By Tvisha Jani, Staff Reporters
The new Lingua Link club at Conestoga provides students the opportunity to tutor a Ukrainian student in the English language. Members participate in weekly sessions ranging from reading an article about travel to discussing food and music preferences. Through Lingua Link, Conestoga students are able to create a bridge of learning and friendship thousands of miles long.
“A big inspiration is that I feel people don’t really talk about the war between Ukraine and Russia as much in the news,” junior and Lingua Link vice president Angela Wang said. “It’s still happening right now in Ukraine, and it’s been a few years and the situation has worsened.”
Junior and president Jessica Joseph created the club in December. Close to the beginning of the war in Ukraine in 2022, Joseph started volunteering to teach English to Ukrainian students through an organization she saw on Instagram called ENGin.
“I started around freshman year.” Joseph said. “Now as a junior, I thought I should let all these other Conestoga school kids also have that opportunity.”
Lingua Link is a chapter of ENGin, an international nonprofit that has connected 48,000 U.S. volunteers to Ukrainian students for English-speaking practice. The club hopes to help with ENGin’s volunteer shortage following an increase in the number of Ukranian students participating in the program.
“Lingua Link is simply a club that helps connect you to ENGin,” Joseph said. “Essentially we’re just helping (Ukrainian students) develop their English skills by communicating, practicing informal language and also building their vocabulary and grammar, and that’s through a very flexible schedule.”
Club members independently attend weekly Zoom sessions with one or a small group of Ukrainian students. In these sessions, volunteers teach skills the student is having difficulty with or wishes to improve on with lesson plans customized by the volunteer or created by ENGin.
“English is a really big part of our culture around the world. A lot of these kids want to move to the U.S. or English-speaking countries,” freshman and club member Anna Lee Anderson said. “Learning English is important because you can read books and be on the internet and TV shows and also for general communication.”
Through the sessions, the students can connect and share their experiences. Volunteers and students build bonds that extend farther than the lessons, creating strong friendships.
“We have great conversations, and it’s nice to see how we can have lasting friendships. I still connect with my first student through Telegram, and we still talk about daily habits or anything that we have in school and that’s really nice,” Joseph said. “My favorite part about Lingua Link is being able to share that experience with all the students in Conestoga.”
In the future, Joseph and Wang envision planning fundraisers to support ENGin. The club is continuing to expand so they can reach as many Ukrainian students as possible and help reduce the language barrier that holds many back from new opportunities.
“They (Ukrainian students) will be able to communicate with the English audience on the internet about what is happening right now in Ukraine because the spotlight has been removed from this war,” Wang said. “They’ll be able to divert attention back to it.”
Tvisha Jani can be reached at [email protected].
