From English Learners to English Teachers

A Penn GSE initiative provides an opportunity for TESOL students to practice their teaching with language learners across the University and around the world.

hen Chih-Hung “Gordon” Cheng moved to Philadelphia in 2022 so his wife could pursue her graduate studies in organizational dynamics at Penn, he had been learning English for years—in Taiwan, where he grew up, instruction started in seventh grade. But the Mandarin speaker still found himself nervous using his English among native speakers.

“When I first came here, I was truly afraid to step out. I was afraid to pick up the phone, to talk to people in person,” said Cheng. “I would doubt myself when people would ask me, ‘Can you say that again?’ or ‘What did you say?’ It made me think my English was awful.”

But a class he’s been taking since January has given him newfound confidence in his proficiency. That course is part of the Practical English for Daily Living (PEDAL) program at Penn GSE, which offers free English classes to adult language learners of all levels taught by students in GSE’s Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) master’s program.

“PEDAL was started with two missions,” said Hannah Brenneman, GED’15, who is not only the current PEDAL program coordinator but was also one of the early TESOL students who taught in the program. “One is to help current GSE students practice real-world teaching with real learners. But … also to offer dependents of Penn community members a place to find a community of friends while they are in the US and to practice their English.”

This year, 14 Penn GSE students have acted as teachers for PEDAL students from 55 countries and territories around the world who speak 28 different first languages.

“PEDAL is also a lab, it’s not just [a fieldwork] site,” said Iryna Kozlova, a lecturer of educational practice and the PEDAL faculty advisor. “We teach life, because we teach English as it is used in real-life settings—how to make a doctor’s appointment, how to do grocery shopping, how to make polite requests. I emphasize this when working with our graduate students that they are responsible for helping [English language] learners to adjust to living in a new country and using new language in everyday life.”

Because the majority of the master’s candidates in the TESOL program learned English as a second (or third or fourth) language, they have deep empathy for the learners they are now leading in their PEDAL classrooms. They understand how people learn English and what some of the setbacks can be.

“I’ve been learning English for my whole life, so I know what’s going to be easy for [my students] and what is going to be a common error that I would make,” said Hailey Cho, a TESOL master’s candidate from Korea who has been co-teaching the most advanced “level four” PEDAL class this spring.

Of course, the classes aren’t just sites of learning for the students, but for the student-teachers as well.

“We have a lot of freedom in the class, because there is no designated curriculum or tests that we have to do in the class,” said Cho. “We can just focus on our students’ needs and our community’s needs.”

So, what does class look like? The student-teachers lead discussions of almost anything related to life in America, depending on their students’ interests and language mastery. Because Cho and her co-teacher, fellow MSEd candidate Qianyu Di, teach the most proficient English speakers, they have spent their class discussions this semester exploring complicated topics, such as income inequality in the US. Classes for newer language learners can focus on skills such as shopping at the supermarket or navigating public transit and the accompanying vocabulary they might need.

It’s real English, real contexts, real life, not focusing on perfect grammar, but communicative competence.

– Hannah Brenneman, GED’15

“We are preparing them to live in the United States, not just to learn a language,” said Di, who is, herself, a native Mandarin speaker.

For these student-teachers, the PEDAL classes give them the opportunity to think about creative ways people learn languages. Kozlova said that in their home countries many of them were taught English through memorization and repetition, but that isn’t the best way to create engaged English speakers. So when they run classes of their own, those student teachers put into practice a more discussion-based framework where the purpose is competency, not perfection.

“Our goal for PEDAL teachers is that they’re able to analyze and develop the critical-thinking skills about the decisions that they’re making in their teaching,” said Brenneman. “They haven’t been asked to do that before—until they get here, they had not thought about why their classrooms were set up the way they were.”

“Our students are truly amazing,” said Cho. “They are so ready to learn, even though they’re already very successful English learners. They are already professionally achieved individuals, and we are just pre-service teachers. But they are so respectful, always telling us, ‘You guys are the best teachers,’ and that really makes me happy.”

For Cheng, who has taken other English classes—at the library, via Penn’s Family Center—while his wife pursues her master’s, the PEDAL program has offered not just a chance to improve his language skills, but a regular, ongoing social opportunity and a way to build community while he’s living far from home.

“I’m so glad that everyone is so committed and that we attend class regularly,” he said. “We can easily treat each other as a friend.”

That sense of community extends to the student teachers as well.

“Working at PEDAL has given me a sense of connectedness with the whole University of Pennsylvania,” said Di, whose students have family connections across Penn. “We are teaching at GSE. That gives me a sense of pride.”