Bong-Rae English Experience Center

A couple of weeks ago, I was given a camera, and was set the task of taking pictures of the Bong-Rae English Experience Center (which is where I work) for our brochure. BREEC, as we call it, is still very new-- just opened up December 2008-- and our hope is that in the future other elementary schools in the Yeongwol area will send their students to our facility for a one or two day intensive.

So I thought, who knows, maybe some of you out there are interested to see where an English teacher in Korea is working. Maybe even some of you would get a kick out of seeing where I work. So I decided to post a few of the pictures for you!

First, the outside of the building (inside which, in fact, I am at this very moment):






Come up the stairs:



To our front door!




Inside, we've got a lot of goodies for visiting students (and for the students at Bong-Rae elementary, for that matter). First there's the library:






Then we've got tons of stations where students can, in essence, play make-believe in English. We give them dialogues, and they pretend to be doing many different everyday things, in semi-realistic surroundings. This could be, for instance, a hospital:




Or maybe airport security:




A produce store:




Or a hotel:




There are plenty of other stations, as well. We hand out realistic-looking passports (for the Republic of BREEC) to each class who comes through, which come complete with suggested dialogue. Once a student completes the dialogue (or, for younger grades, a simplified version) in the mock-up, we give them a stamp on that page of their passport.


Next is the Multimedia Room, where students can be on big-screen TV, and actually, by waving their hands around in the air, interact with the things on the screen!

I can't figure out how to convert the format of those pictures (which I didn't take, as they involve students actually interacting with the system). If there is any interest whatsoever expressed, I'll try harder to post some of these. :)


And there you have it: the workplace of a foreign English teacher at a small English Experience Center in rural Korea. I'm in Gangwon-do, the least developed province of South Korea... imagine how snazzy these places must be in other areas!