CONVERSATIONS WITH MIGRANT FRIENDS

Mah Wee Yi, R3 Connect Group

Hassan who was a friend of Regina, one of our zone managers, always had an interest in learning English. Hence Regina, along with Wee Yi decided to teach him through weekly conversations via phone calls.

The original idea was to have a pilot English lesson where they would teach basic conversational English to Hassan. To do this, Wee Yi managed to get his friend Adika, his friend from Polytechnic to be their Bengali translator.

They started to do it every Sunday through WhatsApp video call. Initially, the plan was to gauge Hassan’s English speaking ability and think of how to proceed and structure the lesson accordingly after the first few calls. However after a few sessions, Hassan said that he was enjoying what they were doing, conversing (or at least trying to) in English during the calls so that he could improve at his own pace and pick up the language naturally every week. Therefore it became more of hanging out with Hassan just to get to know him better, while conversing in English.