Course Details:
Classes run from January to August every year, with an April break for Water Festival. The Bridging experience culminates in students sitting for the Cambridge English exam upon completion of coursework.
General Classes
We mainly focus of developing English 4 language skills. Students are required to take the placement test and according to their results they are assigned to be in different level classes.
| Bridging Classes |
Cambridge English |
Comparison With CEFR |
Comparison With IELTS |
| Beginners |
Movers |
A1 |
2 |
| Elementary |
KEY English Test(KET) |
A2 |
3 |
| Pre-intermediate |
Preliminary English Test(PET) |
B1 |
4-5 |
It helps chronological progression of the students from the beginners level to pre-intermediate level of English. The fundamental English skills are trained through the coursework on performing the 4 language skills. Students will learn to understand basic English on practical language skills for everyday use and develop foundational paragraph writing. Presentation and group activities are conducted on developing the confidence in oral communication. Students learn grammatical forms, structure and their functions which are unconsciously used in daily practice. Based on the grammatical uses students learn to use in the certain context of speaking focusing on the development of accuracy in both the forms and uses. Students are encouraged on knowing more vocabulary through the vocabulary extension activities like brainstorming and categorizing. Through individual and group activities students improve on their productive skills like pronunciation, conversation, delivering presentation, sentence writing , paragraph writing. The text are designed to do intensive reading with certain amount of words with different reading skills like skimming, scanning, predicting and comprehension. To develop their fluency in reading, students are assigned to do extensive reading to build up their confidence in reading. Sentence completion, gap-filling, sentence transformation exercises helps the students to understand how to create their own writing and proofread their work with the writing process.
History
Founded in 2010, Bridging is based at Phaung Daw Oo (PDO) Monastic School in Mandalay, Myanmar. Since our inception, Bridging has adapted the curriculum to include social sciences, critical thinking, and Cambridge English: Proficiency objectives in response to student feedback and partner organization recommendations. Throughout these changes, Bridging has remained committed to growing curiosity, self-confidence, courage, and compassion among students and staff. Bridging has been generously supported by World Child Care (WCC) from the Netherlands since 2015.
Vission
Bridging is a free educational program for Myanmar youth that focuses on developing English language proficiency, social science knowledge, and critical thinking tools. Through developing these skills, Bridging encourages students to engage with and impact their local communities while establishing frameworks for future success.
Self-Awareness Training
Besides the English Proficiency training, the program integrated the Self-awareness Education to help young people rediscover their fundamentally interdependent nature while developing the skills essential to bring about genuine change. Our vision is that positive and lasting social change must be grounded in a transformation of the way each individual views her or his connection to our world and all its inhabitants. Through a 15 day program, where youth live and work together, we will do many types of challenging activities. These include trust building, identifying strengths and weakness, and personal growth exploration through yoga, meditation and challenging activities. According to Myanmar's education system, youth are not trained enough in personal capacity building. Consequently, nowadays, the majority of young people are facing a lot of difficulties in their future goal settings, team building, and decision making. An experienced trainer will help address this lack of social skill to build self confidence in the youth to better equip them to face future challenges in their lives.
