The choir, established in April, has so far attracted about 30 members originally from China, Congo, Eritrea and India, at the average age of 70.
Seniors learning English at the Mosaic centre are now part of a choir that performs for the elderly in Vancouver.”Row, row, row your boat. Gently down the stream ... ” Tina Dai, along with several dozen immigrant seniors, is warming up for a singing performance in a Vancouver care home for the elderly. The singers wear bright smiles, moving their elbows up and down like they’re rowing. Even just for practice, none of these performers slacks off.
Ms. Dai emigrated from Shanghai, China, to Canada in 1996. Picking up a second language for the then-working mother, who was in her 40s, wasn’t easy. After taking some English-as-second-language classes and passing the citizenship exam, Ms. Dai devoted most of her time and energy to raising her children and taking care of her family. Her English was never as good as she wanted it to be.
While the task of learning English can be daunting for most new immigrants, it’s especially challenging for older Canadians.Natalia Balyasnikova, a PhD candidate in the department of language and literacy education at the University of British Columbia, said cognitive functioning can decline as humans age, presenting challenges for language learning in some domains such as processing the meaning of words, immediate word retrieval or complex sentence comprehension.
“A couple of them said to me, ‘Slow, slow.’ They said, ‘We’re getting old; we don’t remember,‘ “ she noted, laughing.But after leading the choir for more than eight months, the two-hour practices with these students has become her weekly highlight. “I just have fun. I think they do, too.”
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