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SINGAPORE : A group of trainee teachers from the National Institute of Education wants to equip foreign workers with basic English in just one lesson.
They plan to teach twice weekly at a foreign workers' dormitory on Pulau Brani.
20-year-old Xian Yaping, a foreign worker from China, and 30 other construction workers from Resorts World Sentosa eagerly signed up for the one-and-a-half hour English lessons.
The lessons were initiated by 23 first-year trainee teachers as part of their community service project.
Jenny Tan is one of the trainee teachers involved in the project called "Project Bridge". She said the aim is to equip foreign workers with basic English to express common health- and work-related issues.
Ms Tan said: "We hope that through this project, the workers will be able to apply what we have taught them in their daily lives. Through this project... we will be able to... teach them so that they will learn, and the teachers will be able to learn their culture and befriend them."
The teachers employ what they call the translation method.
Ms Tan explained: "In every lesson, we (have) Chinese and Tamil translators (on standby); anytime the participants do not understand the vocabulary or sentence structure we are teaching them, we have a translator to translate it into their language."
The teachers will conduct lessons over a period of three weeks, reaching out to 180 of these workers.
Although the numbers may not seem significant for a dormitory with 4,000 workers, the trainee teachers said it is a first step that will allow some workers to be able to interact with Singaporeans. - CNA/ms
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