lattitude-hanoi-2014Twice a year Shane Vietnam provides training and guidance for a group of about 20 volunteers who are part of the Lattitude global volunteering program. These volunteers are primarily gap year students from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and The UK. The program is designed to provide schools and universities that would not normally be able to afford them with native English speakers to help out with the teaching.

In essence it’s like compacting a CELTA into one week, which at times can certainly prove challenging.

The course consists of teaching theory, lesson staging, error correction, teaching large classes, teaching young learners, pronunciation and phonics work among other things. Luckily the trainees were all enthusiastic and did their best to take on board the almost overwhelming amount of information and put it into practice in their assessed lessons they had to teach at the end of each day.

As the week reached its close, their transformation from friendly young adults to confident and competent teachers was really quite remarkable and there were sad farewells as they got picked up on the Friday evening to go to their various placements that scanned the entirety of Vietnam.