Goducate’s Sing Your English (SYE) program aims to help Indonesians (and other nationalities) to speak English. Indonesian students learn English in school but after 12 years most of them can hardly speak a few words or sentences of English, although they have hundreds of English words/phrases in their heads. There seems to be a “traffic jam” between the head and the mouth. This is probably because in schools the focus of the teaching of English is to help their students to pass their English exams, which puts more emphasis on written rather than spoken English.
SYE aims to clear this 10 cm “traffic jam” between the head and the mouth, through its fun songs. After over a year of testing SYE programs in many schools and organizations in Batam and Pekanbaru in Indonesia, we believe that SYE does clear this “traffic jam”. Children confidently sing the songs and speak the words and phrases learnt (albeit in a sing-song manner). Their fear of speaking English is removed and replaced with the fun of speaking English.
We will be expanding our program to many other schools and organizations , both in Batam and Pekanbaru. On Sept 9 we invited 50 community leaders in Pekanbaru to a seminar to introduce them to SYE. The response was overwhelming.
At present we have 9 Filipino community development workers (CDWs) stationed in Pekanbaru but we will soon need many more. Thankfully, there are 40 CDWs being trained at the Goducate Training Center in Iloilo, Philippines, and many of these will join our Indonesian SYE team.
