York’s Turkish community celebrate with their student buddies

Student volunteers and members of York’s Turkish community were presented with certificates during a celebration event at York St John University last week.

The group have been working together as part of the University’s English language programme for Turkish women, which gives current and former student volunteers an opportunity to practice teaching English, while helping members of York’s Turkish community improve their English.

The English language programme was first developed and introduced by Indu Meddegama in 2012 and has helped over 15 Turkish women and men improve their English language skills. The programme lasted fourteen weeks and involved Indu Meddegama, tutor in English language for the project and PhD researcher at York St John, offering two hour English language classes to the Turkish participants every week. During class hours, the student volunteers assisted the Turkish women in completing the tasks and activities that had been assigned to them by Indu. 

Elaine Lawson, former graduate in M.A. Applied Linguistics: TESOL, was one of the language buddies. She said: “Being part of the programme has been great, just meeting and getting to know the Turkish students has been very enjoyable. Furthermore, finding out about the everyday language related challenges they face and figuring out ways to help them has also been really interesting.

“I intend to continue volunteering as a language buddy and teacher because I can see how valuable it is to be able to communicate with the people you come into contact with daily, especially for those who have very little access to language learning resources themselves. It is projects like these which can really make a difference.”

As part of the programme the group were asked to prepare presentations to give at the celebration event. The students all had an opportunity to demonstrate their improved language skills by introducing themselves and their families in English, with some participants discussing some of the cultural differences between Turkey and the UK including fashion, food and the weather.