A group of trainee teachers from the National Institute of Education or NIE, has been helping foreign workers learn English.
They make their way to a foreign workers dormitory on Pulau Brani two nights a week.
And one lesson it seems is enough for the foreign construction workers
who are from resorts world sentosa to pick up simple conversational
English.
How do they do it?
The news desk finds out.
When I visited the class, some 30 construction workers were learning conversational English through songs and role play.
The workers are working on the Resorts World Sentosa project.
The lessons, conducted at the dormitory were initiated by a group of 23
first year trainee teachers from NIE as part of their community service
project.
Through non-government organisation, Transient Workers Count Too, the
teachers were introduced to Resorts World Sentosa, who were keen to
have the teachers volunteer their time teaching English to their
workers.
' Project Bridge' aims to equip foreign workers with basic English to express common health and work-related issues.
Jenny Tan is one of the trainee teachers involved in the project.
"Here we adopt the translation method. In every lesson we standby a
Chinese and Tamil translators, anytime the participants do not
understand the vocabulary or sentence structure we are teaching them, we have a translator to translate into their language."
The teachers will be conducting the course 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, Ms Tan says its a first step that will allow some
workers to be able to interact with the local communities.
"We hope that through this project the workers will be able to apply
what we have taught them in their daily lives and not only that.
Through this project bridges we will be able to bridge to them to teach
them so that they will learn and the teachers will be able to learn
their culture and befriend them."
But can these workers pick up simple English after just one lesson?
This was what Ganesan, a 23 year old foreign worker from India asked me after his lesson.
"Can i have one chicken rice please?"
--938Live