COVENANT LIFE

Welcome to Conversational ESL at Covenant Life Church.

Mission

We began our program out of our desire to honor God's command to treat the stranger among us as a native and to love them as we love ourselves (Leviticus 19:33-34). Our purpose is to demonstrate the love of Christ by teaching English and American culture and befriending internationals living in Montgomery County, MD. We would highly encourage a church to consider whether this is their motive prior to starting a church run program. We believe that while we desire to offer excellence in English, the Gospel must always be what drives our mission, not the need. We follow NAFSA guidelines in regards to proselytizing in the classroom, but believe it is our joy and privilege to communicate the good news to the students through our example and lives. The love of Christ and sacrificial serving are compelling demonstrations of Christ to a lost world. We are not ashamed of what we believe and Jesus Christ. We actually find that most of our students ask about our church and God on their own, even inviting themselves to church. We also believe that no truly American "cultural" experience would be complete unless an international experiences our rich religious heritage, especially the Protestant Christian church life of America. There are few places in the world where you can experience anything like it.

Location

One of the main reasons we started this program was because of the great demand in our area for English conversation classes. (If there is not a great need, I would encourage your church to consider other ways to serve the community.) The Washington DC metro area ranks fourth in the US for largest number of internationals and speakers of English as a second language. Gaithersburg, Maryland is located 20 minutes north of Washington DC in Montgomery County. Montgomery County has over 900,000 inhabitants, a third of which are first generation Americans who speak English as a Second Language. The state and the county can not provide enough classes to support this growing population. These were two large considerations before beginning our program.

History

We highly recommend much research and prayer before starting a program. After 2 years of evaluating (10) ESL programs across the US (5 church based/3 private/2 public), much planning and research (we thank God for the FOCUS program @ Park Street Church in Boston- specifically Karen Patschke for their assistance), we began our program in 2002.

Our first class had 6 students with varying degrees of English proficiency from 4 nations. We spent the next two years evaluating whether we could achieve our mission with excellence and the needs of our students. Most of our students indicated to us that they needed practical help with understanding American Culture. The majority of our students had taken English classes for many years in their home countries, but had a difficult time speaking the language. We decided that we would create a year long program, with three semesters (Fall, Winter, Spring). Our students would stay in the same level for the entire year, with the same teacher and student relationships. It has taken much time and work to get to this point. Please be patient.

Our Schedule

We started off providing 3 semesters of classes per year (Fall/Winter/Spring.) We did this out of a desire to provide almost 10 months straight of classes, so that we could continue our relationships with the students. It made it difficult to have the students changing teachers and classes each semester. We highly recommend trying to keep them together with the same teachers as long as possible.

We have recently changed to 2 semesters per year for several reasons, including: volunteer recruitment is easier when the commitment is only 2 semesters/year; in order to provide food and childcare to our students, we need to work with another Outreach program we have running on Wednesday's which also switched to Wednesday nights. We believed that providing food and childcare was more important than 3 semesters without it.

Our Wednesday Program meets for 11 weeks (Fall: September to December and Spring: March to June). We have dinner and social time from 7-7:30pm. Classroom instruction and activites run from 7:30-9:30pm. Our Friday Program offers the same number of classes and meets from 9:15-9:30am for breakfast and 9:30-11:30am for classroom instruction and activities.

Our Students

Our night classes have since grown to 10 classes with 8 levels (beginner to advanced) and over 100 students from 20 nations. Our day classes are a bit smaller due space limitations during the day, as Covenant Life School meets in our facilitity during the day. We have two day classes which meet on Fridays for advanced students only. These students are mostly housewives from Korea and Japan. Most of their husbands work at the NIH or NIST (research institutues in the DC metro area) and are here for 2-3 year fellowships. Many of them have a difficult time meeting other moms, so this is a great place for them to develop friendships and learn the English language.

Our Curriculum

We could not find many programs which focused on conversation, American Culture and relationships. We were also looking for a curriculum which matched their needs with our desire to educate them about American customs and culture.

We are currently using Converation Books 1 and 2 for our Beginner and Intermediate levels. We have created a curriculum which combines a year of student needs assessment and our thoughts on what they are missing out on based on our student population. Not every curriculum works for every program. Study your students and ask them what they want, this is often overlooked. Here is a summary of our Fall and Spring Themed Based Schedule. We have lesson plans pre-written for all levels and provide a cd and notebook for all of our teachers for all lesson plans at the beginning of the semester. We have attempted to minimize lesson prep for our busy volunteers. For more information in regards to our lessons and curriculum, please contact us.

Fall Class Themes:

Registration and Testing, 9.20

Making Friends in the US, 9.27

Community in the US, 10.4

Transportation in the US, 10.11

Marriage-Relationships in the US, 10.18

Weather and Time in the US, 10.25

Voting-Citizenship in the US, 11.1

Food in the US, 11.8

Thanksgiving in the US, 11.15

Home/Home Repair in the US, 11.29

Christmas in the US, 12.6

Event Schedule:

Harvest Party

Thanksgiving International Dinner

Christmas Party

Spring Class Themes:

Registration and Testing - April 12

ACTS Musical @ Covenant Life School - April 19

No Class – April 26

Making Friends in the US - May 3

Education in the US - May 10

News/Media in the US - May 17

Hero's in the US - May 24

Leisure/Everyday Activity - May 31

Family in the US - June 7

Sports in the US - June 14

Baseball in the US - June 21

Religion in the US - June 28

Graduation - July 5

Covenant Life Summer Camp - July 10-14

(Ages: 6-12)

Event Schedule:

Easter Egg Hunt

Father’s Day Party

Graduation

Our Volunteers

Volunteers are a gift from God and we have to always thank Him and remind him of this gift. They do not have to be serving you and these students. We constantly remind ourselves and the team that it is only God's grace through the Gospel that they would want to give up their time to not serve themselves. Every time they come out to serve the students, they are demonstrating the the Gospel is alive and at work in their lives, no longer living for themselves but to love these students.

Training is vital when you work with volunteers. We provide training prior to each semester of class (or now 2 times per year). We require every team member to participate, even if they have been serving with us for many years because we believe we are called by God to do everything we do unto Him and for His glory. This means that we are not called to be perfect but to be as excellent as possible. We try to ensure that if our volunteer teachers do not have a teaching background, that we provide them as much mentoring and training as possible. We ask that everyone who wants to teach, regardless of background, assist a current-experienced teacher prior to teaching. Obviously, there are times when we really need a teacher in a class and need to make acceptions. We love to have our new teachers co-teach with an experienced teacher first. This is a wonderful way to build their faith for this role.

We also found that by having co-teachers, you give your volunteers much flexibility in the classroom. Minimally, we have a teaching assitant with every teacher to provide support and a context for relationships with the students.

We are constantly recruiting and looking for new members to join the team. We are actively recruiting through our church and members of the team.

We currently have 20 volunteers serving in the classroom (2 per class) and around 10 serving in other capacities: admin/coordination/greeting/food/activities.

Our Training

See 'Our Volunteers' for thoughts on training and the attached files on site for some sample training sessions for our teams.