The 24 adults seated in the class, from at least a dozen countries, are each connected to someone at Penn. They are here to learn to speak English, free of charge.

The teacher is a student herself, in the second year of the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) master’s program in Penn’s Graduate School of Education (GSE). Assisting her are four first-year Penn GSE students, all volunteers.

Named Practical English for Daily Living, or PEDAL, the program is designed to give TESOL students experience teaching in the classroom, while also contributing to the Penn community and beyond.

“It’s a dual mission,” says Hannah Brenneman, PEDAL program coordinator, “to help teach English to English language learners, and also to help train our novice teachers.”

The PEDAL@GSE program offers weekly classes for people 18 years of age and older who have an affiliation with someone at Penn, including faculty, staff, students, and visiting scholars. Often, class participants are spouses, but there are also siblings, children, and au pairs.

A Community PEDAL@GSE program offers classes to West Philadelphia community members at the Walnut West Philadelphia Library.

The PEDAL courses emphasize English that is useful in everyday encounters, like banking, shopping, housing, transportation, health care, and school. 

“We focus on speaking and listening more than reading and writing,” says Brenneman, who taught in PEDAL while earning her master’s in the TESOL program.

Launched in 2012, PEDAL has grown to four proficiency levels of classes for Penn-affiliated people—novice, intermediate, advanced, and a high-advanced discussion circle—and three levels for the general public. Attendance ranges from about 10 students in the high-advanced to up to 30 students for the intermediate. Each fall and spring semester consists of 10 weeks of instruction, and an 11th week celebration; registration is ongoing and online. Community PEDAL classes are also offered in the summer.

“PEDAL was created as a steppingstone,” says Sarah Peyton Kaufman, program manager of GSE’s Educational Linguistics Division. “That’s why we consider the experience invaluable to our program.”

Kaufman says PEDAL is one of the only programs of its kind in the country, allowing the second-year students to take full responsibility for creating and teaching the classes while also mentoring first-year students. 

“I feel like PEDAL is an invaluable part of my education,” says GSE student teacher Aaron Brown. “I am taking what I am learning in the classroom and I’m using it in this class, which is almost like a workshop or laboratory.”

For the class participants, the program can be a way to become more integrated into Penn.

“Students have expressed that something they love about PEDAL is that they meet people, and are able to create a community and make friendships they probably would have never found otherwise,” Kaufman says.

On a recent Friday, the two dozen students in the intermediate PEDAL@GSE class were learning about English needed to navigate at a bank: how to open a checking account, how to use an ATM card, and how to most effectively ask questions to resolve a problem.

The lead teacher was Yuxiao Li, who is from China.

“I like how we get to design what we want to teach. We don’t have a textbook. We have to create everything from scratch,” Li says. “We get to apply what we are learning in class to an actual classroom.”

Class participant Minako Honda is in Philadelphia with her husband, a first-year student at Wharton. She says she likes that Li covers many topics in each class.

“I use several sentences that she teaches me with my friends and my husband,” says Honda, who is from Tokyo.

Jeff Chen came to Philadelphia from China with his sister, a Ph.D. candidate in archaeology at Penn, and is studying at the International House. The PEDAL class, he says, has helped him overcome his nervousness speaking in English with people from other countries.

“Sometimes I don’t know how to express the word correctly for what I mean,” he says. “I’m not as nervous now. I have more confidence.”  

Building the confidence of the first-year team teachers is an important part of the PEDAL formula. The lead PEDAL@GSE teachers are second-year students like Li, who have completed at least a year of training.

“PEDAL is designed in a way that is hand-holding,” Brenneman says. “As the semester goes on, the role shifts, with the lead teacher gradually taking a back seat and allowing the team of first-year students to make the lesson plans and put their skills to the test with the class.”