W&J teaches English to foreign students
How do you translate the phrase “dog-eat-dog world” into Arabic? Hamid Al-Ahmari said that just doesn’t work. Instead, he just figured out what it means.
“I learned how to use it,” Al-Ahmari said.
The idiom is among the vocabulary and other aspects of English that Al-Ahmari, 21, has learned since he started studying at the English Language Institute at Washington & Jefferson College – an intensive program of study founded two years ago that helps international students prepare to study at American colleges and universities.
“It really is an effort by the college to internationalize,” said Dana Poole, the director of the institute.
Al-Ahmari, 21, who hails from Abha, Saudi Arabia, and classmate Yijiao Zhang, from southern China, also 21, toured the Observer-Reporter’s offices in Washington on Wednesday.
Field trips such as Wednesday’s – during which the students met with publisher Tom Northrop and retired executive editor Park Burroughs – are a regular occurrence for students in the program.
Instructor Mark Petrovich said students in the program have visited other sites in the area, volunteered for local nonprofit groups and heard lectures from academics outside the language institute.
“It’s just kind of a way for them to interact with their English in a more realistic way,” said Petrovich, who teaches listening and speaking and works with Poole on curriculum.
Last fall, Petrovich visited the Washington County Courthouse with Al-Ahmari and another student to sit in on a hearing. The students, both from the Middle East, worried that they were being profiled when they had to pass through a metal detector and let sheriff’s deputies scan their bags.
“They were nervous,” Petrovich said. “I said, ‘No, that’s what they do for everyone.'”
Along with speaking and listening, students also take classes in reading and writing; vocabulary and grammar; and American culture.
Zhang said days in the classroom consist of two 3 1/2-hour blocks of instruction – mentally taxing sessions that are draining but allow students to learn quickly.
“You really work in the morning because, by the end of the afternoon, you’re tired,” she said.