In 2022 Gina decided to move from Colombia to Canada, and Edmonton was the chosen destination for her and her husband. While her husband was a PhD student, Gina decided to achieve her goal of becoming bilingual, and that is how she discovered CCI-LEX.
As an Advanced level student, it was her CCI-LEX teacher Sandra who encouraged her to apply for a volunteer opportunity to teach at CCI-LEX. Back in Colombia Gina used to teach people about her work, but teaching a language as a non-native posed a new challenge.
In her first class teaching English to other newcomers she felt nervous, she did not want to make any mistakes, and she also thought about her accent. “I have an accent, and my accent is not from a native speaker”, she explains. However Gina found this was also a great place to connect with students, accepting their accents and encouraging them to keep focused on learning English, and this is one of the things she wants her students to remember about her.
Gina has been a volunteer teacher in the LEX Program since Summer 2023, and what keeps her coming back to CCI-LEX is that she found her second home in Canada, “I feel so grateful for this opportunity”.
Going into the classroom Gina knows that no matter how her workday was, sharing and interacting with the students elevates her mood. “The most important thing is not teaching, the most important thing is how you connect with the students”, Gina says considering what kind of advice she would give to future volunteers.
“When I speak Spanish, I’m so talkative, I really like to ask things to people and make conversation”, she laughs. That is why she always takes a couple of minutes to prepare specific questions for her students based on the class content, so the students can feel they can connect and share with the class.
The most rewarding thing for her is to observe how the students’ skills improve. “I have been with them since Low Beginner to High Beginner, and I have seen how they evolve […] Now I tell them ‘Hey, now you must speak, you must read’ and they do the best that they can do, just to see how much they improve, I think it’s amazing”.