By Adama Kone, Teacher Project Manager

Students in Mali face many challenges, but maybe the largest is that classes are taught in a language – French – which is not their mother tongue. If a student doesn’t quickly learn French, they fall behind in all of their classes, from history to math.

That’s why Mali Rising runs the French Language Intervention Project, aka FLIP. FLIP helps 7th graders improve their French skills in speaking and writing, as well as their vocabulary and comprehension. This helps students understand their teachers in the classroom, as well as making it possible for them to read their texbooks or ask questions during class.

We piloted FLIP last school year, and this year expanded the successful project to six of our partner schools. The project enabled about 240 students in 7th grade to attend extracurricular French classes with their French teachers. These courses are made up of 8 lessons that fully engage the students during the class sessions, through well-developed exercises designed to help students with core language skills and classrom vocabulary.

Students are evaluated to measure their level of improvement in the French language….stayed tuned for the results next month ! At the final class, we also hand out course completion certificates to each student who attended at least 7 of the sessions.

We recently completed these courses in one of our partner schools, Sue Taylor Middle School. At Sue Taylor Middle School the students were very happy to take part in the extra French courses as they  told me their French teacher was very helpful during this time. The students each received their certificate of participation last week. The presentation of these certificates was a great excitement for students and their French teacher, Mr Taliby Mallé.

Mr. Mallé, was very pleased to hand out these certificates to his students; which was an honor for him. Mr. Mallé said, “The students will keep these certificates as great souvenirs and their parents will also be honored to see their kids have completed these extra courses and brought home certificates from Mali Rising Foundation.”

Mr. Mallé was also excited to teach these extra courses because they were opportunities for him to learn different ways to teach French through the curriculum developed by Mali Rising Foundation. Mr. Mallé told me, “I believe my students participated well and learned a lot of new words and phrases during the lessons. My students improved quite a bit on making sentences, writing words, and even reading texts.”

Here at Mali Rising, we are just as excited about FLIP as our teachers are. We see this project as giving students a leg up in the classroom. It also provides a way to encourage our teachers to use more active learning technigues in the classroom by providing them with a well-designed curriculum. We can’t wait to share this year’s resuls with you !