ESL for Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada

By Albert Janzen

We seldom hear of churches that teach ESL to Temporary Foreign Workers (“TFWs”), and it probably stays below the ministry radar of most churches much as the workers themselves are well below the radar of Canadian multicultural diversity. After all, they are only here temporarily, why should they need good English? There are isolated ministries that teach ESL, but it is not anything widespread, else we would know. My own experience is very limited with teaching a conversational English class after a Saturday evening church Friendship event with a meal, devotional and an ESL class at the same time as indoor soccer, an unfair pairing of events to attract students. Most workers voted with their feet to enjoy their favorite sport.

I did this for about 7 years before Covid, once every two or three weeks on Saturday nights, not an optimum schedule to maintain momentum for attendance or to teach through a series of lessons under a unified theme when only very few of the same workers would return for subsequent classes. Therefore, I did my best with a conversation class approach to my lessons on seasonal topics like holidays or general life related topics about shopping, safety at work, useful words of greeting or courtesy, etc., the most basic phrase book language to help them get by from day to day. I often gave them lesson sheets as a resource and sold many Ingles para Latinos texts (at my cost) for them to study on their own time.

And that is exactly what these TFWs need, simple survival English to help them navigate life on the job and when they come to town. I know that many of them feel intimidated to go anywhere else than the usual stores, the bank or a restaurant, enough of a challenge just to do that. Forget about any fancy academic curriculum and teach them English as it would be found in a phrase book for a Latino visitor coming to Canada, which is what they are. Just the basics, good enough, and make it fun for them to learn and you will also learn Spanish, a great benefit to you the next time you go to Mexico.

I always enjoyed my informal classes with lots of smiles and informal banter in both English and Spanish and the end of the class came far too soon. Would I see them again? If I did, there was always a friendly greeting from a worker I had not seen in a long while and may have forgotten their name, although they had not forgotten mine. Friendship, that is the most important key to unlocking their interest to learn the English. I am rarely asked to teach English, but when the door of friendship has been lubricated and opened, we will often find them willing to cross the threshold to an ESL teaching venue wherever that can be done.

There could easily be much more ESL being taught to these workers if some of the main bottlenecks were eliminated, and interest of the workers is not one of these. Firstly, there needs to be a place to teach them, which could be in their residence, an imperfect classroom, but it could be made to work, if the employer and the workers would agree to let that happen. Otherwise, ESL classes could be in churches if more churches were disposed to allow for that.

That would create a need for transportation of the workers to these classes because they do not have cars like most of us do. The employer would need to allow use of the company van for transportation, or the church could arrange for that. Otherwise, the workers could arrive on their bikes, which is an unlikely scenario even in the warmest months of the year, and certainly not in winter. Although most workers are reluctant to go out in the evening, a class in a church would still be better than in their house.

The last ESL bottleneck is the need for teachers. Very few people I have spoken to have interest in teaching ESL even though I have spoken of the blessings I have received from good friendships with these TFWs. Nevertheless, I believe this bottleneck could easily disappear if more churches would embrace the vision of ministry to these temporary neighbors, some of whom are fellow believers. I am confident that many of our churches have gifted volunteers just waiting to be asked.

Lastly, the question about how to initiate ESL classes is not that simple. It is imperative to first contact the workers’ employer to respect his position of responsibility for the welfare of these workers and seek his cooperation. In my limited experience, employers are not often in favor of that because learning English might give some workers the idea to look for alternate employment and break their contract. However, the employer may still be interested in having a select number of workers to learn English if these have a supervisory role in their workplace.

On the other hand, a church representative could speak to a worker and offer ESL classes and ask that this worker inform the employer so that all of this is being done with due respect to the position of the employer. In my own case as a volunteer in an existing church ministry outreach to Latino workers, these steps have already been taken by a Mexican pastor on staff of the church.

Meanwhile most of the TFWs make do with whatever English they happen to pick up on the job or in town and it never surprises me to meet one of them who has worked in Canada for many seasons and still only manages with a few English phrases. Whether we see them or not, this invisible migrant minority are still our neighbors and deserve a welcome place in our pews and in our ministry priorities.