What’s Been Happening At Life College

From time to time, Life College organises workshops, often at no cost to participants, as community service projects. One such FREE workshop was the Phonics English Workshop which we organised with the co-operation and support of the Oriental Daily newspaper on 30th April, 2006. The facilitators of this workshop, Evelyn Garrard, Gemma Wong, Tony and Pepi Wong, and Darlene were flown in from Australia and China.

As educators we have always been interested in innovative programs that facilitate learning and fill a need in the marketplace. The increasingly global nature of today’s marketplace has made proficiency in English a must for graduates to successfully secure choice job placements. It comes as no surprise then that many people are unable to get the jobs they want, or if they are already employed are hampered from advancing in their careers simply because they do not have a good command of English and cannot speak the language fluently enough to influence others. Considering the difficulties that second language learners face in improving their command of the English language, we were very excited when we first heard of the Phonics English program.

Phonics English, we discovered, was developed in Australia but implemented with phenomenal success in China—in a province in which the natives do not speak English at all and have little, if any, exposure to the language. Already more than 300,000 young Chinese children are being taught to speak English fluently using Phonics English. We were thus convinced that if the program could be so effective in remote areas in China where English is really an alien tongue rarely heard and much less spoken, then it should yield certain success here in Malaysia where we are constantly bombarded by the language through the media and where there is an abundance of study materials for anyone with a will to improve their grasp of the language.

To learn more about Phonics English, click here.