Georgetown University: School of Foreign Service in Qatar

The Hoya English Language Program (HELP) represents a joint and collaborative take on community service which requires mutual cooperation from both providers and benefactors. The earliest club to establish at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar (SFS-Qatar), HELP is a unique initiative that gives SFS-Qatar students the opportunity to teach, and, at the same time, provides many of the University’s support staff the chance to learn basic English language skills.

Founded in Fall 2006 by students Lina Abdul-Jawad (SFS ’09) and Assma Al-Adawi (SFS ’09), the club aims to promote and encourage student leadership, while also allowing the students to reach out to the greater University community. Specifically, the purpose of HELP is three-fold: to teach the support staff basic English in order to advance their respective careers, to implant a sense of community within SFS-Qatar and Education City, and to empower and develop the SFS-Qatar students’ leadership skills and self-confidence.

To a certain extent, the mechanics of the program are comparable to that of a typical educational environment. For example, the ratio of one or two teachers to roughly 12 students per class, and the use of the newly implemented international English Language Services (ELS) curriculum, make the HELP initiative a familiar “class-based” program.

However, several characteristics of the club earn it a fresh and innovative distinction. The instructors in class are SFS-Qatar undergraduate students with either limited or no teaching experience, while the students range from security guards to café workers to janitorial and maintenance staff - altogether comprising an all-male student body where most of the adult learners are nearly twice the age of their instructors.  

While certain indicators pointed toward a successful program, such as strong attendance and positive feedback from all those involved, the club’s lack of standardized curriculum, coupled with the instructors’ lack of experience in teaching English as a foreign langage, initially led to mixed results.  In order to remedy the situation and better equip the instructors to fulfill the club’s goals, the past semester has concentrated on training and educating the instructors.

As part of the training program, the one-and-a-half hour class was divided into two sections. In the first half, ELS-certified teachers trained the Georgetown students and provided them with key teaching techniques, while also promoting cultural awareness between the instructors and the mostly south Asian support staff. In the following half, the instructors proceeded to tutor the support staff under the supervision of the ELS-certified teachers, before separating them into smaller and more individual-focused groups to work on various activities.

“Implementing HELP has been empowering for the SFS-Qatar students; a truly defining piece of their Georgetown education,” explained Student Affairs Officer, Patrick O’Neill. While the club has not focused on introducing conventional performance measures, homework is consistently set every week and the introduction of informal assessments are viewed as a “future possibility.”