By Hamad Rashid
Milele Zanzibar Foundation (MZF) is implementing a development of English Audio Content Project, a project that was launched at the beginning of March, 2024 in Unguja, in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and training in Zanzibar, to enable children to learn the English language fluently, also strengthen learning skills to reach the targets MZF in the Education Sector as Ali Bakar Amani the Head of programs and education program coordinator (MZF) said, “In Education general, we were looking to see the Child grow well, study and learn to reach his potential, in a fun way and be able to achieve his full success”
Dr. Maryam Jaffar Ismail, who works as a consultant and English Language specialist in the Project talks about the importance of listening and speaking English during the learning process.
“In the teaching of English there are four skills that children must acquire: reading, writing, listening, and speaking, these two things are very basic listening and speaking which many children lack and it leads to not knowing how to speak well, so what we participated in this program was it is a completely different thing because when we say listening to it means that the student should have the opportunity to listen to accents, differences in English therefore, before he starts listening to English accents himself you have to create an environment for him to be able to hear English frequently so, this was a different matter because listening was not given proper time and when you teach English you must give weight to all these four things appropriate so that the Child can learn different vocabulary, but also be able to hear different people when they speak the English Language,” said Dr. Maryam.
Dr. Maryam Jaffar Ismail also spoke about cooperation with the Government during the process of the project “But the second, our national English exams do not measure listening, we have seen that if we start listening, in the language it means you build the child’s ability to begin to understand the language well, also we have worked very closely with the Zanzibar Institute of Education who is responsible for ensuring, all content prepared by students they review it and comment on it to check if it has reached the required standards, so in this programs, we worked closely with them they listened to all ten audios, and after that, they brought their corrections and we worked on it again, the programs were recorded, so we are confident that we have made something good”
The idea of the development of the English Audio Content program, started during the COVID-19 pandemic disease, according to Eshe Haji Ramadhan the Program Manager of the Education Sector (MZF) “At that time schools were closed and children were at home but we saw that these children still needed to continue their studies, so Milele came up with the creation of content that is available online and offline for the Community and being able to use them for students, and to involve parents and teachers to work together, and to ensure that they continue to study, during and after the Corona period, so we started to create, audio content where, various topics that are aimed at ensuring that this child develops, abilities and Language skills, I mean fluency and accuracy in using the English Language” said Eshe
Eshe Haji Ramadhan added “These ten episodes of English content that have been created, are aimed at students starting from, the Upper Primary which is standard Four, up to Lower Secondary which are students of Form One and Form Two but also, this content will be used by teachers, they will use it in teaching because we have aimed to reach 200,000 students, by using different media and various social media, but these programs will be broadcast through Kwarara Media Education Centre they have Elimu FM, we also want to do training on how teachers can use this content during their teaching and in this training, we will involve community facilitators, among them are young people, and teachers in our Communities, who will work as a Bridge between the Community and teachers, to help the Community to be able to read and speak English.
Ahmad Ali Mohamed (Bello) the acting Head of the Kwarara Media Education Center, a center that is under the Ministry of Education and Training in Zanzibar, during the Studio session Tanzania Kids Time spoke to him.
“Our job is to make programs for TV and Radio, the program is to help students, teachers and society in general, currently we have worked with the Milele Zanzibar Foundation in making 10 audio programs, program that we call, “Let’s Learn English” after having all the ideas we do research on the matter or investigation of the matter for example in study tours we read what is the meaning of Study tour, its benefits and how we will succeed after that we write a script like this one here this script is what is used in recording, some experts review it then we go to the Studio, with students to record their voices, we have seen these programs that the children already understand, and it becomes easier to learn through audio because now the world is where it is, people use social media so, they use the Radio and Phones in learning” said Bello
EXPERIENCE FROM THE STUDENT WHO PARTICIPATED IN THE PROJECT.
Mahya Mziwanda Ngwali one of the children who participated in preparing the Let Learn English programs said, for my part, the experience I gained firstly, has increased my confidence in the past I was unable to stand in front of an audience to present something in English, but now I can since I started doing this programs, the second I noticed is that there are a lot of English terms I didn’t know before but now I know for example Cinnamon, I only knew in Kiswahili that it is Mdalasini but I did not know in English if it is called Cinnamon, I advise my fellow children to continue listening to let’s learn English programs, because those English programs help us develop our knowledge of Education also, they help us understand the English Language.
