Immensely down to earth your suggestions and proposals are. We are pretty convinced that these tips will help us carry on more resourcefully our undertaking of updating and professional networking in the days to come. Particularly, your personal conviction of deputing of an executive member for the coordination of a larger project NELTA on the Web including neltachoutari for further expansion and acceleration of ELT activities online is tremendously visionary. Further, endorsement of such an innovative scheme legitimately will create a sense of belongingness not only on the part of contributors but reciprocally thereby wiping out alienation so far felt. Likewise, although participating in online discussions via choutari, yahoo mail etc. should be voluntary and spontaneous, responses/comments from the (senior) NELTA colleagues will reinforce contributions, boost up the morale of the contributors and will also deepen the discussions which will ultimately lead us shape Nepalese ELT in our own way and build up our own theories.

We are immensely happy that you have shown keen interest and have also made efforts to promote ELT activities at suburbs. This is the only way NELTA can truly reflect the NEPALESE ELT. Unlike other centralized organizations which run on the implicit principle of NEPAL MEANS KATHMANDU and KATHMANDU MEANS NEPAL, NELTA is supposed to work more regionally and locally. It has to go decentralized, diversified and all-encompassing. Though NELTA seems to be spreading gradually to reach one and all ELT professionals from the country, a large portion of Eastern and Central Nepal seems not to have access to NELTA yet. Consequently, ELT activities have not flourished there as they should have been. An effort needs to be made to embrace the underprivileged. NELTA has to reach grass roots level to remedy the ailing Nepalese ELT in the vicinity. The concept of regional centers is of course a welcome step. In order to empower and enrich the ELT professionals of suburbs, NELTA has to divert its attention towards more regional and district level conferences

Of late, a wave of revolutionary change seems to be blowing in NELTA. A strong realization that has been amongst us is Nepalese ELT should not be directed by imported theories and principles, rather by the ones generated and contextualized in accordance with our own settings and needs. Therefore, time has come for NELTA to exert its efforts more on research oriented activities. Accommodating the Master’s and PhD’s titles on NELTA web as you have proposed will be a preliminary step towards becoming innovative. The department of English education owns a large number of researches which should have been applied by the concerned. Unfortunately, the theses seem to be rotting in shelves of the department. NELTA can work for the further applications of such research activities. Additionally, NELTA itself should also take initiative to promote research activities on its own.

Web tools have brought groundbreaking changes in academia. Researches and experiences have revealed that technologies have power to boost up retention ability, develop intellectual skills, and build up problem solving ability and also to nurture creativity. In other words, technology provides new opportunities for enhancing students’ learning that otherwise would be impossible. Those who have embraced these tools have leaped forward and those who do not have lagged behind. Therefore, in order to survive and grow up in the networked academic world, NELTA need to develop more digitally. On the one hand, it has to embrace digital tools to expose its members to the vast treasure of research based materials available online. On the other hand, it has to venture to equip its members technologically so that they can make the most of those resources in order to enhance their professional expedition. NELTA therefore, today has to concentrate its attention and efforts on how digital divide in Nepalese ELT can be bridged.

Dear Sajanji, Uttamji, the Choutari team and all NELTA colleagues,
I am very happy to read the comments by Sajan and Uttam on the ideas that we have floated. I very strongly feel that NELTA should now be decentralised in its action. Rather than asking the colleagues at the branch level to organise activities as directed by the center, they need to be empowered to organise events and activities at the local level and share their rich experience in the wider forum. The center can facilitate this process by building capacity of the branch committee members and through exposure activities. We have already started this.
Also, in this regard, NELTA Executive Committee has proposed the ELF’s working modality for 2010 on regional basis. The committee has also encouraged the branches to to organise regional conferences so that they can gain hands-on experiences in organising such mega events. This morning’s NELTA meeting (it was a full body meeting with the colleagues from the branches as well) at Little Angels’ School, Hattiban (the venue of the 15th conference) and we talked about how we can actively involve the branches in the discussion. I am happy to announce that the Committee has given Kamal Poudel the responsibility to coordinate e-communication both with the branches and the Choutari team. I believe that with the involvement of Kamal from the Central Committee and the ongoing professional commitment of Shyamji, Balji, Premji and Sajanji the network will gain a new height.
Thank you very much and I look forward to reading your valuable comments and observation.

Ganga

Kate asks a really important question. Sajan might be following up on it, but I’d like to chime in to add a quick point. I believe that the discussion about “Nepalese ELT” (teaching, theory, training, scholarship, discussion, etc) is a call for discussion rather than a reference to an established concept/discourse. I think that when Nepalese ELT practitioners (researchers, teachers, trainers, bloggers, etc) talk about the need to develop/discuss ideas and practices that are situated in Nepal’s own educational, socio-cultural, and political contexts, they are referring to a need–like the need to identify the goals, priorities, and relevance of training that Kate herself has been urging Nelta community for quite some time. In fact, I think that Kate is an important figure in NELTA who—-whether deliberately or in effect—-has been urging us to situate our trainings, discussions, and teaching in the local material, educational, and social contexts. More of us—-both those who live in and those who work to promote Nepal’s ELT profession—-must be engaging this important question: “What is ‘Nepalese’ ELT?”
Questions are tools for thought and action. And this is a very important one.
I could be wrongly reading between the lines of Kate’s comment above as suggesting that it is for the local Nepalese teachers/scholars to define the term, but since we are also talking about disrupting the local/global binary as a problematic construct, we can all contribute our own perspective on the issue of “Nepalese ELT.” I work as a business writing consultant, mostly with professors of marketing, management, economics, etc, and the disciplinary discourses and jargons freak me out on a regular basis, but I don’t stop offering my perspective as a reader of their text. I also study totally unfamiliar subjects like Queer Theory, but there too I role-play a learner who asks critical questions and challenges cultural assumptions, which many seem to appreciate. To be a cultural, disciplinary, or experiential other is a great privilege—-so long as it is appreciated by the “insiders” whom you may talk to—-and personally, I greatly, really greatly appreciate when Kate and Nelta’s many great supporters (or “well-wishers” as we put in Nepali English) challenge, inspire, and urge us to rethink—-actually, quite often, think about ELT!
So, actually, what is Nepalese ELT? Or, what can it be? I am sure we need an answer, and I am also sure that we won’t answer it by regurgitating theories written by people in dissimilar contexts with dissimilar educational goals and material/social contexts. But I don’t have an answer myself: What is Nepalese ELT?

Discourse reflects knowledge as well knowledge is constructed through discursive practices. Our discourses and dialogs, I see, are a form of constructing knowledge. Shyam and Sajan have already responded their personal as well as NeltaChoutari’s perspectives regarding what constitutes “Nepalese ELT”. I am not sure if the label ‘Nepalese ELT’ is appropriate construct to refer to English language teaching practice in Nepal or if it is a distinct pedagogic practice different from the rest of the world. We can discuss ‘if there is something called Nepalese ELT’ It is subject to further discussion. Thanks Kate for bringing this issue to a further discussion.

The idea that I am trying to develop as member of the Chautari team is to contextualize ELT theories and methods that are fit the geopolitics of the particular pedagogic context. I do not mean to revitalize our ‘gurukul’ system of education where ‘guru’ knows all and ‘chela’ receives a pure form of knowledge from the authority unquestionably. (though there are bright sides of the gurukul education as well). The idea is to call for an ’emic’ perspective on teaching and learning of English in the Nepalese context. I must say that this idea is not new because we can find a huge literature on the topic. Suresh Canagarajah in the US, Adrian Holliday in the UK, Alaistari Pennycook in Australia, etc. have long been arguing for the idea. There is a bulk of literature that documents why task-based teaching failed in Hong Kong, why communicative language teaching was not successful in Korea and why learner autonomy could not yield fruitful results in Japan. The context of Nepal is also different due to its political, social and historical reasons. The following blog entry by Laxman Gnawali http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/blogs/laxmangnawali/teachers-social-change-agents gives one example of how teaching leaning process and teachers in Nepal are viewed as, which of course is not generalizable to all the contexts in Nepal (which the author probably does not intend to do).

Nepalese ELT practices as we all know has been undertheorized and less-decumented, and has not been much reported and represented in both local and international scholarship. Choutari is trying to address this crucial issue making a call for local research.
Another issue that I always look at critically is also the studies that we in Nepal have done so far. Most studies that have been carried out in our formal university settings, for example, come up findings that conform with the similar ones that have been reported in Western countries; issues like students working in groups and pairs do better than working alone, cooperative learning is better than ABC learning, learner autonomy yielded better results, etc. etc. We need to critically look at those constructs and fairly report if these theories and constructs developed and used in other socio-political contexts yield the same results in Nepal. Nepalese scholars need to develop this perspective.

Let me point out another issue. Knowledge and skills gained through several exposure trainings and education programs in different contexts in the world are always subject to a critical look in the Nepalese context before we easily ‘pick up’ and use them as they are. I have seen postings on Neltamail, for example, reporting that “I attended XYZ program for 6 months in ABC country, I learned MNO and used that in my class. Then my students achieved the same thing as the students of ABC countries.” I doubt such superficial statements. We should be able to say “I learned this and used in my class. It was successful but I had these challenges or it was not applicable due to the following reasons” or something like that.

Third issue which might address Kate’s question to Choutari family is: what is local ELT method, and what is imported, and what is Nepalese ELT, etc.
From a personal level, I never mean to develop an ELT method in Nepal from a scratch. There is probably nothing like Nepalese ELT method, Indian ELT method, or something like that. In today’s world where we are interconnected via global media of communication, nothing is ‘purely’ local. The idea that Choutari is advocating might sound counter-favorable to the foreign scholars who have been working for NELTA in Nepal. We never mean that. ‘Need analysis’ before delevering a teacher training program, for example, is a solid example of what it means to be emic and contextualized practice of English pedagogy.

Finally, (this might sound too repetitive), we need to ‘appropriate’, ‘adapt’ and adjust the so-called theories and methods of ELT according to our local context, rather than to pick them up and use them as they are in far-away lands. I admit that this is the beginning of our professional discussion, and should continue further to explain ‘what it means to use a local ELT method’ or ‘what it means to ‘contextualize the global ELT methods to local contexts’.

I’m wondering if considering ‘goals’ and ‘outcomes’ would be useful. Bal talks of many initiatives elsewhere that haven’t worked, and Sajan quite rightly says there is no ‘one size fits all’. Do we know why initiatives don’t work, do we know what they were designed to achieve? If there were any goals, were they well thought through and achievable? What is appropriate for Kathmandu with its resources, both material and knowledge based, will be out of reach of most rural areas. I think each of us involved in Nepalese ELT are coming from different perspectives looking for different solutions for different problems. So yes, Sajan, I think we do have to start from local. But even then, we cannot expect a rural teacher to tell us what they want if they do not know what is either possible or available. They deserve to be made aware of what is happening elsewhere, goals need to be developed but not before the means of attaining the goals are explored. Centralisation of expectations means that thousands of children are failed because of a system that is serving neither the teachers nor the students. This is not just a criticism of ELT but literacy levels in Nepali I believe are only around 50%. So what are we trying to achieve? Isn’t it interesting that neither top-down nor bottom-up theories on their own have the answers. We must strive to see through many pairs of eyes.

Dear Friends,
We talked about the survey in the NELTA committee meeting yesterday and everybody is very happy to hear this good news. Once we have the needs from this Survey, we can plan series of training in the NELTA branches. In order to get this going, the committee has formed a new team to work on the plan to use the NELTA human resources for various activities including training. The team will prepare a roaster of all the NELTA members who have attended various professional development opportunities (home and abroad) through NELTA and then work on a plan how their expertise can be best utilized for the benefit of other teachers. The team members are Laxman Gnawali, Gita Sitaula, Lekh Nath Baral, Kashi Raj Pandey and Siddhartha Dhungana.
They will submit their report in two week time.
Thanks.
Ganga

Talking about training, NELTA Dhading needs a trainer or two (trained, experienced, and committed to bring changes) who would like to go to Northern region ; a day’s TATA safari and a day’s walk but very exciting experience s/he will have- the center where all 25-30 teachers would gather is right adjacent to Gauri Shankar himal, fresh air and all- but the training is intensive, fixed for 3 days, and the participants from 15 some +2 schools around expect really effective antibiotic for secondary plus +2 level ENGLISH TEACHING. The date they suggested is Feb. 3,4,5 or 6 as they expect all teachers to attend the workshop this time. Interested friend/s, Please respond. Kashiraj Pandey at kashiraj@ku.edu.np