1) The author completed an internship at the International Rescue Committee in Phoenix, Arizona where she developed an 8-lesson English curriculum focused on teaching refugees job-related vocabulary and skills for cleaning industry jobs. 2) Some challenges included differing opinions from supervisors, students not showing up for the first class, and varying English skill levels among students. The author learned about doing needs analyses, maintaining a positive attitude, and being over-prepared for varying skill levels. 3) Successes included making activities like timesheets realistic for job skills and using content-based instruction around cleaning topics. The author reflects on how to improve lessons using problem-based learning and making activities more student-centered and group-focused

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A. Rose Gochnour
Professor Macksoud
LIN 584: MTESOL Internship
Final Reflection
November 25, 2013
A Summer at the International Rescue Committee
In the summer of 2013, I had the opportunity to intern at the International Rescue
Committee (IRC) in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. Upon reflection this past semester,
through Blackboard journal entries and time spent in my ENG 404: Lessons in Second
Language (L2) Acquisition course, it has become very clear that my time at the IRC was
a great learning opportunity that will influence the ways that I approach L2 teaching for
years to come. In this reflection I will provide an overview of the internship experience,
address challenges and lessons learned, analyze some of my successes, and discuss
potential improvements for future teaching applications based on my internship
experience.
INTERNSHIP OVERVIEW
From June through mid-August, I spent 6-10 hours a week volunteering in-person
at the IRC. I also spent 4-6 hours working on curriculum development on my own at
home. The goal of my internship was to develop a brand new course at the IRC that
added to their previous efforts in L2 teaching in a new and more focused way. Working
with MTESOL student, Hameed, I was instructed to develop a week-long course,
consisting of four classes that prepared refugees for jobs in the cleaning industry

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(Hameed was instructed to develop lessons for the following week). The objective was to
only teach them the English that was relevant for obtaining and maintaining a cleaning
job such as, hotel room cleaning, dish washing at a restaurant, or school/office cleaning.
This meant that the classes were focused primarily on vocabulary acquisition, as well as
on skill development. That is to say, we didn’t just teach the students what a mop was, we
also demonstrated how to properly mop a floor. This course falls under the label of
teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP).
As mentioned, our students at the IRC were refugees from all over the world. We
had students from Burma, Iran, the Congo, Myanmar, among other places. The ages of
our students ranged from 17-40, with the majority being males in the 17-25 year old
range. Although originally planned to conduct the class with interpreters available, due to
budget restraints we ended up conducting the class with no interpreters and entirely in
English. The skill level of the students greatly varied. Some had reasonable experience
with speaking English, while others were illiterate even in their own language. The IRC
helped bring these students to America and works to get them financially independent
and well situated in about a three-month period; we were just one part of making this
mission possible.
In addition to working with Hameed, I worked with my supervisors Waleed and
Stephen, full-time employees at the IRC to develop the course. Their insights were
particularly valuable because they had been training refugees for work in the cleaning
industry for several years. Our main goal was to help lighten their load, and allow them to
teach more refugees at a faster pace. Waleed’s knowledge was invaluable because he
knew unusual, but important things like the fact that the colors of spray bottles and their

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corresponding rags were very important in hotel cleaning. That is to say, workers are
expected to know that you use a red colored bottle on hardwood floors as opposed to a
blue colored bottle on windows. With insights like this, we were able to develop lessons
and activities that not only taught colors, but taught the relationship between colors and
cleaning items.
In the end, we developed eight lessons that taught around 15 new vocabulary
words per lesson. Each lesson also focused on teaching cleaning skills that related to the
topic of the day, such as cleaning action words, places in the cleaning industry, cleaning
supplies, etc. Lessons consisted of signing in on a timesheet, a PowerPoint overview,
instructional videos, role-play tasks, matching game handouts, and skill demonstrations.
It took a lot of trial and error to come up with this format for the lessons, but in the end
we were able to tell what sort of activities made sense to the students and produced the
best results. After teaching the course by ourselves for a few weeks, we prepared detailed
lesson plans so that IRC volunteers could begin teaching the course each week without
our oversight.
I was fortunate in that my internship was primarily curriculum development
focused (which I needed the most practice at), but I also had the opportunity to teach the
course that I developed towards the end of my internship. This was insightful because I
was able to see first hand the way in which my lessons worked, and could work for
others. It was great to be able to review my lesson plans after teaching them.
With this overview of my assignment, timeline, students, coworkers, and
curriculum in mind, I will now go over some of the challenges we faced along the way.

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LESSONS LEARNED
During my ENG 404 class this past semester, I was able to reflect on my
experiences at the IRC and to find ways that I could have dealt with challenges better.
One of the pervading challenges I faced while developing curriculum was dealing with
opposing ideas and objectives from my two supervisors at the IRC. For example, I would
receive instructions from one about how writing should be emphasized in the course,
while the other would encourage only practical, hands-on activities. This made it so that
sometimes I spent time developing activities that ended up being cut upon further
discussion between the supervisors.
I think that this problem would have been solved if I had done a thorough “needs
analysis” with both supervisors at the very beginning of the internship. Needs analyses
are essential in L2 teaching, and more specifically in ESP teaching, because they allow
the activities to be relevant, focused, and advantageous to the learner. I certainly tried to
figure out what these needs were based on my own knowledge, but I didn’t have my
supervisors do the same. If I would have sat down and compiled a list of everyone’s
needs for the course right at the beginning, including some one representative of the
student population, I could have avoided doing unnecessary work due to
miscommunication.
Another challenge Hameed and I faced came near the end of our internship, after
weeks of hard work and preparation, none of the students ended up coming for the first
day of classes. The IRC staff seemed to have miscommunicated with the clients and

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interpreters. No one was really able to provide us with answers about why this was the
case and we were excused for the day without much explanation.
This taught me a lesson about the importance of the administrative side of
teaching. For example, the IRC worker in charge of coordinating students and interpreters
booked all the interpreters even when he lacked certainty about whether or not the
students were for sure coming. Booking the six interpreters (who did all show up) was a
big waste of money for the IRC who runs on a tight non-profit budget. From there on out
we taught without interpreters due to this failure.
I think this experience taught me a valuable lesson about maintaining a good
attitude despite set backs in L2 teaching. As a teacher or a volunteer you cannot expect to
control your students or coworkers. In times of disappointment or setbacks it is best to
focus on your own accomplishments and readiness. Hameed and I were able to stay
positive because we knew that we were prepared and ready if things would have gone
differently. Hameed and I used this time to troubleshoot the lesson preparation and to
figure out how to make the set-up process more effective – for example printing handouts
the day before, providing pens for the class, checking the audio system before class starts,
etc. Fortunately, the following week we started classes again and had 24 students show
up on time and ready to learn.
In the future I might try to be more involved in the administrative side so that I
can have more certainty about whether or not I will be teaching and how many students
will show up. If this isn’t an option, I can at least reflect upon this experience and the
ways in which it was overcome. Similarly, I was proud that Hameed and I were able to

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stay positive and make use of our time so that we could start up strong the following
week.
Another challenge that I faced came during the first week of classes. The class'
overall skill level was more advanced than we had anticipated, but there were still many
low-level learners. I found myself having to think on my feet as I tried to make our
planned activities more advanced, yet also making sure that the slower learners were not
feeling overwhelmed or falling behind. I am sure that this is a problem that teachers of all
kinds face, in all sorts of learning environments.
In preparing for future lessons in which the skills levels of the incoming students
are unknown, I would probably include alternate activities or lesson ideas in the case that
students are more advanced than expected. Being over-prepared is much better than
having to think up ideas in front of a class. During this first week I also noticed that the
class seemed to respond positively to the cleaning movies I showed. Watching the
cleaning videos engaged the lower-skill level students because they could visually
engage, while also engaging the more advanced students who had many questions
afterward and provoked good class discussions.
Mainly we just went for a balanced approach to this challenge, by creating some
activities that were catered towards the more advanced and others towards the beginners.
It also ended up being a good idea to let the more advanced students pair with the
beginning students so that they were there to clarify, answer questions, and to set an
example of how to perform the activities. That being said, it was also important to make
sure that the lower-level students were not simply copying or mimicking the advanced

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students. We ran into this a few times and we would separate the students during the
activities and would give the struggling student more one on one time with either
Hameed or I.
SUCCESSES AND APPLICATIONS OF L2 TEACHING METHODS
As was mentioned, this course was clearly an ESP course in that it was designed
specifically to prepare students for jobs in the cleaning industry. Thus, we tried to make
every activity skill-based and relevant to the type of work that the students would be
doing outside of class. One successful idea stemmed from the IRC requirement that
students sign-in when they attend a class. I came up with the idea to make the sign-in
sheet look like a timesheet. So instead of just signing their name on a clipboard, the
students had to find their timesheet, sign-in, and include the time that they arrived.
When we took breaks the students had to sign-out and back-in, and at the end of
the day the students had to “clock-out” and obtain a supervisor’s signature. This sort of
activity was successful in transforming a mundane task into an ESP activity. The IRC
loved this idea and it was great to see the students progress through their timesheet from
day to day as the expectations became more and more familiar to them.
Similarly, in my ENG 404 class we discussed CBI (content-based instruction).
This is an L2 teaching strategy that focuses on teaching English through specific types of
content that are relevant to the learner's goals outside of class. As we discussed this topic
I felt that it related very well to the type of teaching needed at the IRC. At the IRC we
were not teaching English in a formal, grammatical way, or even emphasizing

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communicative approaches. Rather, the English was supposed to enable the refugees to
be prepared to get and keep a job as quickly and for as long as possible.
With this focus of the class, it only made sense to use cleaning-based vocabulary,
activities, and tasks as the basis of the English learning. At the time of my lesson
preparation at the IRC I didn't know I was employing a well-known teaching method, but
in reflection I can see that in many cases I was, and I believe it was a good approach for
this type of learning/teaching.
POTENTIAL IMPROVEMENT
In my ENG 414 class we also discussed a method called Problem-Based Learning
(PBL) as an approach to L2 teaching. I didn't use this method during my time at the IRC,
but upon reflection of the lessons I put together – I think that there were ways in which
some of the activities could be modified to reflect this method. PBL focuses on providing
the class with tasks that are problem-oriented, group-based, student-centered, and that
build on the interests of the students.
At the IRC many of the activities I designed focused on a problem solving
activity, but few were group-based. I think that going back I would try to make the
activities more group-based not only because it is an effective learning method, but also
because the students, being refugees, could really benefit personally from making
connections with fellow refugees at the IRC. Although we did some role play activities,
many were individualistic in front of the class, rather than group-based.
In addition, none of the activities I proposed were very student-centered. Studentcentered learning in PBL means that the activities are predominantly carried out by the

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students as opposed to the teacher, and that the students are free to direct the activities in
their own ways. I feel that the lessons were planned in a way that I spent too much time
talking. It would have been better to construct them in a way that the students could try to
guide their own learning in a modified way. Since the classes that I constructed focused
on the shared vocational interests of the students and they all had a common end in mind
for their English purposes, I really could have been creative in the sort of PBL activities
constructed.
In the future I will try to keep PBL approaches in mind as I plan my lessons, in
hopes that students can get more out of their learning experience and have the chance to
direct their learning, with my guidance and advice, in their own ways.
FUTURE APPLICATIONS
In conclusion, I think my internship was rich in future teaching applications. I
have submitted an application to the Peace Corps and am hoping to get an assignment to
teach English in another country for 27 months. It is very likely that the skill-level of the
people I will be teaching will be quite similar to the refugees at the IRC. In my internship
I was required to start from scratch on developing these lessons and I had to work with a
limited budget and with limited resources – just as I will in the Peace Corps.
Furthermore, I may also be assigned to teach teachers in the area that I am called
to serve. The internship really brought to life the L2 methods that I studied in my ENG
404 class, as I was able to imagine how they could have/did play out in my own teaching
experience. I feel that my ENG 404 class would have felt much more abstract or
inapplicable if I had not participated in my internship first. I feel confident that in trying

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to share these methods with others I will be successful not only because of my
knowledge, but because of my ability to relate and share my own experiences in their
application or failure to do so.
In conclusion, I am grateful for the opportunity I had to volunteer and to reflect in
great detail throughout this semester. I am hopeful that the skills that I have acquired will
be useful for years to come, whether I am teaching in a formal Peace Corps environment
or tutoring children in my neighborhood.