How can I teach my Cambodian friend English?

Ask specific questions about your target languages. Beginner questions welcome!
User avatar
leosmith
Brown Belt
Posts: 1341
Joined: Thu Sep 29, 2016 10:06 pm
Location: Seattle
Languages: English (N)
Spanish (adv)
French (int)
German (int)
Japanese (int)
Korean (int)
Mandarin (int)
Portuguese (int)
Russian (int)
Swahili (int)
Tagalog (int)
Thai (int)
x 3102
Contact:

How can I teach my Cambodian friend English?

Postby leosmith » Wed Jan 18, 2023 2:44 am

I’m in Thailand now, and I have a Cambodian girlfriend. She has been working in Thailand for 9 years and speaks the language well. But she does not read or write Thai. In fact, she does not read or write any language, not even her native Khmer. She wants to learn English, not just conversing but also reading and writing. So my plan for her is to
1) learn the alphabet/basic pronunciation
2) do a basic phrases audio program that also has text available
3) have her read and write out the phrases in 2 while reviewing them in an SRS
4) converse with natives/read/write and text/watch native content/listen to blogs/etc.
4 is easy to find. Questions:

For 1, do you know of a good free resource that has audio and a sample word for each letter. For example, maybe a list like:
A a apple (audio when I click on apple)
B b ball (audio when I click on ball)
etc... it would be nice if there were a picture or a place that I could add Thai or Khmer audio too.

For 2 and 3, can that be covered by Glossika?

Any other suggestions? I’m actually excited about teaching someone who is illiterate, but quite over my head. There are some Thai to English audio resources available locally, but Thais have terrible pronunciation because they make little effort to pronounce things correctly, so I want her to start out with pronunciation.
4 x
https://languagecrush.com/reading - try our free multi-language reading tool

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
x 6299

Re: How can I teach my Cambodian friend English?

Postby sfuqua » Wed Jan 18, 2023 5:25 am

Waaay back in the '80s, when I worked in the refugee program in the Philippines, we taught people who were illiterate sometimes. I wasn't directly involved with students at this level, so I only have indirect knowledge of how they did it.

As I remember, it takes a lot of patience and encouragement. I seem to remember the teachers doing a lot of things with putting letters in different positions on a chalkboard, for the different sounds they can make in English. "E here means silent E, and E over here sounds like the EEE sound and over here it sounds like EH. They also used different colours for different pronunciations.

There was a lot of argument at our refugee camp about whether to use phonics to teach the sound system of English. Of course, someone who doesn't read any language needs to use phonics, sight word, and everything else you can think of to break into English. I can't imagine approaching English without using some sort of phonics to get to the point where you can pronounce 90% of English... You may get some good mileage out of reading things aloud in English that she can understand, you know, you pointing at words and her pronouncing them.

This is all just in the basic stage, for a few hours.

Like, I say, I worked with people who were doing things like what you are talking about, but my team of teachers worked with people who had already been to at least a few years of school in their native language. And as you can tell from my suggestions, I don't know much about modern, app based instruction. Possibly some of the missionary programs may have resources for you..

I answered your question before I consulted any of the people I know who might be able to help you more. Let me look around and see what I can find.

She has a long, hard road ahead of her, but her initial progress should be rapid and satisfying. There is no reason to think that she will take nearly as long as a child does to learn to read. Once she can get through the initial steps of connecting together sound, letter, and meaning, there should be tons of regular ESL material that will help her thorough here Intermediate plateau. There were a lot of useful resources in Hong Kong way back in th day; maybe they have exactly what you need now...

Let me ask around my school district and also see if any of the old gang from the camp are still around and interested in making suggestions.

Anyhow, best of luck. She has an adventure ahead of her if she really wants to do this, and you have an adventure ahead if you are going to help her.
4 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
Axon
Blue Belt
Posts: 775
Joined: Thu Jun 16, 2016 12:29 am
Location: California
Languages: Native English, in order of comfort: Mandarin, German, Indonesian,
Spanish, French, Russian,
Cantonese, Vietnamese, Polish.
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=5086
x 3288

Re: How can I teach my Cambodian friend English?

Postby Axon » Wed Jan 18, 2023 5:41 am

There's a great deal of ESL research on this. Look for "Resources for pre-literate ESL adults" as a search topic.

Of course, you have a different relationship with her than teachers have with students, and only you know how motivated she'll be to learn by different methods.

Can you teach her the Latin alphabet with a language she knows already? I imagine it would be easier for her to grasp it that way first. For example, you could teach her the Royal Thai romanization for Thai, which she would certainly see every day on street signs in Thailand. Her getting used to seeing the way English vowels are used in different ad hoc ways for romanizing Thai and Khmer would probably get her prepared for the same thing happening in English.

Glossika and other basic-phrases type of programs rely too much on existing literacy. Depending on her interest and attention span, there are oodles of YouTube videos for English phonics and slow-speed basic conversation out there. YouTube also has plenty of romanized karaoke videos in Thai, Khmer, and of course English.
5 x

User avatar
CDR
Orange Belt
Posts: 113
Joined: Fri May 06, 2022 10:47 pm
Languages: English (N), Portuguese (B2?), Japanese (A2?)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=18051
x 465

Re: How can I teach my Cambodian friend English?

Postby CDR » Wed Jan 18, 2023 6:45 am

https://www.tacomacommunityhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Making-it-Real.pdf

This is an interesting topic, I did some searching and found this pdf that was prepared for teaching refugees, including those who are non-literate.

pg 61
NON-LITERATE
Non-literate students come from a culture with a written language, but they have had little or no
exposure to literacy in their first or second language. Sambath’s first language is Khmer. It has a
written form, but she did not have any formal schooling and did not learn any native language
literacy. For non-literate students, instruction should still emphasize the connection between
spoken and written language.


It has a lot of different activities and the kind of things that need to be focused on, hopefully it might be some use to you?
2 x

Lawyer&Mom
Blue Belt
Posts: 980
Joined: Sun Mar 04, 2018 6:08 am
Languages: English (N), German (B2), French (B1)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=7786
x 3767

Re: How can I teach my Cambodian friend English?

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Wed Jan 18, 2023 7:06 am

https://www.starfall.com/h/abcs/?mg=m

Starfall is designed for children, but it can teach anyone the alphabet with an emphasis on the letter sounds, not just the letter name.

There are also lots of free alphabet worksheets to print, search for “alphabet printables.”
4 x
Grammaire progressive du français -
niveau debutant
: 60 / 60

Grammaire progressive du francais -
intermédiaire
: 25 / 52

Pimsleur French 1-5
: 3 / 5

User avatar
leosmith
Brown Belt
Posts: 1341
Joined: Thu Sep 29, 2016 10:06 pm
Location: Seattle
Languages: English (N)
Spanish (adv)
French (int)
German (int)
Japanese (int)
Korean (int)
Mandarin (int)
Portuguese (int)
Russian (int)
Swahili (int)
Tagalog (int)
Thai (int)
x 3102
Contact:

Re: How can I teach my Cambodian friend English?

Postby leosmith » Wed Jan 18, 2023 9:01 am

sfuqua wrote:Of course, someone who doesn't read any language needs to use phonics, sight word, and everything else you can think of to break into English.
Good point, and awesome post!
Axon wrote:For example, you could teach her the Royal Thai romanization for Thai, which she would certainly see every day on street signs in Thailand.
This is possible, but I think we're going to barrel ahead right into English. Honestly, I'd like to teach her the writing system for Thai first, but unfortunately she sees that as an unnecessary delay. She works as a hostess in a bar; about 2/3 of her customers communicate with non-native English, and 1/3 with native English.
CDR wrote:I did some searching and found this pdf that was prepared for teaching refugees, including those who are non-literate.
Thanks - I'll check it out.
Lawyer&Mom wrote:Starfall is designed for children, but it can teach anyone the alphabet with an emphasis on the letter sounds, not just the letter name.
Haha, that's cute. Thanks.

I think we've got 1 covered now. I am having her watch/pause and repeat the letters in this video, and we bought her a simple alphabet book to practice writing out the letters (it shows stroke order, and also has some simple word writing practice). I told her to listen/repeat the video until she finishes it or for at least 20minutes, whichever comes first, and write for at least 10 minutes per day. I figure it will take her at least a week to master these.

So I'm looking for a good resource for 2 & 3 now. I'm thinking an anki deck with maybe a couple hundred very basic high frequency English sentences, audio and text, on one side, and either Thai or Khmer audio and text on the other. I've heard it's not hard to make these now, but I'd love to find something already made.
3 x
https://languagecrush.com/reading - try our free multi-language reading tool

User avatar
Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4768
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
Location: Denmark
Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
x 14962

Re: How can I teach my Cambodian friend English?

Postby Iversen » Wed Jan 18, 2023 9:48 am

Axon wrote:Can you teach her the Latin alphabet with a language she knows already? I imagine it would be easier for her to grasp it that way first. For example, you could teach her the Royal Thai romanization for Thai, which she would certainly see every day on street signs in Thailand.


I haven't personally tried to teach anyone an alphabet, but it must be easier to do so with a language that the person already knows. OK, Thai is written with a lot of different letters (twice as many as for English), and I have read somewhere that the Thais don't even mark word separations, but it must still be easier to learn to write a language you know than it is to learn how to write English when you don't know it. And then go for simple spoken English as a supplement, but postpone the absurd orthography until she has learnt the basics of the spoken language.
3 x

Irena
Green Belt
Posts: 392
Joined: Wed Dec 28, 2022 11:42 am
Languages: Serbian (N), English (C2), French (C1), Russian (C1), Czech (C1), dabbled in a couple of others, dreaming of many others
x 861

Re: How can I teach my Cambodian friend English?

Postby Irena » Wed Jan 18, 2023 11:23 am

sfuqua wrote:She has a long, hard road ahead of her, but her initial progress should be rapid and satisfying. There is no reason to think that she will take nearly as long as a child does to learn to read.


I wish! Google "neoliterate adult dyslexia" and see what you find. (This is something Helen Abadzi has written about, so that's the name to Google if you want a name.) Apparently, when children learn to read, what happens is that, with some practice, their brain starts seeing written words as faces, rather than decoding them letter by letter. In adults, this doesn't happen. (It's not clear whether it really, truly does not happen, period, or if adults simply need more time - a lot more time - than children for this to happen.) Adults can still learn to read, but their reading speed plateaus quite quickly and does not seem to improve. Would it improve with thousands of hours of practice? Maybe... It's not clear. How many adults do you know who only learned to read as adults, and then invested literally thousands of hours into reading practice?

Anyway, this is an issue with illiterate adults who try to learn to read for the first time (typically in their native language), and also for fully literate adults trying to learn new scripts. Now, it does somewhat depend on the script! If you learned the Roman alphabet as a child, you shouldn't have much trouble with the Cyrillic or Greek script, since those scripts are similar enough to the Roman script. Ah, but try learning something distant, such as Devanagari or Arabic, and see what happens. Hebrew (as per Abadzi) seems to be somewhere in between. Some adults seem to manage, and others not so much. I guess it's because Hebrew is sort of similar to the Roman/Greek/Cyrillic triangle, but still noticeably different. (However, Abadzi did hint - but hasn't discussed in any detail, as far as I know - that Chinese may be different, precisely because it's, roughly speaking, one picture one word. If that's correct, then paradoxically, Chinese is easier for an illiterate adult brain to manage than something like Spanish.)

In my case, I tried learning Hebrew in my late 20s. It took me about three weeks of practice (at a rate of one-to-two hours per day) to get to the point where I could decode the Hebrew letters (both print and script) and write script. I believe that's quite a bit faster than a child would manage. Alas, that's where the good news ends. I took four semesters of college-level Hebrew after that (this was four times 75 minutes per week, plus some admittedly light HW; so, it was not super intensive, but nor was it a Mickey Mouse class), and... My reading speed remained painfully slow. I could read (sound out) Czech more quickly and accurately on day one than I could Hebrew after those two years. And that remained the case even for very simple Hebrew texts, those in which I knew every single word.
0 x

Kraut
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2599
Joined: Mon Aug 07, 2017 10:37 pm
Languages: German (N)
French (C)
English (C)
Spanish (A2)
Lithuanian
x 3204

Re: How can I teach my Cambodian friend English?

Postby Kraut » Wed Jan 18, 2023 11:58 am

I know that Stanislas Dehaene has studied the brains of illiterate adults, but that's about all. I googled and found this, dating from 2015, there must be more findings and more recently, because this is his major interest.

https://www.unicog.org/publications/Deh ... ce2015.pdf


/.../
Generally, the findings indicate that reading relies on the same brain circuit when literacy is
acquired in adulthood or in childhood, and that the majority of behavioural and brain changes
induced by literacy can therefore occur in adulthood. Anatomically, adult literacy acquisition
yields detectable changes in grey- and white-matter anatomy, particularly in the left arcuate
fasciculus and posterior corpus callosum10,13. Functionally, ex-illiterate adults show most of the
effects reported in this article, including increased visual word form area (VWFA) responses to
letter strings; activation of the left-hemispheric spoken language network by written sentences;
increased responses of the occipital and calcarine cortex to non-reading-related stimuli; and
enhanced planum temporale and top-down VWFA activation in response to spoken words and
pseudowords8,9. Behaviourally, adult literacy acquisition affects both visual processing11,12,22,83,86 and
phonological awareness103,108.

/.../

Dehaene's twitter account:
https://twitter.com/standehaene?lang=de
Last edited by Kraut on Wed Jan 18, 2023 12:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
2 x

Irena
Green Belt
Posts: 392
Joined: Wed Dec 28, 2022 11:42 am
Languages: Serbian (N), English (C2), French (C1), Russian (C1), Czech (C1), dabbled in a couple of others, dreaming of many others
x 861

Re: How can I teach my Cambodian friend English?

Postby Irena » Wed Jan 18, 2023 12:14 pm

Thanks, Kaut! I just glanced at your link. In Box 3 (on page 5), it says (with references removed and with my emphasis in bold):

These effects are generally smaller in ex-illiterate adults than in literate adults who learnt to read and were schooled at an early age, but it is currently not possible to determine whether this arises simply from reduced reading experience or is due to reduced brain plasticity in adulthood or other sociocultural factors (BOX 1). A few ex-illiterate adults do become fluent readers and spellers, reading in excess of 50 words per minute. However, a common observation is that reading in late-learned scripts often remains dysfluent. Furthermore, literacy does not have the same impact on the face recognition system when it is acquired in adulthood compared with when it is acquired in childhood, suggesting that the adult ventral visual system cannot be as flexibly reorganized: literate individuals who learnt to read at a young age showed reduced activation to faces compared with illiterate adults, whereas there was no statistically significant difference between illiterate and ex-illiterate adults. Furthermore, even after adjusting for variations in reading score, ex-illiterate adults still showed a significantly smaller reduction in face-evoked responses than did schooled literate individuals of matched social origin.


Right. Also, note how low the threshold for fluent reading is: 50 words per minute. A typical printed page will have about 300 words, and so this translates into 6 minutes per page. So, hardly speed reading! Yet, if you manage that in a new script, then you can consider yourself quite successful.
1 x


Return to “Practical Questions and Advice”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests