Slowly, but surely

Ever since Mohd decided to pursue Management instead of Engineering, we decided to put Math aside temporarily and focus on improving his English. We have been meeting two to three times a week for English lessons. He comes to our teachers’ lodging and we go upstairs into the makeshift kitchen on the roof, dragging chairs behind us. We push aside cutting boards, pots and pans to make room on the kitchen table and we go through an old, simple English language book that one of the other teachers gave me for teaching English. The book deals with basic grammar and reading comprehension. He does extremely well with filling in the blanks and learns quickly when instructed. We are doing what we can with this one, single book.

I realised very quickly that to progress further, I would need to furnish Mohd with more reading material. So I borrowed some old editions of National Geographic and asked Mohd to take one home and read. He took about a week to read the whole magazine, and it was interesting to note which stories appealed to him. He was particularly interested in articles that covered technology and IT. I helped him with some words he was not familiar with and could not find in the dictionary.

It isn’t very easy teaching him a language that he does not use nor practice on a daily basis. I feel very ill equipped at this task but I know that fluency in English is the one thing that will help him by leaps and bounds at this point in time. He needs to be able to prove that he’s at an acceptable level of English in order to qualify for admission to schools abroad. And assuming that the language of instruction in whatever programme he gets accepted to is indeed English, it goes without saying that his learning experience would go so much more smoothly if he had a strong command of the language.

And so we persevere as best as we can. Mohd continues to show up at our doorstep three times a week, and we continue going through sentences and trying to identify English grammar rules. We pore over short passages and pronunciation as Mohd tries to gain confidence in his English and expressing himself.

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