RICHMOND — For nearly 15 years the Virginia Baptist Mission Board has encouraged volunteers to participate in a summer English program in China and an overview of this year’s plans will be provided at an information session Feb. 15 at 7 p.m. in the Virginia Baptist Resource Center.
At a 2011 celebration of the summer English program, Lynn Yarbrough (second from left) pointed out previous SEP sites with former teachers (from left) Kim Rose of Richmond, Lynn Lanzillotti of Richmond and Penny Jenkins of Goochland. |
Lynn Yarbrough, who for two decades has represented the Mission Board in China, will discuss opportunities to serve in that country through the Amity Foundation, a Chinese Christian voluntary organization created in 1985 to promote education, social services, health and rural development there.
Since 1999, the Mission Board has sent more than 70 volunteers to participate in Amity’s summer English program, which aims to improve the English proficiency of Chinese teachers. Many others have engaged in additional Amity projects scattered from the country’s urban east cost to its rural interior.
Yarbrough has coordinated the Mission Board’s effort as its Kingdom Advance Ambassador. She lived in China from 1992 until last year, teaching in Nanjing for much of the time. Now based in the United States, she continues to lead the project with frequent trips to country.
Volunteers don’t need to be trained to teach English. Their students will be adult English teachers in China’s public schools who want to improve their fluency in conversational settings.
“Every Chinese child must learn English beginning in the third grade,” Yarbrough said recently. “And now the government is stressing skills not only as a written language but as a spoken one. Chinese teachers who are English instructors have studied the language but don’t have many opportunities to speak it and keep it up. You can’t teach a language without speaking it.”
To better equip teachers, the Amity Foundation developed the summer English program and staffed it with native English speakers.
“The philosophy is that if teachers speak it well, the students will learn it better,” said Yarbrough. “So our teams don’t actually teach English — they provide conversational opportunities.”
This year’s dates are July 6-Aug. 4, with an April 1 deadline for submitting an application. Details about costs and other criteria will be discussed at the Feb. 15 meeting.
For additional information, contact Nichole Prillaman in the Mission Board’s glocal missions team at nichole.prillaman@vbmb.org or 804.915.5000.
Robert Dilday (rdilday@religiousherald.org) is managing editor of the Religious Herald.