15 Best Practices in Teaching Khmer to Expats

Making It Easy recently held a group discussion for our Khmer tutors and resource staff to focus on “Techniques and Tips for Highly Effective Teaching.” One of our discussion objectives was to brainstorm about Best Practices in teaching Khmer to adult expat language learners. The group discussion elicited an impressive output of fifteen Best Practices, as recorded below.  These will now be applied by our Khmer tutors and language students alike. 

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1. Asking, Listening, and Learning: We adopt this approach from the very beginning. We ask students to fill out an application form which lists critical questions. This form helps us to understand about the individual and about the particular learning needs of the student. At the outset, our tutors also invite the student to say what they want to learn and how they want to achieve their learning goals. Students are always welcome to give comments to our tutors in order to make classes most helpful for their learning needs. We are teachers, and also learners ourselves. 

2. Focusing on Students’Needs: We direct our lessons to meet the needs of each student. We practice flexibility in all aspects of our educating, including adapting our teaching style and the resource materials that we choose in order to make our lessons practical for the learner.

3. Good Teaching Resources: We only recommend good teaching resources to our students. We offer a range of teaching materials from which students may choose the one that suits them best. 

4. Effective Teaching Methodologies:  We apply two teaching methodologies which are Communicative and Interactive Approaches. These approaches make our tutoring service unique. Click on our Tutoring Curriculum to learn more about these approaches.

5. Punctuality and Professionalism: Time management is one of the keys to our professionalism. Our tutors understand and practice the common principle, “To be on time means arriving at class at least five minutes before hand. Arriving to class on time means to be late.”  Tutors go to class in a well-prepared manner; lessons are prepared and reviewed.

6. Practical Lessons: We make lessons practical and relevant to the working environment or life of our students. This enables students to practice more outside class time and gives them opportunities to apply what they have learned with people with whom they interact either at home, office, or on the streets, etc. Students can also practice their language skills by phoning their tutors outside class time (within reason).

7. Creating Practical Opportunities: We give opportunities to students during classes so that they can present their speeches in front of people whether in formal or informal speech. We also link them to related groups of people and events so that they can learn and practise more Khmer language and understand more about culture. In this sense, students are advised to be a fan of our Facebook page in order to get access to our up-to-date news and events. 

8. Speaking More Khmer: Our tutors try to speak Khmer as much as possible. We limit the speaking of English unless new terms, phrases and sentences require an English explanation in order to avoid misunderstanding and interpretation. 

9. Assigning Useful Homework: We give useful homework to our students, neither too much nor too little. This is to prevent our students from being too casual with, or too stressed by, their language assignments.

10. Motivation and Encouragement: We motivate our students to practice their Khmer language as much as they can since learning is about doing. Learning without doing equals nothing. We also encourage them to have a language helper outside class times. This is another way to develop their language skills and build confidence in the new language they are learning. 

11. Using Recording Devices and Social Media: We encourage our students to use asuitable recording device during classes. This is a tool to help them practice and correct their pronunciation when they review lessons. Social media also plays an important role in providing students opportunities to practice their language more. We encourage our students to get access to Apps, YouTube, TV, Movie, Radio and News, etc in order to improve their language skills.

12. Cultural Sensitivity: We understand that our clients are adult expats who are from different parts of the world. They might have different worldviews, habits and ways of life or practices. Our tutors need to understand about the similarities and differences between Cambodian culture and the culture of the students. They share about Cambodian culture to students so that they can learn well on sensitive behaviors and what they should avoid doing when with local people.

13. Interactive and Visual Aid: We make sessions flexible and active. We sometimes change the learning environment by choosing another place for conducting classes. We play games as one of our learning tools. We use pictures and physical resources, e.g. images and currencies etc. We are always open to questions and answers.

14. Never Rush: We do not conduct lessons in a rushed manner because this may cause students to get lost or discouraged. Nor do we move too slowly which may make students become bored. Rather, we teach students according to their learning speed and ability and modify this from session to session as required.

15. Making It Easy and Fun: Last, but not least, we make lessons easy and fun for our students. Our principle is “the more people laugh, the more people learn.” 

Written and Edited By:
Kimsophat Kong, Pheakkdey Tim, Sokha Sun,
Nev Sok, Tri Pok, Rathy Cheng, Lydia Heng,
Jill Hamill, Margaret and Malcolm Garthwaite