Resource Overview: Teaching English to Prevent HIV Manual

Education is a key to preventing the spread of HIV and reducing stigma and discrimination against those who are living with the virus. Teach English to Prevent HIV: A Teacher’s Manual is designed to enable PCVs to teach English while also providing students a safe space to learn about HIV/AIDS and develop life skills that reduce their vulnerability to infection. The curriculum focuses primarily, though not exclusively, on speaking and listening skills and aims to achieve a measurable impact on students’ knowledge, attitudes, self-efficacy, intentions, and behaviors.

Props to the HIV-AIDS Taskforce for sharing this information in their monthly update!

Program Design:
This manual is designed for school-based programs targeting students ages 13–16 with an intermediate level of English language proficiency, but could be adapted for an intermediate community class, a group of college students studying English or even a class with English teachers.

Most lessons last one hour, except lessons 10 and 11 which require project work and more time; however, all lessons could easily be extended to an hour and a half with more time for review and language reinforcement activities. 

Topics Covered: 

(1) Setting goals
(2) Steps in making good decisions
(3) Resistance and negotiation skills
(4) Relationships
(5) What is HIV? – how it is transmitted and how it affects the body
(6) What is HIV? – how does HIV affect our community?
(7) Risky behaviors: drugs and alcohol and HIV
(8) Risky behaviors: sex and HIV
(9) Making good decisions and using my resistance/negotiation skills
(10) Teaching my friends and family – identifying the message
(11) Teaching my friends and family – sharing what I learned
(12) My future is in my hands: final reflection
(13) Living with HIV – discrimination
(14) Living with HIV – maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

Information provided for each lesson:
The manual assumes that teachers have limited experience blending English language and content instruction. Detailed instructional tips and techniques are therefore provided in the preface and throughout the curriculum.

Each plan includes the following information: language skills students should already be able to use, learning objectives, content focus, language focus, key vocabulary, and materials needed. Lessons are structured with a motivation, presentation, practice, application, evaluation and homework/extension activity.

Additional resources in the manual:

On top of the 14 lessons, the manual also has a 4 lesson Booster program to review and reinforce the content and language learned earlier. It’s suggested that these lessons happen within 6 months to a year of the initial program.

The 4 Booster topics are: (1) My goals and my future, (2) Resistance and negotiation skills, (3) Risky behaviors, and (4) Living with HIV.

The end of the manual includes a ‘Program Evaluation’ appendix that can be administered at the beginning of the course, at the end, and at the end of the booster program to determine the following:

What effect did the program have on the students’…
--knowledge of HIV?
--attitudes toward people with HIV?
--belief in their ability to prevent HIV infection or transmission?
--intention to practice protective behaviors?
--interest in sharing the information they learned with their communities?

Depending on the level of your students, this may need to be translated into Spanish for use as a pre-evaluation. More questions could be added to evaluate the English learning that happened over the course of the program.

Click here to download the Teaching English to Prevent HIV Manual

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Unlike many sources that suggest using English to teach about HIV, this manual goes beyond the general suggestion and actually structures lessons around the 2-prong goal of language acquisition and HIV prevention. We hope this manual is helpful for some of you in your sites! If you have success implementing as part of this program, the GAD committee would love to hear about it!