This website has been set up by a volunteer English teacher in Scotland to help my female students in Afghanistan to learn English (IELTS).
It is a new resource, primarily for my own students and any others doing the IELTS Advanced track, writing section. It may be expanded to cover other sections and the General track, in time
It is also a landing pad for new students and new native English volunteers in order to match them so that students can receive native speaker feedback on written work and verbal presentations. The recommendation is to do this by sending files.
The reason for creating this resource is
to create a resource for self-study for whoever is interested in IELTS, especially Afghan women currently without assistance from English teachers or native English speakers.
to allow those
- with unreliable internet connections to read and study at their leisure
- who may not follow a face-to-face session easily to read and study at their leisure
- who miss a lesson to still have access to the work they missed
to help students, and potential volunteers, to understand the IELTS exam task
to provide
- guidance on how to create a good answer
- model answers
- sample student answers with corrections
- synonym tables that can be used in further student summaries
- background and a structured resource for other volunteer tutors .
What about online lessons?
I have run online lessons for a small number of students. While these have been successful:
Many students only have a phone and an unreliable internet connection.
Teacher and student cannot always understand or hear one another
If students cannot attend a lesson, they miss that week's work
Different cultural norms can delay learning
Teachers are restricted to women (for Afghan female learners)
Preparing for lessons, teaching and marking is limited to a few students and takes up a lot of time.
Resources cannot be used by other students who do not yet have a place on an online course
So this resource supplements and replaces some of my online study sessions and extends that resource to others.