CYCU Cambodia Service Group Teach English in Broken Classrooms

National Education Radio 2016/12/01 11:28 (21 hours ago)

It is common to see teaching by projector or online in Taiwan. However, the local classrooms in Cambodia might have no lights at all. This year, the CYCU student, Liao Wei-Chi, served as an overseas volunteer in Cambodia. According to her, the local education resources were so poor that she finally realized how lucky we born as Taiwanese. The Mainland China student studying in CYCU, Wang Tsun-Chao, revealed that he would bring the experience in Service-Learning to China and founded some society to help more people.

CYCU provides services in Cambodia each year. It has been 11 years since then. Upon selection, the six students, including Wang Tsun-Chao, Liao Wei-Chi, Chen Hsiang-Chun, Li Yi-Han, Liao Chia-Hsin and Hung Cheng-Yu stood out in the candidates and went through the training for a few months. Then, they headed for Cambodia to serve as English volunteers and work with the NGO locally to organize the English teacher conference and child camp.

The student of Department of Applied Linguistics and Language Studies, Liao Wei-Chi, said that the education resources were so poor in Cambodia that the classrooms even had no lights at all, let alone online resources; teachers had no additional teaching materials other than one textbook, and teaching was traditional and so bored; therefore, they designed six major teaching plans and tools, including games, picture books and pronunciations.

The Mainland China student of Department of Finance, Wang Tsun-Chao, said that despite the poor resources, they had routine lifestyle when providing the service and, therefore, he could not help introspect university students’ bad habits, such as staying up late and late for class. As an overseas volunteer for the first time, he has learned a lot. He said that he would not only work harder to learn English but also bring the Service-Learning back to China to found some society to help more people.

Liao Wei-Chi said that as an overseas volunteer, she saw the different corner in the world and would cherish resources more after returning back to Taiwan; meanwhile, this experience also urged her to apply for the qualification of exchange student and she had chance to learn in the U.S.A. next year.