Each weekday, for the last eight weeks, this group has met for four hours of intensive English instruction in preparation for a medical aide program.
Photo by Trevor Nichols
Just after noon on March 4, in the South Okanagan Immigrant and Community Services building, a group of immigrants take turns reading paragraphs from a case study about an immigrant named Ajay working in a re-assembly factory.
As one student finishes reading a paragraph about “losing face” in the Canadian workplace, the group decides it’s about getting respect by asking for help.
Guiding the discussion is Chandra Wong, the course instructor, who walks to a Smart Board and jots down a few sentences as the group gives its summary.
As they make it to the end of Ajay’s saga, Wong gives her students a quick writing assignment. As they scribble on note pads and murmur among themselves, she talks about the class.
“A lot of what we’re doing is giving them confidence, and feeling confident speaking English, reading English, writing English, and listening,” she says.
Each weekday, for the last eight weeks, the group has met for four hours of intensive English instruction.
The goal, Wong says, is to prepare them for the Canadian Language Benchmark (CLB) evaluation. Her students need to score sixes on the reading and writing evaluations, and sevens on their speaking and listening evaluations, in order to qualify for an upcoming medical aide program.
Preparing them for that program is the entire purpose of the medical English course, which is running for 10 weeks at the centre thanks to a grant from the Ministry of Jobs, Tourism and Skills Training and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.
Wong says the constant instruction, and being forced to speak English every day, has made a real impact on many of her students, and she’s seen real improvement.
“What I notice is the confidence. Before they would be very shy about speaking, and they didn’t want to make mistakes, [but now] I see a confidence in them growing, which is wonderful.”
Demonstrating her growing confidence speaking English, Doris Benitez takes a few minutes out of her lunch break to explain why she’s taking the course.
Benitez moved to Canada from Colombia six years ago, and has been diligently working to learn to speak the language, something she says has been a dream of hers all her life.
It hasn’t come easy for her, but Benitez says she’s been working hard, and this course provides her an opportunity “to get more skills and maybe to get more possibilities to go forward.”
“You can imagine for us immigrants, how we sacrifice to learn another language. It’s not easy. But if you pursue and you are a dedicated person, it is possible,” she says.
Benitez says her goal is to get her Grade 12, take a Language Proficiency Index (LPI) assessment, and “someday, maybe in three years,” become a human support manager.
She has notebooks jammed full of English vocabulary, and says she tries to learn at least one new word or phrase every day.
“I always tell my husband and my friends from church: someday I will speak it, I will read it like you guys because I never give up. I will learn,” she says.
For Manpreet Sidhu, the course offers opportunity for the future. Sidhu, who has a two-month-old daughter, is taking the course while on maternity leave.
She says making the time to get to the course can be a challenge, but she does it because she can see that it’s an important opportunity.
“But it’s hard for me to every day come. But the first thing in front of my eyes is to learn English. After I learn English, then I can do everything,” she says.
She says while she’s taken in a lot from the course, the first thing she’s learned is confidence.
“Before we can’t talk with anybody because we are thinking when we speak; somebody will say ‘oh, she doesn’t know how to speak.’ Now we have confidence.”
She says she’s also learned valuable lessons about verb tenses and how to write an essay, all skills she will use when she enrols in the medical aide program later this summer (providing she passes the CLB assessment).
She and her classmates will take the assessment during the final week of class, which Wong says is right around the corner.
Sidhu says she is nervous, because she really wants to pass, but also excited.
Once she passes the test, she says, the world opens up to her.
By Trevor Nichols
