach and tell him what to do. He marks you out of 200; you score 1 point for getting it roughly right, 2 if you get it spot-on
- You and your coach retrace your steps and he talks in the past tense about what you did. I knocked on the door, I shuffled the Cards.
- You now walk round and talk in the past tense about what you did.
- You now use the future tense, by going round and telling a partner what he will do. eg You will knock on the door, you'll shuffle the cards.
The Niche in the Market: There are many people in Duhok who have a decent academic grasp of English, but very little experience speaking it. And they are prepared to pay good money to get practice. But I can only provide IELTS preparation courses in the evenings. Some are asking for Saturday classes. That's the opening for a whole-day experience. No one amongst the hundreds of expat English teachers in Kurdistan seems to have offered this kind of immersion experience.
A local partner: Imagine a shopkeeper in a village. He speaks his own language crisply, slowly -- frankly, like the kind of guy Blue Peter would snap up as a TV presenter. He has no idea that he has a God-given gift that can help him provide well for his family. He has land nearby, perfect for recreation - a short mountain bike's ride away -- and a sizeable house with a room where you could play table-tennis and darts.
Who would be the coaches? Yes, this is a potential bottleneck, because expats don't want to give a whole Saturday to being an English coach. But there are lots of Kurds who are fairly fluent English speakers, eg English students or returnees--they could be very adequate as coaches when they follow the TPR script.
Does TPR work, or is this just a bright idea? TPR has been widely advocated and practised. It really does work, because all five senses can be engaged, not just the eyes looking at letters on a page. After all, this is how we learnt our mother tongue as children. And often, more complex vocabulary is rooted in basic everyday actions: eg in Kurdish 'complicated' is a metaphor - têkvedayî - and it comes from the literal world of shuffling cards and stirring tea. So...drink tea and play cards, and then you'll be able to move on to talk about 'shuffled' international relations!
Despite the acclaim TPR has received, I failed to find anyone who had developed a TPR lab syllabus that could be used in a particular location. If successful, this syllabus could be sold to others.
To view the syllabus of actions as we develop it, look here
To view the syllabus of actions as we develop it, look here
