Bootcamp Blog Day 3

Kampong Cham is a 40 000 population town. It sits along the bank of the Mekong River and even though its not a big place it has it charm. Along the river there is a long nice walk where you can stroll and every evening there are many people out and about to do exercise, cruise on their motorbikes, eat popcorn, have dinner and so on. It is a very social little place but with a much smaller alcohol; consumption per person than we are used to from back home in London. I’d say that the Cambodians live a very healthy life.

So, The English Bootcamp happened for the first time last year and in my group we introduced an English teaching technique called Jolly Phonics. When you teach with Jolly Phonics the idea is that you teach the language based on the sounds in the language instead of the alphabet. This is a very effective way of teaching and the classes last year went really well. This year we asked the question to ourselves what we should teach the people that came last year. One option was to continue with more jolly phonics and to go deeper on most topics. BUT we ended up deciding to go down a slightly different route. Instead of moving further into Jolly Phonics we decided to focus on speech therapy which is a very big part of Jolly Phonics as well as all other English teaching methods. If people can’t pronounce and master all sounds in a language it is very much harder to speak the language.

In Cambodia many people have problems with the TH sounds like in THE or the TH sound like in THIN. When we started to work on these sounds today it was great to see that some people actually can pronounce the sound if they just know how to do it. To instruct people how in a mechanical way actually pronounce the sounds seemed to be exactly what was needed. Many of the sounds that we knew was a problem last year do sound much better this year.

Tomorrow, day 4 J