Gab Fest

Our small book of lesson plans is now ready.  Gab Fest:  A Collection of Activities to Promote Spoken English will be given to the eight primary schools and the three secondary schools that we work with.  It is our hope that the books will be useful.

Gab Fest

We have long believed that many students of English have heads full of grammar but lack the ability to communicate.  Some ESL teachers drill English structure and have their students do endless 'fill in the blanks' activities and grammar tests that are then corrected and marked.

Our approach is different.  We believe that learning English is like playing football.  You can read and write about football until the cows come home, but you will never be able to play it until you start kicking the ball around.  The activities in Gab Fest are designed to get the students speaking English and to gain ability and confidence, in other words to get them kicking the ball around.

The lesson plans came from a wide variety of sources.  Some of them were found in ESL books and some on the Internet.  Many were developed through conversations with fellow teachers.  We invented some of them.

We have used some of the activities in Gab Fest as primary school teachers in Korea and university teachers in China.  Many of them have been adapted to meet the local conditions in rural Tanzania.  We have selected activities which do not require a lot of resources.  Most of them can be done with pens and paper and with chalk and a chalkboard.  They are designed to be done at no cost or very low cost.

We would like to thank Cuso International and VSO Tanzania for their support of our work among rural Tanzanian teachers.  We are very grateful for the constant support of our partner, Mr. Ndee, the director of the CERC and Mr. Henry Kimola our Champion Teacher.

A very big thank you also goes out to the folks at the Tanzania Development Trust (TDT) who provided the funding for the printing of Gab Fest.