Volunteer project:

English as a Second Language (ESL) Course Development

 

PEOI wants to develop language training courses in several languages, English is one of the major languages and its development is perceived as a priority. The goal of the language training program is to help individuals gain employment as a professional in English speaking firms. The language training program complements the professional courses PEOI also offers. Language training courses are to be offered free of charge.

The proposed curriculum will include five courses of increasing difficulty
- essentials level: to acquire verbal skills to deal with bare necessities of daily life;
- introductory level: to interact in verbal and written form with short text and fundamental grammar;
- intermediate level: to become functional in a work or studies environment with skills to write a letter;
- professional level: to be fully operational in any business environment with ability to write full length reports;
- proficiency level: to be immersed in culture (formal and informal) of the country and make full use of language.
Completion of each level is verified with a set of PEOI tests. (The language training may allow a student to prepare for some of the popular language proficiency tests such as TOFEL or SELT, but is not specifically aimed at any such test.) In addition to the text of each module of a course, a large data base of exercises and questions needs to be written.

Volunteers are needed for the following tasks:
- course authors who should be organized in subteams for each of the five courses with a desirable three volunteers for each course;
- illustrators who will draw the pictures that are used in each module based on the scenario devised by course authors;
- audio specialists who will create the audio files for all the word or sentences that students must learn to verbalize;
- course instructors who can assist online students by correcting their written assignments and answer questions;
- one technical assistant who can provide team members with knowledge on how to integrate pictures, sound and voice recognition into course material;
- one coordinator who will interact with course authors, provide guidance and keep track of progress.


Writing test questions in ESL01EN

PEOI's ESL level 1 course ESL01EN writing of its course pages was completed in 2019 after fifteen years of work by hundreds of volunteer authors, illustrators, audio specialists, reviewers, javascript specialists and coordinators. About 4,000 test questions were created for word recogition based on images and audio present in the course. While useful, these existing questions can't test a students knowledge of the English language other than at the very low level. Now new questions need to be written based on the course teaching of spelling, grammar, sentence structure and many other aspects of the English language.

These new questions must be written using PEOI's "Edit questions" procedure so that they can be used in PEOI's automated tests. Please read these explanations.

All the work can be performed at home on one's own computer. Additional explanations of the course file structure and the work to be performed can be found in "Authors" section. The Edit text and Edit questions are the major procedure which will be used by authors to create the module text and questions data banks.

The ESL language courses can be found in courses under construction in the "Courses" section.

Volunteers should join in forum or group discussions on issues of common interest, however, registration is necessary to participate in a forum. Volunteer course authors should register as authors in the Authors section, and make sure to join the ESL training course development team. Other volunteers are invited to register as volunteer staff members. For more details, please write a short message indicating the volunteer opportunity interests you, attach a recent resume, and email to John Petroff, PEOI executive director, whose email address is shown in contact information.

To see the members of the ESL team, use the Authors list in "Authors" section. Note that you must be registered and logged in to make full use of the procedure, for instance, to view the work completed in ESL courses and what remains to be done.

To ask questions, and to offer your comments, criticism or suggestion, please find the relevant person and email address in contact information.