Dorly Piske does not teach sitting still, even online. She stands, shapes each sound with her mouth, and talks with her hands the way Brazilians do — she was born near Florianópolis. But the rhythm of her English is American, with only a trace of an accent. On her screen: 12 public school English teachers, logged in from nine Brazilian states, from the Amazon to the far south.

A map of the mouth

The Color Vowel® approach puts every English vowel on a chart shaped like the side of a mouth — tongue high or low, front or back — and gives each sound a color instead of a phonetic symbol. GREEN TEA holds the vowel in “teach.” A student who pronounces it with a Portuguese “i” doesn’t get a lecture. She hears: “Teacher is a GREEN TEA word.” Gesture carries the stress — it’s WALmart, Dorly shows them, not walMART.

For a decade, the teachers came to Greeley

Training Latin America’s English teachers is old work for Colorado. For decades the chapter was paired with Minas Gerais; the pairing has lapsed, but members remain deeply involved with Iracambi, an Atlantic Rainforest research center in Minas. Each July from 2015 to 2020, and again in 2024, the chapter’s Teacher-in-Residence Program — TRIP — brought 12 to 14 public school teachers to Greeley for a month: classes at Aims Community College, homestays with volunteer host families — English at breakfast, Howdy culture at Cheyenne Frontier Days, the craft breweries of Fort Collins, Denver.

STEP — Strategies for Teaching English Pronunciation — is TRIP renamed for a new decade. Now the training travels instead of the teachers.

Ninety-Four applied. Beads have paid for two scholarships

The first class was picked hard. From 94 applications, 27 teachers were preselected; a one-week video test caught only 16 in time; 12 won scholarships. All had finished a year-long, online U.S. Embassy training program for Brazil’s public school English teachers.

Dorly taught an introduction to the course in person in four Brazilian cities in 2025 (reaching 50 teachers), then tried it online with university students visiting through the chapter’s STEAM exchange. “Their evolution in speech and confidence in speaking was impressive,” said chapter secretary Marianela Pepe, an Argentine.

Dorly negotiated the price from $500 to $296 a teacher. Her bio-jewelry project, University of Wyoming and Laramie friends help string a variety of colorful Amazonian seeds into earrings, necklaces and bracelets and then sell the jewelry at regional fairs — has paid for two of the 12 scholarships; the chapter is raising the rest of the money. The teachers pay nothing. Except! Tape three videos a week, done right or done again, until October 31.