Praveen Kumar Yadav
This is the second part of an interview with Dr. Rajendra Bimal. In this part, Dr. Bimal speaks about key changes in the scenario of English in Nepal (teaching/learning/practices) and about English as an interdisciplinary field.
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Shyam Sharma
Welcome to Choutari again!
First the contents.
Pursuing our interest for including practical ELT resources/ideas, we have included three entries that you might find relevant to your classroom teaching. The first is an entry on teaching language functions within a broader concept, the second an entry on teaching research, and the third one a reflective teaching experience about students who seemed to be inattentive in class. Because the 17th International NELTA Conference was just held in Kathmandu and Chitwan, we asked one of the rapporteurs to share a brief report (we will include more on this next month). Then there is a narrative piece on the idea of “teacher” as a verb/action. This time, we have included a piece based on poetry (and we’ll leave it to you to draw pedagogical implications from the entry). And, finally, there is a thoughtful piece on pedagogy in the age of digitally globalized world.
Then a quick thought about Choutari.
For some time, I have been thinking about a title for an imaginary article: “Blackouts, ‘Bad’ English, and the Beauty of Blogging: Scholarship and Professional Development in the Global Periphery.” Such an article could be a nice tribute to the readers, writers, and those who have otherwise been a part of Choutari. It could also be a tribute to those who believe that the older mode of scholarly communication has changed, and in fact, it should keep changing.
First, there is the power cut (blackout) for incredible amounts of time in Nepal, further diminishing our readers’ access to the internet, which is already limited. But this community shows that where there is will, a community like this will find a way. Second, judged from the traditional standards of publication, the language (English) in the texts published in this blog-zine is not highly standardized. Editors of Choutari don’t have too much time on their hands, being a volunteer group; but even if they do, a polished language is not priority number one. We first spend time to collect materials, trying to find contributions by our fellow teachers in Nepal and sometimes from abroad, contributions that our readers (also mostly teachers across the country) might find useful. In whatever time remains, we help writers revise and edit, trying to help them do that wherever we can. What is most important is not the language and grammar, it’s the idea. Finally, a blog–even when it is turned into a magazine of sorts, like this one–is a blog, so we actually try to keep entries short, simple, and not too formal.
But therein lies the beauty. As a blog, this venue circulates new ideas quickly. It allows a community of teachers across Nepal and across the world read, share comments, promote posts, and contribute to the forum from wherever they are. And that is how in three years, we have more than 42,000 views, 200 posts, 500 comments, and countless shares and likes.
So, please enjoy another issue of the beautiful forum that you have helped build in your own way. Like the shade under a tree in a village yard or on the way to one, Choutari is yours, it is everyone’s place to gather and share ideas, to create new knowledge. Please do not forget to encourage the writers by leaving comments. Please also share entries on your social networking sites.
Praveen Kumar Yadav
In this post, I share some information about and my personal reflections of the 17th International Conference of Nepal English Language Teachers’ Association (NELTA) which took place in Kathmandu (18-20 February) and Chitwan (a city in western Nepal, 21-23 February). The theme of the conference was “Beyond Binaries: Sharing ELT Practices and Creating the Future.” Rod Ellis from the University of Auckland, New Zealand; Angi Malderez, an honorary senior fellow at the School of Education, the University of Leeds, UK; and Fredricka L Stoller from Northern Arizona University, USA, were the key panelists of the conference. The conference covered issues about various aspects of English Language Teaching (ELT) among ELT professionals, practioners, researchers, experts and scholars. It greatly helped to promote ELT in the country.
It is perhaps that first time in the ELT history of Nepal that More than 750 ELT professionals from 22 different countries including Bangladesh, India, Singapore, USA, Pakistan, Britain, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Oman, Indonesia, New Zealand, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakasthan, Thailand, Morocco, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Malaysia and Japan presented, participated and held discussions on different burning themes in the mega event of ELT in Nepal. More than 270 research papers including 191 in Kathmandu and 80 in Chitwan were presented in the conference. However, unfortunately, I missed Chitwan conference, about which I learnt from colleagues that it added a new chapter in the history of NELTA via energizing ELT professions of suburbs via new trends and techniques in the field.
Other than the plenary sessions on the first day, I attended a few other panel discussions and concurrent sessions which I briefly reflect upon in this entry. I could attend three concurrent sessions on the first day, as one of the rapporteurs. Presenters of my sessions on the first day were from Bangladesh, Japan and India.
Rasel Babu, one of the researchers of EiA-DU-OU, Research Collaboration Programme at Institute of Education and Research of the University of Dhaka presented the research paper on learning English at primary level, fun not fear. Exploring the success story of English in Action (EiA) project (2008-2017) funded by UK-Aid and implemented by the government, he concluded that the project has recently changed traditional scenario of ELT at primary level in Bangladesh where English is taught as compulsory subject from grade-I to grade-XII. It has helped the students develop English language skills through games, songs, rhymes and different interactive activities, leaving all the anxieties behind. The most exciting things about the sharing was that the songs like good morning, hello and good bye have been developed during the project to make the students enjoy learning English language. Such projects could be implemented in Nepal as well since the context of Bangladesh is very much similar to Nepal. The government or the concerning stakeholders like NELTA can take initiative to implement the EiA project in our country Nepal as well in collaboration with UK-Aid or other developing agencies like US-Aid, I assume.
In the second session, Shawn Huizenga, a licensed attorney in the United States of America and associate professor in the law department of Kinki University in Osaka, Japan shared the Approaches and considerations about Content Based Instruction (CBI). Introducing the CBI and presenting the rationale behind it, he discussed about three general models of CBI: Theme Based, Sheltered Content and Adjunct model to organize the content based courses. Then he moved ahead referring Fedricka Stroller and William Grabe who outlined A Six T’s Approach to CBI: Themes, Texts, Topics, Threads, Tasks and Transitions. To address the challenges while following the CBI, he finally concluded his session with the considerations that worked well based on his experience. They were motivation, selection of appropriate approaches, introduction of vocabulary in advance, selection of level-appropriate texts, frequent repetition, breaking the lecture into short “mini-lectures” and questions in advance. It was very beneficial to those who are involved in teaching content-based classes.
Amitpal Kaur, a senior lecturer in English at Degree College, R. S. PURA (J&K) had her session on Innovations: Crux of ELT, which was very effective and useful for the teachers for making the students concentrate towards the learning with the help of visuals, realia, videos, movies, documentaries, etc. She focused her discussion largely on the use of information communication and technology in ELT classroom to bring innovations.
In the evening, the participants were thrilled to watch the cultural programme organized by the team of English Access Micro Scholarship Project implemented by NELTA in support of the US Embassy, Kathmandu to develop English language proficiency and cultural understanding for the needy children in Nepal. The access children performed their dances diverse culture representing Rai, Sherpa, Newari and Tamang Communities of Nepal. This is the first time NELTA has been able to organize a cultural show to give a flavor of Nepalese culture to attendees from abroad and to give some sort of recreation to the Nepalese attendees.
2nd Day (February 19, 2012)
The second day of the conference (February 19, 2012) began with the plenary talks by key note speakers Angi Malderez and Fredricka L. Stroller and Nepalese presenters Dr. Ananda Sharma and Laxman Gnawali.
Key speaker Malderez facilitated a plenary talk on Stories in ELT, wherein she demonstrated the use of four stories for primary language classroom, secondary classroom, teacher development and mentor development. At the end, she provided the participants the sources of more stories that can be used in ELT classroom. In another plenary talk on vocabulary building as a response to students’ present and future needs, key speaker Stroller has explored important principles of effective vocabulary teaching and learning that can be used with the students at all proficiency levels. The talk was focused on vocabulary selection criteria, ways and techniques to teach and recycle vocabulary and instructional options that encourage students to see key words in relation to other words.
Dr. Ananda Sharma, associate professor at Tribhuvan University and Laxman Gnawali, associate professor at Kathmandu University jointly facilitated a plenary talk on Dictionary and Foreign Language Learning. The joint talk attempted to break the confinement of the general language users regarding the use of dictionaries in finding word meanings, spellings and pronunciation. The session motivated the language learners to get out of the traditional box of using dictionaries in classroom and suggested them to use the dictionaries extensively for different purposes like grammar, usage status, synonym discrimination, application of derivative affixes and distinction between spoken and written English. They concluded the talk that the dictionary is an indispensable weapon in teacher’s arsenal and its discussion on its preparation and practice is a must for a teacher training programme.
Following the plenary talks, I attended five concurrent sessions on the second day of the conference. In the first concurrent session, Ushakiran Wagle, an M. Ed. in ELT from Kathmandu University presented a paper on “Introducing Humour in English Language Classroom”. Basing on the learning-through-fun principle, she suggested some of the ways of creating humour in ELT classroom. She concluded that introducing humour in the language classroom makes the learners motivated towards learning.
Bir Bahadur Shahi, Chair of NELTA Dailekh and the principal of Bhagwati Higher Secondary School Dailekh and Suvash Gautam, life member of NELTA at Dailekh presented a paper on English for Academic Purpose to the Students of Science and Technology. The presentation focused on suggestions to teachers, students and planners how science can be taught effectively through English.
Sharmila Sitaula and Kalpana Poudel, students of masters in ELT from Kathmandu University together carried out “An Action Research: How to Make Grammar Class Interesting?” in a primary school. Basing on the action research, they have relayed the findings that grammar can be taught about the teaching of grammar in an interesting and interactive way.
A Fulbright ETA Amber Powers who is currently teaching at Dapakhel, Lalitpur, Nepal had a presentation on How to Teach While Students Play. Illustrating public school classrooms where she taught English to younger students in Nepal, she discussed on easy ways to teach and assess them through playful and hands on activities.
The last concurrent session of the second day, I attended the session on English language, Globalization and Teacher’s Role, wherein Ishwor Adhikari, CEO of Pathshala Nepal Foundation and his co-presenter briefly presented the key roles of a language teacher for teaching English language in the globalized context.
At the end of the second day, Annual General Meeting (AGM) was held, where in the members of NELTA only gathered there.
3rd Day (February 20, 2012)
The third day of the conference began with two plenary talks and followed by concurrent sessions. Assistant professor at SIA University, Thailand and Editor-in-Chief of Language Testing in Asia Robert Kirkpatrick’s plenary talk IELTS Writing Test: Reliability and Raters, which mainly focused on IELTS writing module. He shed lights on difficulties involved in scoring writing tasks and the ways that IETLS organization attempt to meet the objective and reliable rating.
Professor of English and Journalism Ms Gayatri Khanna from India had plenary talk on Assessment: An Indispensable Part of the Curriculum. She argued that assessment not only measures the progress and achievement of the learners but also the effectiveness of teaching materials and methods used for transaction. The talk concluded with the argument that assessment should be taken as a component of curriculum that fulfills the objectives of effective delivery and further improvement in teaching learning process.
I participated in four concurrent sessions by the presenters from Mehedi Kayser Pabitra from Bangladesh, Laxmi Bahadur Maharjan, Sajan Kumar Karn and Sarah Elisabeth Howlett from Nepal. Pabitra, lecturer at American International University, Bangladesh (AIUB) presented his paper on Business World in Language Classrooms: An Effective Language Acquisition Model. The paper presented a simulation model of an authentic communicative platform to develop students’ business communications in speaking, reading and writing. The teaching of English to the students of Bachelor in Business Administration (BBA) he shared he was involved in was quite amazing and innovative. He changed the classroom as a corporate office and he played the role of manager and let students play the roles of employees of the corporate house. Even they were dressed up in the way that they looked as if they were in an office not in the classroom.
Laxmi Bahadur Maharjan, teacher at Department of English Education, TU Nepal presented a paper on Which Accent to Follow, which focused on the significance of the proper accent for English language teachers. Sajan Kumar Karn, lecturer Department of English Education, TU Nepal presented a paper on why we are not doing what we are not doing? Integrating Critical Thinking into ELT Lessons. He motivated the participants with his argument to integrate the elements of critical thinking into ELT lessons in order to pave the way for active learning. His argument was that Nepalese ELT is too much indulged in philosophy of presence and it was time to ponder over the things that have created gaps in Nepalese ELT. In order to bridge those gaps, critical thinking has been essential in perspectives and practices both.
The last concurrent session of the day was Sarah Elisabeth Howlett’s presentation on Rapping with Obama: The Power of Music in Understanding English Texts. Firstly, she handed over an essay on Barrack Obama, the President of the USA to the participants and let them comprehend themselves and she facilitated them in the meantime. Extracting the ideas from the essay, she finally asked them to prepare a poem or song and present it with music and they did accordingly. Hence, she beautifully presented her ideas to make the participant understand the texts with the power of music.
After concurrent sessions, following Ms Gayatri Khanna’s plenary talk on Dictionary-indispensible part of life, a closing ceremony was organized wherein Dr. Abhi Subedi was the chief guest and the main attraction of the ceremony.
It would be unfair if I did not mention the journals published by NELTA centre and branches which were made available to the participants of this conference. The journals and newsletters published by NELTA Centre and branches like Makwanpur, Siraha, Birgunj, Nuwakot, Sindhuli and Pokhara branches were released by Chief guest Prof. Dr. Jai Raj Awasthi, the first vice-chancellor of The Far Western University during the inaugural ceremony while journals of NELTA Rautahat and Surkhet were released by Dr. Abhi Subedi during the closing ceremony. The publication of the journals by NELTA branches increased this year.
NELTA Birgunj has celebrated the success of NELTA Choutari publishing its journal ELT Today that has included the materials retrieved from this blog. This is an attempt to bridge the “digital divide” created by the lack of access for many of our colleagues on the ground to the emerging conversations in online forums. Being web-based, this mode of professional conversation is not yet feasible for many of our colleagues across Nepal due to load-shedding, geographical difficulties, lack of internet access and adequate computer and internet surfing skills in most of the teachers —hence this attempt made by NELTA Birgunj is appreciative to provide some contents of Choutari offline—to encourage the readers and contributors along with editorial board to make it more productive.
There were more participants than expected in the conference. Finally, NELTA president Hemant Raj Dahal’s closing remarks wrapped up the conference held for three days at St. Xavier’s School Kathmandu.
Marohang Limbu
Choutari is a great platform with many outstanding essays in “Nelta Chautari,” but one piece by my friends Prem Phyak and Shyam Sharma, “Teachers’ narrative: Building theory from the bottom up” particularly draws my attention. Prem and Shyam envision the need of scholarship, research, and pedagogy to construct knowledge at the local level. They also observe the “need to start developing new approaches, theories, and methods based on local social-cultural contexts and dynamics” so that “practical challenges of the classroom can be better tackled … theoretically, methodologically, and pragmatically.” In this essay, I am discussing pedagogical theories and practices of teaching English in the glocal (global + local) context in the age of digitally globalized world. My discussion focuses on mapping new “bottom up” pedagogy, significance of “bottom up” pedagogy, and the importance of “bottom up” and cloud computing pedagogy and its future direction.
I, like these colleagues, believe in the philosophical theory and pedagogical practices of “… Building theory from the bottom up,” for I suppose that teaching is to map/remap new knowledge, to disseminate, and cultivate it. Teaching is a powerful force that can construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct realities, and the results we achieve depend upon how we apply theories into classroom practices. Hence, in my “bottom up” pedagogy, I, as an educator, create strategic pedagogical inquiry questions, such as how my teaching/research matters to a student’s individual, academic, and professional life; how I can effectively connect pedagogical theories into classroom practices; why and how I should embrace globalization and new social media technologies (Web 2.0 tools) in my day-to-day pedagogical practices; how I can create “safer spaces” (non-threatening environment) for diverse student populations so that students can bring their cultural narratives and prior academic literacies; and how my pedagogical practices prepare cross-culturally and digitally potential human power for the 21st century digitally globalized world.
As a 21st century educator, I foresee an urgent need of pedagogical practice that Prem and Shyam indicate that we need to develop, as well as new teaching approaches, theories, and methods based on “local and social contexts.” But what does it mean in the context of digitally globalized world? And what prevents us to translate it into classroom practices? And how are we creating our “local” linguistic values and cultural identities in the context of the 21st century global/world Englishes? In our “bottom up” pedagogical approach, rather than mimicking so called the Standard English, our teaching approaches should seek ways of creating spaces of non-native English speaking students inside and outside the classrooms. Our pedagogical strategies should help, not hinder, students create their cultural and linguistic identities from the local perspective and connect them to the global level. We, as non-western educators, should also advocate for the inclusion of multicultural materials, students’ prior academic literacies, cultural narratives, and web 2.0 tools in our curricula, syllabi, and in our pedagogical practices. Our “bottom up” pedagogy should engage students in dialogical environment in both virtual and physical spaces in order to make them critical and analytical thinkers and communicators.
Furthermore, we advocate for the development of “new approaches, theories, and methods based on local social-cultural contexts and dynamics” (Phyak and Sharma). We may be claiming/reclaiming our local linguistic identities and agencies. We may be creating our identity as global citizens, but what kind of impact our pedagogy has at the local and global level. More importantly, we are living in the digitized global village where our knowledge is constantly shifting; that means disciplinary discourse is also shifting, such as analog literacy is shifting to digital literacy, paper to screen literacy, industrial economy to information economy, local culture to global culture, and national perspective to global perspective. So, as pedagogues of the 21st century global village how our pedagogical approaches address the disciplinary/knowledge shifts when we meet with our students in the classrooms (without modern technologies).
Now is the time, not only do we have to create pedagogical environments that offer students their voices and identities, but we also have to create cross-cultural communication/intercultural communication settings where students learn to contest, question, and negotiate their spaces. As I understand, the notion of “bottom up” pedagogy tends to advocate for “local social-cultural contexts and dynamics” (Phyak and Sharma). That means it also tends to validate students’ (especially non-western and language minority) voices, but we should critically contemplate how we are conforming their voices and identities; how we are supporting world/global Englishes from our local pedagogical practices; and we also should critically evaluate how our students’ voices will be recognized in other discourse communities from the 21st century globalized context.
Furthermore, when our pedagogical strategies come into discussion, we invariably claim that our teaching approaches are “student-centered” ones, but what does “student-centered pedagogy” mean to our day-to-day teaching practices and how we practice it? In terms of my pedagogical practice/s, I teach at Michigan State University, East Lansing where I am, more often than not, likely to meet with students from almost all around the world. In my writing classes, I use Web 2.0 tools (Facebook, blogs, websites, YouTube, videoblogs, and podcasting, etc.); these cloud-computing pedagogical tools tend to be more democratic, inclusive, and representational. I, via these cloud-computing tools, encourage my students to bring their cultural narratives and individual voices. I allow my students to bring/present their cultural literacies and prior experiences in the classroom discussions and in their writing assignments. I highly encourage students to share, collaborate, communicate, create, and publish both in digital (and physical) spaces so that students can share their ideas in a single click. Additionally, my pedagogical practice also does not tend to linguistically and culturally favor one group of students over the others. As a result, students seem to question, contest, and create their spaces in the center. In this pedagogical setting, not only students learn to collaborate, communicate, and create together, but they also learn to validate other students’ cultural narratives and prior academic experiences.
Although I claim that my pedagogy is “student-centered,” I still may be ignoring a significant number of students in my writing classes because I still handle the classes based on my interest, department’s interest, and university’s interest. Despite my democratic cloud computing pedagogy, I still feel that I fail to observe how my students are constrained by my teaching approaches and pedagogical practices within that small discourse community due to their age, interest, class, gender, sexual orientation, and prior experience. So, as educators, how are you practicing your “student-centered” pedagogy? How are you creating your students’ glocal identities and connecting their local literacies to the global level? How are you validating their voices? And how are you preparing your students for this digitally globalized world? Overall, are we just preaching or are really practicing our “student-centered” pedagogies?
What is the significance of “bottom up” pedagogical theory? What constitutes “bottom up” pedagogy? I know every teaching is different teaching; every pedagogical practice is a different practice. However, we tend to practice more or less similar type of “bottom up” pedagogical approaches, but how we literally practice it when we teach English in Nepalese rural and urban contexts. How do we practice this theory when we teach diverse multilingual, multicultural, multi-ethnic students (in different geopolitical situations)? Additionally, why do we create our syllabi before we actually meet our actual student populations? Why do we create curricula, syllabi, and so on that do not address the diverse student populations and their interests? If we do not have power to change the curricula and syllabi, how we, including our students, are resisting the conservative ideology and hegemony. Prem and Shyam implicitly observe some “practical challenges” and they believe that those challenges “can be better tackled if we try to theoretically, methodologically, and pragmatically address those issues.” As I mentioned earlier how we are translating these theories into practices; how we are resisting the traditional ideology and hegemony in order to address the interests of multicultural and multilingual students in the context of the 21st century globalized world.
The purpose of English language teaching is not only to make students able to use basic English for basic communication, but it is also to empower them with their voices. Teaching for me is also to support students to globalize their local narratives to the global level. I remember my school level English courses where we were forced to memorize lessons and answers. We also learned grammar, speech, intonation, and some facts and figures. Similarly, when I went to college/university, I learned Western English literature, which literally had nothing to do with my Limbu culture, Limbu literature, and Limbu identity. When I became a teacher/lecturer, I practiced the same teaching approach. In this type of pedagogy, students will not be able to connect local narratives and academic literacies to the global level because cross-cultural communication is ignored; the concept of audience is also too narrow, limited, and localized. The conservative and traditional teacher centered pedagogy implicitly colonizes students. Based on this discussion, my query is how we are applying Prem and Shyam’s “social-cultural … dynamics” and how you are challenging/resisting the conservative, hegemonic, and ideological practices.
My theoretical and philosophical thoughts on “bottom up” pedagogy are we should address glocal (local + global) issues. We have to globalize our local narratives to global level and our new pedagogy should lie in the fast changing global village saturated by cloud computing technology because glocally/cross-culturally and digitally literate students can create their identities better; they can produce more effective, accurate, and high quality texts; they can effectively communicate with students/people from different cultures. Moreover, if we apply “bottom up” pedagogy from the 21st century context, it not only seems to illuminate the geopolitical blindspots, but also reduces cultural and linguistic gaps, which are better pedagogical elements of the 21st century digital global village. We have to create new “bottom up” pedagogy saturated by technology to engage students in different digital, multimodal, and cross-cultural writing projects that will provide them valuable future career preparation. Many of the traditional pedagogies we still practice do not necessarily address needs and expectations of the 21st century digitally globalized world and audience; there is a need of retheorizing and remapping our pedagogical theories and practices. Therefore, “bottom up” pedagogy is a pursuit of pedagogical transformation in the context of the 21st century global village.
Finally, in terms of theoretical, methodological, and pragmatic issues and future directions, teachers (as activists of the global society) should map/remap pedagogy from glocal perspective. This pedagogy will introduce horizontal spaces, languages, subjectivities, speeches, and writings, and these situations lead the “bottom up” concept of free playing field from the “local social-cultural contexts.” In this process, we, along with our “now students” and our “future colleagues,” will continue to enact an epistemology of representation that will guide present pedagogical practice and will shape future pedagogical approaches. In this journey, we do not perpetuate the traditional hegemonic and ideological pedagogy as they have always been practiced, but we will map/remap democratic pedagogical theories and approaches as they will have been practiced in the future.
——
Dr. Limbu is assistant professor of English in Michigan State University, Michigan USA. You can find more information about the author here.
Prem Phyak
We know that ‘teacher’ is defined as a ‘noun’ in dictionary. We have a belief that a teacher is a ‘knowledgeable person’ having degrees and sufficient skills to perform. But what is that ‘knowledge’ we have? Is it fixed or dynamic? Is it one-off or on-going? Is it co-constructed or received? These are some general questions we, teachers of English (ToE), should consider to critically assess our own role to facilitate students’ learning. In a more reflective and subjective fashion, in this brief post, I discuss how language teacher is a ‘verb’ not a ‘noun’. I will nuance this issue by framing my ideas under major themes associated with reflection on my own language teaching.
A brief narrative
When I started teaching at primary level, some 10 years ago, I believed that I would be the best teacher if I could make students listen to me. I tried my best to learn the meaning of words (all literal) from dictionary and write them on the textbook itself. I remember that my books were full of word meanings. Sometimes I could not get the meaning of the words in dictionary which made me feel diffident in teaching. Honestly, it was really hard time for me to understand some stories and I could not really explain well to my students. I still remember that it ruined my sleeps and leisurely times. I had no idea what I was doing. I did not even know whether or not my students were learning. It was really a dreadful experience. My students never talked to me. I was not confident to engage them in classroom interactions. But I was happy that they did not make any noise in the classroom. I could feel that they did not make noise because they were not making sense of what I was teaching and they were overwhelmed with the word meanings I gave them. I was curious to know why my students were so silent and whether or not they understood the stories. But I was reluctant to ask my students’ feedback.
I was able to perform in class but I was never sure whether or not I was helping my students in ‘meaning-making’ process. I never thought that students could learn better if they were given chance to personalize and relate the stories in their situations. I never knew that they could learn words by allowing them to use those words in their own sentences. I never provided them with feedback on their home assignments rather I used to simply identify what errors them made. I could not help them learn from their own mistakes rather I grilled them why they made those silly mistake. As I was imposing my ‘teacher’s authority’, my students were scared of asking questions even if they did not understand what I was teaching.
Many things changed! (I am not describing all those changes to save space). Informed by new courses, readings, trainings, seminars, workshops and continuous teaching, I could do a critical analysis of what I did in the past and learn from those experiences. Although I cannot explain my entire professional trajectories, I can draw following major themes which can be issues for my further professionalism.
1. Co-construction of knowledge: I could say that I did not know that students had rich ‘capital’ or resources (linguistic, cultural, and social) that I could use in the classroom. Now I realize that the knowledge construction process in the classroom is not a ‘one-way’ process rather it is a mutual meaning-making process in which students bring their own worldviews and use them as a basis for negotiating with others in the classroom. This indicates that teachers should consider themselves only as ‘a member’ in the entire language teaching-learning process. It does not happen when teachers simply say that ‘now I am going to co-construct knowledge with you’ but it works only when teachers corroborate students’ views and beliefs as an integral part of learning process.
2. Addressing students’ agency: Every individual has ‘agency’. This means they can decide their goals and strategies to achieve those goals. And they can use their existing knowledge and experience to learn new ideas. When I go back to my own narrative mentioned above, I now realize that there were stories or plots in them which students could easily relate to their life and society if I had asked them. But I never did so. What I am trying to argue is that our beliefs about the role of students as a ‘passive-consumer-like-recipient’ of knowledge may be a detrimental for students’ learning. Working with students’ own personal experiences and socio-cultural capital as a starting point may help us promote more equitable and sustainable learning.
3. Transmission vs. transformation of knowledge: Any kind of teaching including language teaching is related to the production of knowledge. There are different ways to produce knowledge. Traditionally, though still dominant belief, we believe in the transmission of knowledge i.e. we consider ourselves as a repository of knowledge and transmit to students usually through lectures and dictations. Guided with this assumption, we consider knowledge as a fixed and a one-off artifact. But is the knowledge we learned some 20 or 10 or 5 or 2 years ago still relevant to address students’ needs and complex soci0-cultural changes? Does the taken-for-granted knowledge fit into all socio-cultural contexts? These questions imply that we need to rethink about how to generate or transform (not transmit) knowledge in the classroom. This works when students all given opportunity to transform the knowledge discussed in the classroom to their own personal and social contexts. One of the ways of doing this, as I think, is to engage students in exploring and discussing locally situated issues which they are familiar with and can talk about. This process will not only help students learn language but also make them aware of their society and culture, eventually contributing to the transformation of society.
We see that language teachers have challenging responsibilities ranging from promoting students’ individual agencies to contributing to the transformation of society. This requires a lot of transformations in our own deeds, especially belief system. In this sense, teachers are an ‘agency’ and ‘actor’ but they are not simply a performer of what they know. As we do a lot of contested, conflicting and ideological activities, as a professional to promote students’ learning, we teachers are not a noun we are, in fact, a ‘verb’.
Mandira Adhikari
As a student, I learned English largely through Grammar Translation method, but when I studied the subject “ELT Theories and Methods” in the university, I became aware of much better methods for teaching English. As a result, when I started teaching, I was able to teach my students by using communicative and other methods. I used language functions as a key concept to teach communicative skills, and I found teaching language function very much helpful to develop the other language skills of my students and after a short period of time they were able to speak in English. However, when I studied advanced ELT Methods in Kathmandu University, I began to wonder if role play is sufficient for teaching language functions? Are there other alternative methods for it? How can I develop other skills with the help of language functions?
What are language functions?
In order to do anything with and through language, we take help of the certain exponents of language. The purpose of language use is called language function. As Blundell, Higgens & Middlemiss (2010) state, we only speak or write with a purpose in mind: to help someone to see our point of view, perhaps or to ask their advice or to reach agreement with them. The functional use of language is not only based on certain language structure or grammatical rules, it is how we understand the context and use the language in order to fulfill those purposes. For example, sentences in the imperative form may perform a variety of different functions:
Give me your book. (Order)
Pass the pen, please. (Request)
Turn right to the corner. (Suggestion)
Come to visit us on Saturday. (Invitation)
The above exponents are used by the speaker of language in different situations. Thus, language function refers to the purpose for which an utterance for which a form of language is used as a means of communication.
Stages of teaching language functions
Teaching language function is very similar with teaching grammar. There are three stages of it. The three stages are described below:
Presentation
This is the first stage of teaching language function. In this stage, the teacher presents a language function either in a dialogue form or by creating context. S/he holds discussion with the students regarding the possible exponents for the language function to be taught. This stage can also be taken as a pr- communicative activity as it is a pre-step to develop communicative activity. Some of these activities are; Contextualization, Description of the social settings of the language use, Motivation and preparation, Identification of the participants, Setting, Acting emotion, determining purpose etc. Doff, Jones & Mitchell (1997) says “This stage is concerned with controlled practice of a new language. It ranges from simple manipulation of structures to more imaginative practice in which students use language in real life situation” (p. 9)
Thus, in pre- communicative activity, the teacher creates the context and provides description on where to use such language function or in which situation.
Practice
At this stage, the students are given opportunity to practice language function presented. For this purpose, they may be involved in pairs to conduct mini – dialogues. They practice the language function by means of mechanical, manipulative or communicative drills. In this stage, they mainly memorize as well as learn how to use different exponents and realize their meaning.
Production
This is the last stage of teaching a language function which focuses on using the new language function, in free or real life situation. Richards (2006) says that students practice using the new structures and in different context often using their own content or information in order to develop fluency with the new patterns. Thus, this stage focuses more on the fluency of the language rather than accuracy. Thus, this stage is also known as communicative stage. In this stage, students can be asked to work in pairs or a small group to share the ideas. Some of the activities of this stage are; mini- exchange, role plays, oral games, guessing games, interviews etc. (Note: An example of teaching language function for class nine students using these three steps are presented in appendix).
Some other activities for teaching the language functions
Though the P-P-P model is very popular in teaching language function, it is criticized for being limited in certain functions. (Skehan (1996), as cited in Richards (2006) says “The underlying theory for a P-P-P has now discredited. The belief that a precise focus on a particular form leads to learning and automatization”. Thus, only the three stages of presentation practice and production is not sufficient for teaching language function. Role play is very popular activity to develop language function. More than role play, there are other activities which are very helpful to teach language function. As it is very similar with teaching grammar, we can utilize the techniques of teaching grammar for teaching language function. Ur. (2003) has presented different types of grammar practice such as: awareness, controlled drills, meaningful drills, guided or meaningful practice, discourse composition and free discourse. Among these activities, drills, discourse composition and free discourse are really helpful to teach language function because while writing the discourse students should use different language functions that are used in our daily life. Highlighting the focus on meaning and situation of language used, Doff (2010) says that there is a way to show meaning through a situation i.e. to think of a situation from outside the class, in which the structure could naturally be used which may be real or imaginary. So, a teacher can create a context and ask students to use different language functions in those contexts which also can be a technique of teaching language function. Moreover, some other techniques of teaching grammar are presented below:
Information gap activities
It is an activity in which a learner knows the information but other does not know. It is necessary for communication to occur so that the listener actively decodes and reacts. Then the listener speaks becoming the informants for a while. Some of the information gap activities are; discovering missing information, discovering secrets, the role of customer and shopkeeper.
Pair work or group work
The teacher can provide a situation and language function and ask students to discuss that situation and develop dialogues according to the context and present it in front of the class.
Strip story
Strip story is a technique of presenting a story part- wise in a small slips of paper called strips. This activity is also helpful to develop communicative activity among the students because students need to discuss in pairs where there can be interaction, thinking and sharing. While sharing the ideas they need to use different language function such as describing, negotiating meaning etc. students also develop problem- solving activity from this technique.
Communicative drill
This is also a technique which is very helpful in teaching language function. It is a type of drill in which the type of response is controlled but the students provides his or her own content of information. For example:
Teacher Student
What did you do after breakfast? I —————
Say how you greet to your teacher in the morning. ————————–
Thus, this type of drill is also very useful to develop communicative skill of the students and can be used as a technique to teach language function.
Problem Solving
The teacher can provide a problem in groups so that they should have to do lots of interaction and while interacting with their friends they should use different language functions. For e.g.; requesting, description, questioning, refusing etc. thus, this is also a helpful technique to teach different language functions.
Communicative Games
Communication games are designed to provoke communicative activity among the learners. For e.g. oral games, guessing games, solving the puzzles etc. they are very helpful to teach language function as well as to motivate learners towards learning.
Oral Speech (telling stories or experiences)
While sharing experience or the story among the students, they need to use different types of language function which is more helpful to develop the use of language function. Thus, it is also a technique to develop communicative skill of the language with the help of language function.
Developing other language skills
Teaching language functions is very helpful to develop other language such as: listening, speaking, reading and writing. When we are teaching a language function we can develop other language skills as well and it is the most important aspect of language to develop other language skills.
The main aim of language teaching is for communication and communication of language can be developed when we learn to use language in different context and language function is the way to develop communication among the learners. My experience as I have presented above also shows that teaching language function can help developing speaking skill of the learners. Similarly, above mentioned methods not only help in developing speaking skill but the other skills as well. For e.g. when we are using strip story technique students should speak in order to communicate with their friends as well as they should develop a story based on the strips so that they will use different language functions while writing. They should listen the response of their friends as well as it may be necessary sometimes to read in order to complete the task.
Conclusion
The basic model of teaching language function can be the P-P-P model as in grammar teaching which means presentation, practice and production. Any language function can be taught being based on this model in an effective way. Regarding the techniques of teaching language function, role play is a very popular technique however; there are other techniques such as: strip story, communication games, communicative drill, oral speeches, information gap activities, pair work or group work etc. We can use these methods to teach language function to our learners. Moreover, while teaching language function to our learners we can develop other language skills as well.
References
Doff, A. (2010). Teach English. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Doff, A., Jones, C., Mitchell, K. (1997). Meanings into words (teacher’s book). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Richards, J.C. (2006). Communicative language teaching today. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ur, P. (2010). A course in language teaching. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Parmeshwor Baral
In our schools and colleges we want our students to pay full attention to us during lecture and full attention to their work during other activities in class. So when we hear any noise other than what we expect, we rush to the judgment that they are developing a bad habit and disrupting the normal functioning of teaching and learning in the classroom. But the reality might be something different than what we expect from our students. It is hard for us to see any other reasons for students to make noise in the class, other than a lack of attention, not understating our accent or ideas, lack of motivation, or just lacking the discipline in themselves or respect for teachers. I learned something else the hard way.
When I was teaching compulsory English in a class in Pokhara some years ago, I could not understand why three of my students, who I knew were academically successful students, constantly made noise. I wondered if my teaching and the classwork that I gave them was not interesting enough for them. I felt offended because it seemed that they were trying to undermine my authority in the classroom because I was a newly appointed teacher in the college after a teacher left in the middle of the year. Day after day I changed my strategy and teaching technique, and yet they were busy in making noise. Not that they interrupted the entire class, but they were still very distracting to me.
I consulted senior colleagues about the problem and no one was able to explain without being in the class. Someone said that they could be inattentive because they were sons of affluent families in town and they might have private tutors to teach them the content of my course afterwards in the day. That made me wonder why they would come to class in the first place, because if they didn’t want to I had no ways to oblige them.
After a while, I got a few opportunities to meet with those boys, when I asked them why they made noise during class. At first they tried to evade the question and then pretend to not know about the noise I was referring to. But one of them, Sasanka, apologized for the problem without telling me the reason for the noise. These students asked for some advice about the chapter that they were studying, and I responded to their needs.
When I came home that evening, I started thinking about how to integrate these students with the rest of the class and how to encourage them to be attentive in class. I kept trying my best, using different ways to make the class interesting and engaging for all students. One of the things that I did to engage this group of students was to give them specific activities after inviting the whole class to join the conversation, form discussion groups, or share ideas with the whole class. For instance, I told them to write a summary of a reading or respond to comprehension questions at the end of the chapter. Interestingly, the noise suddenly went away.
This incident made me realize that students not only make noise for all the bad reasons that we tend to think about. They may make noise in the attempt to be more engaged about what is going on in the class, the activity that we have given them—or for that matter that we have not given. Some groups bond well, and they engage themselves in critical discussions of the topic at hand. They need to be intellectually challenged. Yes, students may also start making noise when they don’t understand what they are being taught, like they may stop doing the activity they’re asked to do and start doing something unproductive if they don’t understand the given task well. These days, when I hear noise coming from any part of the classroom, I start thinking about positive causes of the noise, or positive things that I can do about the noise by challenging students to be “in class” intellectually and emotionally.
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Mr. President, You are aware that even while many of our fellow teachers across the country do not have access to the ELT resources, conversations, and communities on the web, the increasing number of Nepalese ELT professionals who have access look up to your office for supporting initiatives like Nelta Choutari from the level of policy, resources, or at least moral support and encouragement. What would you like to tell the readers of Choutari about how you have supported this or similar volunteer initiatives in the past?
NELTA has genuinely taken this issue and has adopted some strategies to address it. Part of the strategies, a number of the Journal of NELTA has been uploaded in its website in a pdf format so that many of our fellow teachers can have access to the journals free of cost. Moreover, NELTA recommends the Regional English Language Office (RELO) based in the US Embassy, Kathmandu for online teacher training courses for our members. Some of the NELTA members have already been benefited from these courses sponsored by the US State Department and conducted by the US universities. To take a few examples, some of our members from Surkhet, Dang, Gorkha, Birganj and Kathmandu have already completed the online courses, and some are doing it. Several NELTA members also got chance to participate in the series of webinars presented by the US professors and the ELT experts who have given considerable insight to our friends’ vocation.
In order to promote English language proficiency of the professionals in teaching and beyond, NELTA in collaboration with the US Embassy and Radio Sagarmatha aired English by Radio for one and half-year. The materials were developed by the NELTA experts. With the consent of NELTA, the US Embassy has arranged to air 54 episodes of the programs through ten FM stations in Nepal.
Considering the importance of Nelta Choutari, we have been disseminating some sample works in Choutari, among our fellow members on different occasions. One of the most important occasions to give its visibility is the international conference of NELTA, in which our colleagues give a plenary about Choutari to more than 700 participants. The conference will take place in Kathmandu on 18-20 February and in Chitawan on 22-23 February 2012. I would like to invite the ELT professionals to participate in the conference.
Choutari team–and other volunteer teams working for promoting professional development of NELTA members–have used approaches, platforms, and talents of its members in pursuing NELTA’s visions and missions towards supporting professional development needs of NELTA members. Please tell us a few specific ways in which you might have thought NELTA can collaborate with or support such volunteer initiatives.
First of all, I would like to take an opportunity to salute the Choutari team and volunteers for helping promote professional development of NELTA members through the regular publication of Nelta Choutari. Special thanks are due to Shyam Sharma, Bal Krishna Sharma, Kamal Poudel, Prem Phyak, Sajan Karn and Hem Raj Kafle.
NLETA highly regards the value of Choutari. However, just valuing it is not enough for promoting its visibility in the professional arena. The agenda has already entered in central committee meetings to print selected materials from Choutari and disseminate them among NELTA branches. NELTA has 33 branches across the country covering almost 50 districts. Given the need to reach widely, we are looking for resources for Choutari’s resources for teachers across the country.
Some other ways to support Choutari and similar initiatives would be to include their resources in the NELTA newsletter, journal, international conference booklet, flyers, website, etc., which is possible in terms of cost and efforts. I will certainly consider this as an agenda in the forthcoming meeting of NELTA, and I am sure my team will implement it immediately.
Choutari is a forward-looking professional development initiative in the sense that it seeks to build the platform before it even seems possible for many NELTA members to participate. What are some of NELTA’s official programs that similarly look into the future where you may want us to join hands with such initiatives?
NELTA has been exploring the opportunities for how it could be instrumental in developing the English language teaching situation in Nepal. NELTA, with the support of the RELO office has planned to donate the ELT books to all 33 branches of NELTA and 82 public schools. RELO office has kindly agreed to allocate 40,000 US dollars to buy the books and administer the donation programme. NELTA already received fifty per cent of the books and distributed them to 38 schools, many branches of NELTA, Tribhuwan University, Faculty of Education, Kathmandu University School of Education, Mahendra Ratna Campus, Tahachal and Gorkha Campus. Rest of the books will arrive in March, and then distribution will take place in rest of the branches and the school, including some education campuses in the country. These books will certainly be useful for the teachers and teacher educators to bridge the gap between the theories and practices so that they could share their views to others.
NELTA has started brainstorming for English by Radio program with a focus on the teachers. Moreover, discussions are underway to collaborate with the British Council for providing the NELTA members the access to the British Council global products.
We are also exploring the possibilities for how the Choutari can be linked with the websites of the British Council, RELO, IATEFL and TESOL so that more and more people can have better access to the resources. British Council has abundance of global products – many of them come online. TESOL has enormous online materials which could be shared with NELTA members via uplink. TEFL International is another key institution working for internationally accredited training such as TESOL Certificate and TESOL Diploma. The entire modules of TESOL Diploma are provided online. Collaboration between NELTA and TEFL International could be insightful to look into the opportunity for sharing the training materials.
Which Choutari article that you have read in the past three years did you like most and why?
There is no single article, I could refer to that I am impressed by. However, I would like to mention the one by Mr. Kent Grosh entitled ‘So Many Textbooks, So Little Time‘. Mr. Grosh begins with the practical notion of teaching mathematics linking the ideas of teaching English as a second language. In the context of Nepal, the teachers are obliged to rely on the textbooks to the great extent whereas majority of the textbooks are far too difficult compared to the learners’ schema. Consequently, both the teachers and the students waste a lot of time rather than being self-aware of critical thinking. Therefore, there is an urgent need of revisiting what we do and what we are required to do.
Please suggest any areas of professional conversation that Choutari is yet to pay attention to.
I would suggest publishing more practical teaching and learning tips in each issue of the Choutari.
Finally, do you have any message for Choutari readers?
First of all, the more the readers could disseminate the work of Choutari, the more English teaching professionals get access to the forum. I would like to urge the readers to provide comments and feedback regarding the materials published in Choutari and also submit articles, teaching and learning tips and life experiences related to teaching and learning of English.
Shailaja Jha
We all know that Nepal is an extremely multilingual society. But what is the status of multilingualism in educational context of Nepal? In this essay, I describe multilingualism and the spread of English in Nepal. I also discuss multilingualism as a means for creating social harmony as well as enhancing teaching and learning in general. I conclude by highlighting the role of teachers in promoting multilingualism.
Most of the Nepalese people are multilinguals, and many people don’t even have a clear order of first and second languages. For example, my home language is Maithili but, interestingly enough, I cannot speak it very well. Instead, I have learned Newari in addition to the mainstream language Nepali. This means that we are such a multilingual society that some of us even get confused as to which language is our “home” or “heritage” language. In fact, most of the world’s population speaks more than one language but most of the population in western cultures is monolingual in one of the “major” languages in spite of being exposed to other languages mainly in the school context. So, multilingualism is the norm rather than exception of human societies, except that educational and political institutions try to create artificial situations where one or a few languages are given systematic privilege without realizing that suppressing language diversity is counterproductive as well as insensitive.
“There are almost no territories [in the world] in which only one languages is used by the citizenry” (Cenoz & Genesee 1998). In South Africa eleven languages are given a constitutional recognition as official ones; in India, this number is twenty-two! When people are left to their own linguistic devices, especially in the urban environments which are increasingly the norm of life in this country, their speech behavior is characterized by fluidity, interconnection, multi component code switching and easy transcendence of notional linguistic boundaries. This is true particularly of informal domains.
Also, if we look at the issue of multilingualism in societies like Nepal, South Africa, and India, we will see that there is no single and simple definition of multilingualism. Multilingualism can be rigidly defined as being native-like in two or more languages, but it can also be loosely defined as being less than native-like but still able to communicate in two or more languages. Multilingual speakers have acquired and maintained at least one language during childhood, the so-called first language (L1). First languages (sometimes also referred to as mother tongue) are acquired without formal education, by mechanisms heavily disputed. Children acquiring two first languages since birth are called simultaneous bilinguals. Even in the case of simultaneous bilinguals one language usually dominates over the other. This kind of bilingualism is most likely to occur when a child is raised by bilingual parents in a predominantly monolingual environment. It can also occur when the parents are monolingual but have raised their child or children in two different countries.
Many people believe that Nepali language has always been the majority language of Nepal; in reality, Nepali was called Khaskura spoken by a group of people that was probably no larger than other groups like Magar, Tamang, Sherpa, or Limbu today. Nepali (Khaskura) evolved from the language spoken by a group that became politically powerful in the last two centuries, and in fact it also spread far and wide into Bhutan, India and Myanmar. Nepali language is also the official language of the state of Sikkim in India. At present, almost half of the total population of Nepal speaks Nepali; the other half of the population speaks almost a hundred different languages. If you think about it, Nepal is not only home to more language families than all of Europe combined, but also has more distinct and individual languages in one country than the whole of the European community (Yadava, 2003). However, there is the lack of study and discussion of endangered minority languages and the possible reasons of their status of being endangered for the integrated development of the country. Negligence of Government on Language policy towards poor, rural ethno-linguistic communities, and overemphasis on one language policy considering Nepali as the official language and as the medium of creating national identity and homogenization also can be pointed out major influential reasons for disregarding minority ethnic and indigenous languages. The state policy of the government takes endangerment and extinction of minority language as the matter of mere ‘language shift’ whereas the members from the ethnic and indigenous community might take it seriously as the matter of as Skutnabb-Kangas (2000) states as ‘linguistic genocide’. Some linguists diplomatically point towards political and ideological perspective in regard to the matter of endangerment, extinction of minority languages.
The newest and most important dynamics in Nepali multilingualism is the entry of English as a medium of education and a language of business, diplomacy, and cross-cultural communication. On the one hand, everyone knows the benefits of multilingualism: they would like to teach their children not only English but also other languages. But on the other hand, it is difficult for the next generation to develop the same level of language proficiency for academic and professional communication, for higher learning and sharing of complex ideas if they only use their local languages for basic communication and use English only for educational, professional, and intellectual purposes.
Educators understand that multilingualism helps to facilitate access to curriculum and to learning in school. It also improves communication between different linguistic groups. Multilingualism provides children with ability to share in a wide range of intercultural experiences such as literature, entertainment, religion, and other interests. Children can become fluent in more than one language and for many people throughout the world multilingualism is very common. The level of fluency depends on factors such as the language programme children follow in school and the extent of parental support. The ability to speak the mother tongue as well as the national language and an international language creates a much wider range of life choices for individuals but can also achieve national unity. There is no scientific evidence that learning more than one language is intellectually damaging. Children who have a good understanding of how different languages function are more likely to have good analytical skills and are often more effective communicators. Therefore, there is no doubt that multilingualism is a positive social and personal resource.
As teachers of language and literacy, we also know that there is no evidence to show that multilingual societies are more disadvantages than monolingual countries. Social disadvantage is caused by factors other than language. It is important educationally that children learn in their mother tongues in the early years of schooling. Our Government also make policy regarding this.
However, the forces of globalization, prevailing myths about the power of English (as if it is a magical potion that will create jobs and opportunities and intellectual progress on its own) make it very difficult for societies to develop educational systems based on their understanding of multilingualism. Due to the globalization of English, parents and teachers are attracted towards giving education to the students in English medium right from the very beginning. They wrongly believe that students will be able to better succeed in the competitive world if they have English proficiency. In reality, it is knowledge and skills that students most need. A lot of research regarding multilingualism shows that supporting children’s first language will enhance the acquisition of the second and third language. Similarly, there is a link between multilingualism and creativity. Multilingualism broadens access to information and offers alternative ways of organizing thoughts. But unfortunately, these realities get lost in the maze of myths about the magic of English.
Just consider the work of a businessperson; most business people need to travel around the world, communicate with people who speak different languages. It is very clear that if your students can speak multiple languages they will be much better business people who can not only sell better but will also create and maintain goodwill with a lot more people in the future. Or consider your students who may become diplomats, administrators and managers of multinational corporations or the United Nations, writers and journalists. There is no profession that I can think of where our students will not do better if they are multilingual. But remember, it will not be enough for them to “know” how to conduct basic communication in all the other languages except English. Only if we allow, encourage, and facilitate the use of multiple languages at higher levels of education can our students be efficient multilinguals in their future careers.
Many educators wrongly believe that promoting multilingualism is costly, impractical, or difficult. The reality is that such assumptions are simply wrong. Promoting multilingualism need not cost anything: you can just encourage your students to use and develop different languages by asking them to express their ideas in different languages in the classroom (maybe as long as everyone understands). Similarly, there is nothing impractical about equally respecting and promoting different languages that your students speak; instead, the opposite should be seen as unprofessional, unethical, and shameful for educated people and educators. Finally, multilingualism is becoming a profitable business in many areas. Think about a student who is able to translate documents. Realizing the importance of multilingualism, nowadays many software companies are developing multilingual interfaces, multilingual applications for translation, multilingual communicative mechanisms, etc.
Yet another problem with educators is that they believe that they are not qualified to teach or promote multilingualism. While it may be true that you are not “qualified” to teach different languages, there is no reason why you should not promote and encourage multiple languages among your students. And, there is absolutely no reason why you should suppress students’ languages. Just think about it: you have no right to do that in the first place.
Yes, politicians try to divide the society along linguistic lines. But as educators we can help our students speak the languages of different ethnic groups and thereby help them become cross-cultural citizens and promoters of cultural harmony. For this we need to realize that we are very rich in culture and its aspects, we need to utilize our culture to create peace and harmony among the people of Nepal not for fighting with each other in the name of culture and language.
As teachers of language in a rich multilingual country, it is our duty to facilitate multicultural education among our students. Trust me, if we do so we will not betray our students’ need to learn more English. If our students continue to learn new ideas, if they grow up as citizens of the world who understand and respect different cultures and their languages, in the long run, their English will be better. We need to prepare students for the real world and the real world is multicultural and multilingual. At the very least, we need to draw on students’ linguistic and cultural experiences and knowledge, allow them to utilize those resources, and never try to suppress them—whether intentionally or not. Teacher in multicultural classrooms should be open to their students and put forth the effort needed to know their students inside or outside the classroom. Evaluating cultural diversity, teachers should build multicultural programs, show appreciation of differences, avoid stereotypes, acknowledge differences in children and discover the diversity within the classroom. If we think about it, respect and promotion of multilingualism could be the basis for a new kind of thinking among the future leaders and citizens of this country—different from the monolingual presumptions that lie at the heart of violence, protest, strike, kidnap, rape, robbery and mass brutality in our time.
References
Crystal, D. (2003). Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Blackwell publishing.
The Interim Constitution of Nepal. (2007). Part 3, Article 17)
Phayak, P. (2009). MA in Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Institute of Education, University of London.
Yadav ,Y.P. (2007). Linguistic Diversity in Nepal Perspective on language policy, Kathmandu, Nepal.
Kansakar, T. R. (1996). Multilingualism. Nepal, Kathmandu.
Subedi, D.P (2010). Multi cultural classroom issues in the Nepalese context, Journal of Education and Research Nepal, Kathmandu.
Koirala B.N. (2010). Opportunities for multi lingual Education in Nepal, Journal of Education and Research, Nepal, Kathmandu.
As a member of NELTA, nothing could be more satisfying to me than to see a brand new branch coming into existence. On December 10, 2011, the Rautahat branch of NELTA was formally established amidst a programme held in Gaur, the district’s headquarters. Following the inauguration of NELTA Rautahat branch, a training (focusing on “Emerging Trends in ELT”) was led by Mr. Sajan Kumar Karn, executive member of NELTA Central Committee; the programme was actively participated by general and executive members of the new branch, as well as general members, members of the advisory committee, and guests. There were altogether 50 participants in the programme.
Inauguration Ceremony
The inauguration ceremony started with the singing of national anthem by students from International Bal Academy and lighting of 5 candles (representing each letter of N-E-L-T-A) by various dignitaries. Distinguished guest and facilitator Mr. Karn presented the “organizational profile” of NELTA with its history, mission, vision and goals, NELTA branches across the country, its various programmes and activities organized at branch levels and central level, collaboration and partnership with different national and international agencies. He also shared the branch-by-laws and requested all the participants of the programme to get associated with NELTA for the professional development.
The ad-hoc committee of NELTA Rautahat, which was chosen unanimously, was then announced (please see list below).
The inauguration programme concluded with best wishes from the Guest of Honour Yogendra Prasad Yadav. NELTA Rautahat constitutes 31 members of NELTA including 20 life members, 7 annual members and 4 life members who are already members at NELTA Birgunj from Rautahat.
Training Programme
With the aim of encouraging ELT aspirants to change, the training programme on “Emerging Trends in ELT” was organized following inauguration ceremony. Mr. Karn facilitated the training that was participated by 50 participants including English language teachers and students, campus principals and section officer of DEO Rautahat. He discussed paradigm shifts and the cause behind the emerging trends in ELT Today, thereby motivating the participants to adopt and adapt different changes taking place in ELT.
Some of those trends include learner autonomy, globalization and ELT, methodology and pedagogy, English versus Nenglish, digital ELT, and updating ELT practice. Mr. Karn urged the participants to grow more digitally in order to survive and succeed in the networked academic world.
Affiliate to a professional associationHe further made an appeal to update themselves convincing them stating that academic qualifications once acquired are not enough forever. He concluded the training suggesting the following different ways of updating oneself professionally:
Mr. Karn invited the participants to join the upcoming 17th International Conference and National Conference of NELTA to be held in February, 18-20, 2012 (3 Days) in Kathmandu and 22-23 February, 2012 (2 Days) in Chitwan respectively. He also requested them to visit www.neltachutari.wordpress.com www.nelta.org.np and www.neltabranches.pbwork.com. Finally, the participants shared their experiences and reflections, before they were given certificates of attendance. 
To conclude the day’s programme, Mr. Anil Kumar Nidhi, chair of NELTA Rautahat extended his gratitude to NELTA Central Office, all the participants and those who contributed in the formation of NELTA Branch in Rautahat district. The programme was conducted by Praveen Kumar Yadav, member of NELTA Birgunj.
Newly formed executive committee:
Members: Mr. Anil Kumar Nidhi as chair, Mr. Mukesh Prasad Patel as vice-chair, Mr. Sachindra Yadav and Mr. Upendra Raj Kafle as secretary and vice-secretary, Mrs. Anita Shrivastava as treasurer and executive members Mr. Dipendra Thakur, Mr. Jamun Yadav, Mr. Dharmendra Kumar Singh, Mr. Ram Kripal Yadav, Mr. Rakesh Sharma and Mr. Devendra Sah.
Advisors: Mr. Chandeshwor Raut, Mr. Asha Ram Sah, Mr. Ramanand Yadav, Mr. Chandrika Das and Mr. Devendra Yadav.
Madhav Raj Belbase
Are you teaching a writing course in a college of university in Nepal? If you are teaching in a school, is writing an important component of your language curriculum? Do you help your students write multiple drafts of a text or do you just ask them to submit final versions? Do you only provide a final score on students’ writing or do you provide feedback during different phases of their writing? Do you pay attention to the type of writing genre you are preparing your students for (e.g. emails, letters, websites, creative writing pieces like poems or essays, newspaper editorials, etc) or do you just focus on grammar, vocabulary and spelling? While the curricular mandates, time constraints, and availability of resources will largely determine what you can and cannot do, as teachers we also have a certain level of control over how we want to teach our students how to write and to facilitate their growth as writers.
Here is my proposal for teaching writing in our context—the process genre approach. In my experience, English teachers in the Nepalese context face unique challenges in teaching writing: while teacher education courses expose pre-service teachers with theories and ideas of teaching writing developed in the West, our teachings are mostly motivared by exam-driven product-based writing assignments that encourage students to reproduce what they learned in the classroom. Despite such tensions, “efficient teachers” can implement their “hidden” curricula where they can adopt an eclectic approach to teach writing and prepare students for the global world making them able to write a range of tasks, instead of just memorization and reproduction in exams. In order to build expertise in such a pedagogic skill, teachers need to be familiar with a range of teaching pedagogy options available to them. Here I try to present a model of an approach called the process genre approach that blends two approaches – the process approach and the genre approach. This approach takes account of different steps, for instance, preparation, modeling, planning, joint constructing, independent constructing, and revising and editing. However, before that I present some major shortcomings of product approach to writing which is dominant in the Nepalese context at present.
The product approach
In the product approach, according to Brown (1994), teachers focus on what a final piece of writing will look like and measure it against the criteria of vocabulary use, grammatical use, and mechanical considerations such as spelling and punctuation, as well as the content and organization. The normal procedure is to assign a piece of writing, collect it, and then return it for further revision with the errors either corrected or marked for the student to do the corrections. This approach has received much criticism because it ignores the actual processes used by students, or any writers, to produce a piece of writing. Yan (2005) claims that it focuses on imitation and churning out a perfect product, even though very few people can create a perfect product on the first draft. Another criticism is that this approach requires constant error correction, and that affects students’ motivation and self-esteem. The product approach does not effectively prepare students for the real world or teach them to be the best writers. I encourage the English teachers in Nepal to critically reflect on their approaches to teaching writing and think about making necessary changes.
The process approach
The process writing originated in the first language (L1) classroom, where it was developed in reaction to traditional types of teaching writing. This approach, for Caudery (1997), assumes that writing normally takes place through the making of series of multiple drafts of text. The process approach identifies four stages in writing- prewriting, drafting/composing, revising, and editing. These stages are recursive, taking place many times over in the course of composing. This approach emphasizes revision, and also feedback from others, so students may produce many drafts with much crossing out of sentences and moving around paragraphs. The correction of spelling and punctuation is not of central importance at the early stages. Caudery (1997) points out that the process approach is in many instances potentially extremely motivating and, to teachers and students alike. Most often it involves students in new and stimulating learning experiences. Peer feedback, for instance, is which students show each other their writing and obtain comments on it.
The genre approach
The genre approach to the teaching of writing developed as an approach inAustraliain the 1970s which is now gaining recognition throughout the world. By investigating different genres such as essays, editorials, and business letters students can perceive the differences in structure and form and apply what they learn to their own writing. Following Cope and Kalantzis (1993), the genre approach to writing consists of three phases: (1) the target genre is modeled for the students; (2) a text is jointly constructed by the teacher and students; and (3) a text is independently constructed by each student. Badger and White (2000) support that the approach acknowledges that writing takes place in a social situation and reflects a particular purpose and that learning can happen consciously through imitation and analysis, which facilitates explicit instruction. This approach seems more capable in showing students how different discourses require different structures. In addition, introducing authentic texts enhances students’ involvement and brings relevance to the writing process.
The process-genre approach
Today many ESL researchers have recognized that the teachers should not rigidly adopt just one approach all the time in the writing classroom. I also encourage English teachers in the Nepalese context to reconsider their own current practices and welcome insights from this model of teaching writing. Combining of approaches results in a new way of thinking about writing. One example is synthesis of the process and genre approaches, which Badger and White (2000) have termed the process genre approach. This approach allows students to study the relationship between purpose and form for a particular genre as they use the recursive processes of prewriting, drafting, revision, and editing. Using these steps develops students’ awareness of different text types and of the composing process. The different activities included in this approach ensure that grammatical and vocabulary items are taught not in isolation, but in meaningful, interactive situations and derived from the particular genre.
According to Badger and White (2000), the teaching procedure for the process genre approach is divided into the following six steps: (1) preparation, (2) modeling, (3) planning, (4) joint constructing, (5) independent constructing, and (6) revising. Figure 2 illustrates how these six steps interact in a recursive way with themselves and with other writing skills.
A short description of what occurs during the six steps will also illustrate how elements of the process and genre approaches work in unity.
Preparation
The teacher begins preparing the students to write by defining a situation that will require a written text and placing it within a specific genre, such as a persuasive essay arguing for or against an issue of current interest. This activates the schemata and allows students to anticipate the structural features of the genre.
Modeling
During this step the teacher introduces a model of the genre and lets students consider the purpose of the text. For example, the purpose of an argumentative essay is to persuade the reader to act on something. Next, the teacher discusses how the text is structured and how its organization develops to accomplish its purpose.
Planning
This step includes many meaningful activities that activate the students’ schemata about the topic, including brainstorming, discussing, and reading associated material. The aim is to help the students develop an interest in the topic by relating it to their experience. Since they have to participate and contribute in the classroom, learners will find the activities interesting and entertaining.
Joint constructing
In this step, the teacher and students work together as a beginning of writing a text. While doing so, the teacher uses the writing processes of brainstorming, drafting, and revising. The students contribute information and ideas, and the teacher writes the generated text on the black/white board. The final draft provides a model for students to refer to when they work on their individual compositions. It fosters collaborative writing. This step can be boosted by providing a very caring and sharing environment by the teacher. This step will provide students with a chance to write in a group and to prepare them for individual work.
Independent constructing
By this time students will have examined model texts and have jointly constructed a text in the genre. They now undertake the task of composing their own texts on a related topic. Class time can be set aside for students to compose independently so that the teacher is available to help, clarify, or consult about the process. The writing task can also be continued as a homework assignment. The teacher has to clarify what students should do for writing homework.
Revising and editing
Students lastly will have a draft that will undergo final revision and editing. This does not necessarily mean that teachers have to collect all the papers and mark them one by one. Students may check, discuss, and evaluate their work with fellow students, as the teacher again guides and facilitates. The teacher may make an effort to publish the students’ work, which will impart a sense of achievement and motivate the students to become better writers. Their final achievement will foster self-esteem among learners as they have produced something.
Final Thoughts
Things are easier said than done. Learning to write in a foreign language is a demanding task that can easily leave learners unmotivated. It can be more discouraging when students are evaluated on the basis of their writing products only, as we now observe in the Nepalese context. To combat this problem, teachers have to play more agentive role in order to empower the learners with their ability to perform real world writing tasks. We are not preparing our students just for exams, but for the global world that may require an unpredictable set of writing skills. We language teachers are the change agents even if our curricula are constrained. Use of the process-genre approach to writing allows teachers to help students recognize the steps they go through to create a written text which should lead to less stressful and motivated writing. The fact that learners are encouraged to discuss, asses, and analyze their own writing made them feel more confident and less threatened. Theoretical ideas can be confusing and conflicting at times; it is the teacher who is responsible for translating abstract ideas into a classroom practice. Further the practice to produce optimal learning benefits, teachers should constantly and systematically record, contemplate, and analyze what they have done in the classroom, and use their reflective experience as a basis for improving their instructional practice.
Works Cited
Badger, R. G. & G. White. 2000. A process genre approach to teaching writing. ELT Journal 54(2): 153-60.
Brown, H.D. 1994. Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy.Eaglewood Cliffs,NJ: Prentice Hall Regents.
Cope, B. & M. Kalantzis. (eds). 1993. The powers of literacy: A genre approach to teaching writing.Pittsburgh,PA:University ofPittsburg Press.
Coudery, T. 1997. Process writing. In Glenn, F. (ed). Writing in the English Language Classroom. Hertfordshire: Prentice HallEurope ELT.
Mandira Adhikari
Most of us teach large classes. One of the unavoidable challenges of having many students in the same class is that there will be a wide range of language proficiency levels in the class and it is hard for us to adjust our lesson plans to fit the learning needs of all the individual students. In this article, I want to share a few ideas about how to address that problem, additionally challenging the conventional wisdom that large classes only have drawbacks by showing that there are also benefits to large classes with mixed levels of ability.
In most of the schools of our country, whether private or public, there are more than 35 students in the same class. It is the duty of the single teacher to control them and to deliver the lesson plan effectively. I used to teach two different classes of the same grade in one of the schools. In one section, students were arranged in terms of their ability; average students were in a section and mixed students in another section. I used to prepare one lesson plan and teach in both the sections. There was no problem in the section where there were average students, but there was always problem in the class having mixed ability because some of them used to understand before I taught, but some of them didn’t understand even if I taught the same thing five times. Thus, the situation was really challenging for me.
Benefits of having mixed ability classes
Before I elaborate the challenges of mixed ability classrooms, let me quickly note that contrary to conventional wisdom, mixed level or multi-level classrooms can also have some benefits if teachers know how to make use of the difference as a positive asset.
Hess (2001) has presented some of the advantages in a mixed level classroom are as follows:
When there are students having mixed ability in the same classroom, each individual can bring different and new ideas. They may be from different cultural backgrounds having different world-views and values, which mean many different experiences and many styles of learning. If they share the same experiences with their friends the poor students can be benefitted as well as it will be helpful for the teachers as well. This ability of the students help the teacher to apply different student- centered methods inside the same classroom. So, students don’t need to depend only on the teachers for learning.
Mixed ability classes are really challenging. So while facing those problems, we need to develop new ideas and while dealing with such problems teacher also becomes creative in teaching which is interesting and it directly helps us to develop our professional skills because these types of situations provide opportunity to develop skill of facing problems, we sometimes can get new idea from our learners as well. Now let us look at the challenges.
Challenges of having mixed ability students in the ELT classroom
I have found most of the teachers are worried about having mixed ability students in the same classroom. It is because if there is variety in the classroom, it is very difficult for the teachers to implement their lesson plan because teachers need to take care of each student equally. It is difficult even for the students because those who understand easily feel bored with more explanation, but it is necessary for other students. Hess (2001) has presented some of the challenges that a teacher need to face in a mixed level classroom such as:
Thus, as Hess indicates, in a multilevel classroom teacher often feels out of control. In such classroom management becomes a formidable obstacle. In large multilevel classroom it is very difficult for the teacher to take his/her lesson ahead because some of them have better understanding than others. The most challenging job for ELT teachers in such classroom is to guide students according to their pace. The most difficult task in the mixed level class is the problem of managing the class and checking the home assignments. I have often found that in such classes active students are always active, whereas passive remains passive if the teacher doesn’t pay attention to them equally. As there are mixed abilities of the learners only one method isn’t suitable for all and it is again the challenge for ELT teachers to provide different techniques as their individual need and it is somehow impractical in practice.
Possible strategies to cope with the problem
As I have already mentioned there are a few benefits of having mixed level students in a classroom alongside more challenges of it. Let me now describe some of the strategies to cope with such problems. In order to handle such situations, teachers have to think in a different way. They need to find such strategies which will be helpful for all types of learners of the classroom. For example, audio- visual materials will be equally helpful for all the learners. Copur, in his article entitled ‘Coping with the problems of mixed ability classes’ has provided some points that are useful for ELT teachers to deal with mixed ability classes. They are: appeal to all senses, contingency plans, in-class activity, open ended plans, personalizing the tasks, games, competitions and dramatization, extra homework, portfolios, group-work activities, Self -access centers.
Therefore, to cope with mixed ability class, teacher has to think about such strategies so that it will be helpful for all the learners. Teacher can divide the whole class into different groups and different student centered methods can be very helpful such as: In-class activity, game competition and dramatization extra homework can be very helpful. Similarly, teacher can ask students to make their portfolios as well as self access centers will be very helpful for the learners to improve their study and motivate them towards learning.
Similarly, Sharma (2006) in her article entitled “Ways of effective language teaching in heterogeneous class” has presented some of the points to manage effective classes in heterogeneous classes or classes having mixed level learners. They are: planning, teacher’s leadership, communication, the well managed classroom, voice, effective presentation, pause and pacing, chunking, verbal aspect, visual, student’s participation, positioning, posturing and movement, movements, eye contact, gestures , use of teaching aids, and evaluation. Thus, above points are also helpful to deal with mixed level classroom because the planning and the leadership of the teachers are very helpful to deal with the situation. If ELT teachers are able to bring variety in the class, the chance of being out of track in the classroom decreases. Using different teaching aids in the classroom helps to motivate all the learners. Continuous evaluation of the learners helps teacher to identify poor learners so that they can improve them accordingly.
Conclusion
Mixed ability of the learners is universal and we find mixed ability students in almost all classes. There are challenges for the teachers to deal with such classes because there is variety and teacher feels out of control in such cases. But if we try to apply the benefit of such classes and apply learner centered methods inside the classroom it can be the easiest way to deal with stronger as well as weaker students. Teacher can apply different strategies for teaching four skills of the language, especially by specifying the different task for stronger as well as weaker students.
References
Hess, N. (2002). Teaching large multilevel classes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Negi, J.S. (2010) “Teaching English to Multilevel EFL learners in Large Classroom: A Pedagogical Discussion.” Paper presented at the 15th international conference of NELTA, Kathmandu, Nepal, 19-21 February 2010.
Sharma H.M. (2006) “Ways of effective language teaching in heterogeneous class. Journal of NELTA , 11(2), 115-118.
Uttam Gaulee
Although official statistics show a progressive improvement in elementary education in Nepal over the last several years, an alarming number of children are still not in school. The number of these children is more than one million according to Global Movement for Children. What does this data say about our education system? How does the government or our society look at education? Is education still a privilege or a right of every individual? Let’s look at these questions in the light of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Education For All (EFA) global initiatives. Furthermore, as teachers of language and literacy, let us consider the relationship between the big picture of education and the emphasis on “English as education” in Nepal. How would respect for and promotion of education in local languages make a difference? Would the use of local languages for literacy and education better connect formal education to informal learning in the world outside school?
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are the key development targets declared by world leaders at the end of the millennium. “Achieving universal primary education” is one of the key goals because without basic education, it is difficult to meet other goals which are related to hunger, poverty, health and environment. Hence, the goal to providing basic education to everyone has been the main agenda of international development even before the declaration of MDGs. Government of all countries including Nepal have already agreed to Education For All (EFA).
We know that a million children are not going to school, but we do not have statistics to show how many Nepalese people consider basic education a basic need and a human right. EFA is the official international declaration by all governments recognizing that basic education is the right of every individual. Government representatives from all around the world came together in Jomtein, Thailand in 1990 to declare unequivocally that every single person on earth needs basic education. The very first article of the declaration for Education For All clearly affirms the right of every individual—child or adult alike—to get fundamental education:
Every person – child, youth and adult – shall be able to benefit from educational opportunities designed to meet their basic learning needs.
This declaration stimulated governments to provide basic education to all. However, opening schools, having teachers and textbooks is not enough to provide education for all. There are many other issues such as the student’s personal, emotional, and linguistic and social backgrounds. We will discuss the issue of the dominant language here.
So, basic education is for all, but in which language? Providing education in one dominant language is the norm and that doesn’t serve the purpose for all in multilingual societies. Children who speak a language other than the language of instruction confront a substantial barrier to learning. Basic education should be given in the indigenous language of the children. This question cracks open another complicated question which has also been a matter of contention for a long time. The other question is related to the effectiveness of native language in instruction. Many studies have shown that instruction in native tongue is effective so much so that even proficiency of English or French language is better if taught using the mother tongue (Brock-Utne, 2000).
Africa is the continent where all kinds of language experiments have taken place. Most of Africa was colonized by England, France, and Portugal. The part of the continent colonized by England had English as the dominant language and this part was known was Anglophone Africa. Similarly, the part under the control of France had French as dominant language and was known as Francophone Africa. And, the part colonized by Portugal as Portuguese and was known as Lusophone Africa. Education was only available in the dominant language. The language barrier prevented many children from education. The language policy of such colonized countries was marked by the widespread use of the dominant language, particularly for pedagogical purposes. For example, mastery of French was the primary goal of education in Francophone Africa. Education in indigenous languages was also discussed. However, the opinions were divided and the opportunity of protecting and promoting indigenous languages was ironically foiled by the Africans themselves.
Taiwan’s case is one of the complex cases. While they had multiple indigenous languages, Mandarin remained the dominant language. Taiwanese people had a hard time protecting their local languages. According to Tsao (2008), Taiwan government had to introduce some measures to protect indigenous language such as:
However, after fifty years of high-handed promotion, Mandarin has become the first language of a large group of Taiwanese who have grown up speaking the language in public domains as well as in family. To these people, the use of such other Chinese varieties as Southern Min or Hakka is non-pragmatic and has no value other than fostering ethnic solidarity (Ibid, 287). Eventually, the current tendency is that the government, parents, and publishers all show a far more enthusiastic attitude toward the teaching of English than towards the teaching of local languages (Ibid, 293).
It is not uncommon to consider the mastery of the dominant language as the goal of education itself. It has happened in many societies in various times in history. Bruck-Utne mentions that French was considered to be the education (p. 144) in West Africa, when it was colonized by the French (as mentioned above). While considering mastery of a language as education maybe ridiculous, it is endemic. In Nepal, government has produced textbooks in indigenous languages and opened schools in order to provide elementary education in students’ own vernacular. Ironically, studies have found that parents are not willing to send their children to those schools fearing that their children will remain marginalized forever by doing so. They want their children to learn the widely spoken language Nepali. Moreover, more and more parents in urban areas are sending their children to English medium schools. They want their children to be proficient in the “language of the world.” People listen to you if you speak English, no surprise English is largely taken as the language of education. Anyone found to be speaking in local language is fined in many prestigious schools in urban areas. Actually, children watch each other and report on who breaks the so called rule. This phenomenon has been poignantly depicted by Bruck-Utne in the African context. She metaphorically describes this situation as children being turned into witch-hunters and traitors to their own linguistic community (p. 145).
Now, does that happen in Nepal and Africa only? Indian scenario is not very different. Although English has official status of assistant language, it is the most important language of India. It is the most commonly spoken language after Hindi and probably the most read and written language. Indians who know English will always try to show that they know English. “English symbolizes in Indians minds, better education, better culture and higher intellect” (Daniel, 2000). My curiosity prompted me to look how it is working in China, where people are aggressively learning English. I ended up with a projection that “. . . by 2025 the number of English-speaking Chinese will exceed the number of people speaking English as a first language in the rest of the world” (Andrews, 2011). Here’s a video link describing the “craze for English” in China which my colleague Shyam suggested. As teachers, policy makers, researchers, what do we do about this reality? Maybe we can’t do anything about it. Maybe we can.
There are arguments that the spread of the English language all over the world did not happen automatically. This has been systematically proliferated by agencies and this proliferation is still on. Languages are often imposed by powerful countries to foster their own languages. Robert Phillipson‘s book, Linguistic Imperialism published in 1992 discussed this issue in great detail. Brock-Utne has strongly denounced the politics of donors to support English or French language by the proliferation of English or French text-books. She argues that Britain and France want to recolonize the African minds through these languages again. According to her, these countries first spend money on expanding the use of their language and then ultimately aim to create more demand of English textbooks and materials. Among bilateral donors, however, there are also those that support the use of African languages as a language of instruction, first and foremost the German development agencies such as DSE and GTZ and the Swiss. There are also examples of financial support given by Nordic NGOs and Nordic donors to publishing of learning materials in local languages (Brock-Utne, p. 162). Why do parents, societies, and educational systems favor dominant languages against their own local languages? One of the most important reasons for this is the invisible hands of money. When countries or educational establishments receive cash from someone, they have to meet the expectations of the donors.
The questions remains: what do we do as educators about the fact that people and societies and entire nations favor dominant languages and often destroy their own indigenous linguistic, cultural, epistemological heritages? Is it part of our job to worry or do anything about it? Or is this a question that is more relevant for policy makers than for teachers? Is it worth fighting the fight? If yes, for what reasons? Is it an academic issue or a political one?
An English teacher who has taught for three decades in the Gulf, Patricia Ryan makes a very sensible point that as educators there is no reason why we should suppress linguistic diversity in favor of a misguided craze for a world language. She says in this Ted video that we do need a global language but we need more than that. We need to promote multilingualism because languages are the storehouses of knowledge. We need the global language to learn from other societies and share our knowledge with others. With a foreign language as the only medium of learning and expressing thought, the very development of thought process will be negatively impacted in the first place, and we will not receive a great return by emphasizing too much on the language itself.
Are we just jumping on the bandwagon with the masses, are we more interested in the donors than our students’ learning . . . or are we thinking and working like informed educators?
Andrew, G. (11, March, 2011). China makes unprecedented English-language push. In Indianapolis Business Journal. Retrieved from: http://www.ibj.com/
Brock-Utne, B. (2000). Education for All—In Whose Language? In Whose Education for All? : Recolonization of the African Mind. London, UK: Garland Science.
Daniel, A. (2000). English in India. Retrieved from: http://adaniel.tripod.com/Languages3.htm
Global Movement for Children (2011). Nepal: Disadvantaged Children Missing Out on Education. Retrieved from: http://www.gmfc.org/en/about-us/introduction/about-this-site
Tsao, F. (2008). The language planning situation in Taiwan : An update in Kaplan, R.B. and Baldauf, R.B. (ed.) Language Planning and Policy in Asia, Vol 1 : Japan, Nepal, Taiwan and Chinese Characters.
World Conference on Education for All Meeting Basic Learning Needs (5-9 March, 1990). World declaration on education for all and framework for action to meet basic learning needs. Jomtien, Thailand.
What do you think about Nelta Choutari? What kinds of new materials would you like us to include in the future? These were questions that we asked our readers, writers, and well-wishers a few days ago. For supplementing to the responses that we received, Praveen Kumar Yadav, one of the most active participants in Choutari, kindly provided us with similar responses that he had collected last year. These responses highlight the importance of professional networking and knowledge-sharing in which we engage as a community. Enjoy!
“For me, Nelta Choutari is a source of fresh ideas about ELT which helps me continue in my ELT journey better and faster.” – Hari Maya Sharma, Gorkha Campus, Gorkha
“I am currently teaching a compulsory subject in Hong Kong, and about half my students are of Nepali descent. Reading the blog makes me focus more on teaching them English as a foreign language.” – Carlos Soto, University of Hong Kong
“Nelta Choutari is a very special resource for professional development for me, because I use it for updating my professional understanding with new information in ELT theories and practices, finding lesson plans to teach various aspects of ELT, reading the wonderful stories of our friends’ experiences, reading the reflections and best practices of our friends from home and abroad, and expanding my network with colleagues at home and abroad. This forum has also given me some space to share my professional experiences and learn from NELTA colleagues while working in leadership positions.” – Ganga Ram Gautam, Immediate Past Present of NELTA, Kathmandu
“NELTA Choutari is a live platform for the ELT community from Nepal and abroad, providing excellent opportunities to teachers for sharing their practices with others from around the world. Of course, it is only available to those who have access to the internet.” – Prithvi Shrestha, Lecturer in ELT, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
“A forum that inculcates your skills and knowledge required to be a professional English teacher.” – Mukunda Kumar Giri, Surkhet
“Nelta Choutari is a good platform for English language teachers and practitioners to share our experiences and learn from one another. It is an e- rendezvous for those who belong to English language/literature teaching and learning.” – Ishwor Kadel, Chitwan
“Professionalism is all about sharing and being updated with the emerging trends. Choutari helps us with professional development by allowing us to participate in professional conversations about ELT.” – Uttam Kumar Gaulee, Fulbright Scholar, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
“NeltaChoutari is an open forum for all those inclined to teach English and interested in sharing their ideas and experiences with others. It serves as a common platform with equal recognition of all participants, which I have found highly motivating. Choutari has the potential of bringing together English teachers, educators and students for highly productive conversations about different issues on English language teaching and learning.” – Suresh Shrestha, Zenith English Language Institute Birgunj
“NELTA Choutari is a professional blogging webzine that helps the ELT Practitioners all over the world get to know about recent trends and developments in the field of ELT.” – Eka Dev Adhikari, Jana Jagriti Higher Secondary School, Pithuwa, Chitwan
“It’s a forum for the professionals to write, read discuss and comment and become professionally stronger.” – Dinesh Raj Dahal, Janajyoti Higher Secondary School, Sindhuli
“The monthly webzine of NELTA, NeltaChoutari is a powerful resource for whole ELT community of Nepal.” – Ashok Raj Khati, Gauri Shankar Multiple Campus, Ramechhap
“Choutari is praiseworthy as it is, but it would be better if it could address real problems that we teachers face in our classrooms. Choutari should be the place where people share their ground realities and get ready to face them with domestic weapons next time.” – Ishwor Kadel
“I would like to see additional materials of oral literature, sharing of best practices from home and abroad, links to professional development opportunities such as scholarships and fellowships, links to classroom materials for teachers of all levels of education etc. I sincerely thank the Choutari team for working so hard for the benefit of the Nepali ELT community, and I am sure that this forum will prove itself as an ELT antenna to help us develop as well as access the best ELT materials available worldwide.” – Ganga Ram Gautam
“Real case studies to let readers learn how students are improving their English language from their classroom activities. ” – Mukunda Kumar Giri
“NeltaChoutari has already initiated to encourage and connect more and more teachers and students of English. It can be more general and reach the grass-root level even better. It has not yet reached students of education in colleges and universities.” – Suresh Shrestha
“[To increase readership] Spreading the word through branches, coordinating with the ministry of education, department, district education offices and resource centers, advertising in national media, particularly in “Shikshak” magazine might be effective. Also, rewarding or recognizing the comments from readers such as “the comment of the week” could work. New contributors should be encouraged.” – Uttam Gaulee
“Choutari should continue to work in the development of ELT situation in the country by bringing out articles from across the world, discussing issues regarding ELT and asking the experts to comment and commend in the webzine and help foster the situation.” – Eka Dev Adhikari
“It should touch the reality of Nepalese ground. We are following others’ practices but not focusing on what our reality is. No doubt, it should update us on modern practices around the world, but it is far more necessary to look at what our fellow teachers at home are doing and help them when they are at crossroads of new challenges and confusions about teaching English in their situations.” – Hari Maya Sharma
“I am not local to Nepal, but I do get a sense in reading the blog about the local context. I also see conditions which are less bound in local context that I can relate to. The blog creates a strong link between teaching and research, which is important. [I recommend] More articles which explicitly link theory with classroom practice.” – Carlos Soto
“Choutari should increase readership widely, connect the ELT practices of remote parts of Nepal to the rest of the world, and support the teachers working in those areas” – Ashok Raj Khati
“Choutari should address the readers in rural and marginalized areas with the discussions and guidelines on practical issues.” – Dinesh Raj Dahal
“For increasing the readership of Choutari, NELTA should produce monthly or bi-monthly Choutari bulletins for students and teachers, teachers should encourage their students to visit the site, Choutari should create more space for young writers including university students, add interaction between students and teachers, and add articles that have direct relevance to teaching in the classroom in Nepal.” – Suresh Shrestha
“Choutari already publishes a variety of articles, anecdotes and classroom tips, and continuing them in the light of the changing landscape of ELT including the influence of language learning technologies would be great. A minor suggestion is to minimise long articles for Choutari as they can be published in the Journal of NELTA.” – Prithvi Shrestha
“I would like to suggest Nelta to include the following in the coming days: 1. It should address the issues related to nepalese teachers of english language; 2. In the coming days Nelta Choutari should incorporate those issues which have been facing by Nepalese teachers along with their solutions.” Parmeshwar Baral, P. N. Campus, Pokhara
Under its “Oral History” project, Choutari has been collecting and publishing interviews with teachers from across Nepal. This interview was taken by Hem Raj Kafle with Mr. Prem Subedi, a seasoned English teacher who had also taught Hem in high school a long time ago. Mr. Subedi remembers his early days of teaching, shares a few things that he wants to remember and value about being a teacher, and reflects on the changing ways in which we teach. He suggests that good teaching is the same whether you teach in a city or the rural backwaters of Nepal. He adds that in order to be a teacher you need some special qualities.
As we enter a new year in our professional lives, let us consider what qualities we want to cultivate as teachers. Let us also think how we can share ideas and support for one another across geographical and sociocultural borders.
on behalf of Hem Raj Kafle
Shyam Sharma
Shyam Sharma
Dear Colleagues,
We have a great set of materials for you this month, including entries about the status/role of women in academe, Quality Circles, ELT program building, envisioning one’s role as a teacher, developing your professional learning network, and a spicy entry on Nepali English!
We hope that you will enjoy the entries and also contribute your thoughts as comments to the posts. It doesn’t matter if you have a grand idea or a related experience that you can quickly share, and it doesn’t matter if you are an expert on the subject and want to add to the author’s idea or if you are not very familiar with the topic and just want to ask a question. It is important to share an idea or experience, to add something to the conversation. With that request, here are the ELT khuraks of this month:
1. “Why Can’t Women Do It?” — a book review and reflection on the phenomenon called the Madam Curie complex, by Sewa Bhattarai
2. “Quality Circle for Life: A Quest for Possibility” — an essay adapted from a conference paper on Quality Circles in education, by Lekhnath Sharma Pathak
3. “Learning-Centered ELT Programs in Nepal” — an article on how to make language classrooms as learner-centered as possible, by Krishna Bista
4. “What-like What-like English?” — an entry that includes some humorous examples of Nepali English in private schools, by Parmeshwar Baral
5. “Knowing Your Role as a Teacher” — an essay about the use of metaphor for developing awareness about the type of role we want to play as teachers, by Bal Krishna Sharma
6. “The Power of Professional Learning Networks” — an essay about the importance, benefits, and process of developing networks for learning and sharing ideas for professional development as teachers-scholars, by Shyam Sharma
Happy reading!
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IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT
For the Third Anniversary issue of Nelta Choutari, we are currently accepting contributions. Please send your work—essays/brief articles, narratives, reports/updates, reflections, commentaries/opinions, etc—to neltachoutari @ gmail . com. Please see submission guidelines here.
A book review and reflection on Julie Des Jardines’s The Madam Curie Complex
Sewa Bhattarai
If women really are talented and can do anything that men can, why are there few famous women philosophers, scientists, writers, musicians, and politicians? Why have women been unable to achieve anything notable in history? Are women really oppressed or are they making much ado about nothing? Underlying these questions continuously thrown at women is the assumption that opportunities are available equally to men and women, but women are just not capable enough to utilize them. This issue of women’s inability to break the glass ceiling seems striking to education in general and ELT in particular, because growing up I have heard these limitations resonate in the experience of every female teacher in Nepal (my mother and several aunts being among them). Though teaching is a popular occupation with women, very few women are found in positions of leadership. The widely adopted explanation for this phenomenon is that women can only do women’s work: housekeeping, cooking and raising babies. In this post, I first share a review of the book “The Madam Curie Complex” by Julie Jardines, who completely overturns this traditional view. I then ask readers to consider how the situation compares to the field of Nepalese academia.
Jardines has researched and listed a number of limitations faced by women in science. Interestingly, those limitations sound eerily familiar to any woman in higher education, and even more so in societies like Nepal. Jardines begins the book by tracing the image of science right from the foundations of Western thought. The earliest philosophers like Aristotle and Plato declared that men are objective and analytical, while women are feelers and sentimental beings. Other rational thinkers also Descartes followed in the tradition and perfected this image. The field of science, as a result, has come to be seen as very virile and physical. In the post- World War II era, following the success of atom bomb, scientific victories were treated like military or sports victories. Male scientists, including Albert Einstein, became a prominent part of art and culture, featuring in superhero movies. Already, the well was poisoned against women who wanted to become scientists. How did the definition of science as male affect women scientist?
Madame Curie is probably the most famous woman scientist of all. After radium was discovered, the French academia lobbied to have the prize given only to her husband, just because Marie curie was a woman. Even though she had started the work on radium before her husband Pierre joined the team, and she was the team leader even after her husband joined. Her husband insisted to the Committee that his wife was the driving force in the research before the committee relented and awarded the prize to the couple. Even so, at the award ceremony the prize giver quoted the biblical story of Adam and Eve “God saw that man was alone and sent him a helpmeet.”
Such condescending attitudes awaited all women who wanted to pursue a career in science. Jardines lists the case of a woman whose examiner did not come to take her oral exam and said he had been sleeping, though it was 2 pm. Women who graduated in the traditionally male fields did not find employment. Like many other women, Ellen Swallow Richards took on menial job as a janitor and sweepers just to be a fly on the wall and learn about her subject anyhow. A talented woman like Rosalyn Yalow who later went on to win the Nobel prize in physiology had to take stenography courses because no one would employ her.Due to anti nepotism policies active in those days, only one of the spouses was employed by an organization. Unsurprisingly, it was mostly the male half of the couple who was employed, even if he was less qualified than his wife. Marie Curie’s husband was appointed a professor at university while she was not. And after the death of Pierre, she was allowed to take over his post, but not as a full professor that he was, only as an assistant professor. Laura Fermi, the wife of Enrico Fermi was herself a fully qualified scientist before she gave up her career to pave the way for her illustrious husband.
Besides the sneering attitudes of the top people in the field, women also faced many practical day to day problems. There were no often no women’s bathrooms in the buildings. Women were often barred from attending public lectures because there were no female seats. Men bonded over nights out at bars and made work related decisions while socializing, which women were not allowed to attend.
And what was happening to these women’s home lives as they struggled inthe professional arena? Today, Madame Curie is remembered as a motherly figure who had nothing on her mind but to discover a cure for cancer through radium. But the reality was far from it, Madam Curie had no interest in curing cancer, but instead was a very passionate scientist. This image of a motherly, caring woman was created for the sake of publicity so that more women could identify with her and fund her to get more radium. The slightest departure from this image could be disastrous: when Marie Curie won her second Nobel Prize, it did not make much news because the newspapers were busy writing about her alleged affairs. These allegations destroyed her reputation; in contrast, the affairs of Albert Einstein were treated indulgently by the press.
Other women scientists also struggled to maintain such an image, without which they were shunned by the larger society. Even though they were scientists, they were expected to fulfill all the duties of a mother. Rosaline Gilbraith was said to sew buttons, make lunch, and attend all the school plays for her children, while Rosalyn Yalow lived only one mile away from her laboratory so that she could walk there after she had put her children to sleep. Even Marie Curie’s otherwise supportive husband left the childcare to Marie and his father. Jardines quotes Charlotte Whitton who famously said that “a woman has to work twice as hard to be thought half as good as a man.”
And if any woman, despite these hardships, managed to climb the ladders of her professional career, she would face the biggest roadblock of all: the Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize is awarded to at most three people at a time. Rosalind Franklin unluckily happened to be the fourth partner in the team that won the prize for discovering the double helix structure of DNA . Naturally, she was the one axed from the team, even though it was her photograph that provided conclusive evidence of the structure.
For a woman, it was not enough to be talented to be recognized. They also had to be patronized by the men in the field. Exceptionally talented women like Lisa Meitner, whose work contributed to building the atom bomb, ended up losing out on the prize. Meitner’s partner of thirty years Otto Hahn received the prize alone. As a consequence, Jardines calls the life of Maria Mayer charmed, even though she had taught without pay for most of her life as no one would give her work. Mayer won the Nobel prize for her work. Her husband was a physicist and she socialized with other respected physicists like Enrico Fermi. In contrast, talented women like Eleanor Lamson, Florence Sabin and Williamina Fleming, who had no defending husbands like Pierre Curie, were employed in subordinate positions while the credit for their work was taken by their male superiors. Jardines acknowledges that Nobel Prize discrimination sometimes happens to men too. However, the ratio of discrimination towards deserving women is much higher than the same for their male counterparts.
Many of these problems do not exist any longer. We have laws in place that bar discrimination, and many people have begun to concede that women can be successful in scientific careers. Many (not all, but many) men are willing to help out in the house and coordinate double careers. Thankfully, women can usually find bathrooms at workplace. And yet, the ratio of women in science remains low. A typical engineering class contains about 10% of girls. Girls are even rarer to find in pure science subjects like pure math or physics.
Many of the social glitches that dogged these earlier women still continue to pester today’s women in all fields of career. Jardines writes that once at a conference, a humorous picture of a bikini clad woman was displayed, and the men present burst out in raunchy jokes. How is a woman to handle a misogynist joke? Should she laugh along and hurt her feelings? Or should she express her feelings and jeopardize her career?Most of the socializing takes place in the evenings over drinks. In Nepal, most women still do not stay out late and drink. Work ideas are shared and camaraderie is built over the socialization, out of which most women are shut off.
In conclusion, this book gives an insight into the systematic exclusion of women from science. Jardines explains why it was so hard for them to make inroads into science and proves that the absence of women in science is not a factor of their genetic makeup. In fact, these insights are helpful for women in any field to realize the limitations facing them, and to gradually face these challenges. Hopefully, as time passes and more and more women enter all kinds of subjects, the path will be easier for future women.
As stated above, teaching is a popular career for women, maybe because it falls in the traditionally feminine fields of caring and nurturing children. Today there may even be more female teachers than male teachers in Nepal. But it would be laughable to say that a Nepalese woman can move ahead in her career as well as her male counterparts just by the dint of her talent and hard work. First, the gender hierarchy that prevails in the Nepalese culture as a whole largely shapes the roles that men and women play within the academia: men are expected to, want to, and quite often have the privileges to take relatively superior roles like that of administrators and supervisors compared to women. Second, the burden of work that women have at home doesn’t allow them to invest nearly as much time, to gain as much academic/professional expertise, and to aspire as much as men at work. Third, women who do desire and get into leadership positions are not given the same respect by men simply because they are not men. Fourth, when women are elected or invited to take on roles with authority and leadership, men tend to see their very entry into the position as representation. It would be rare for men to see the entry of a woman into the scene as a privilege for the men to have a female colleague who can add new perspectives and strengths to the institution/organization and its mission. I could go on, but I will leave it there and ask you to add your own perspectives on the issue. I hope you will join the discussion and point out issues that you have observed or experienced in Nepal.
Which of the situations described in the review above have you seen happen in Nepal? Does a particular example resonate with your or one of your colleague’s professional experience in the academia? How far have we come from, say, 30 years ago in terms of women leading or shaping the field of education? I would be delighted to read comments from the NELTA community about this subject.
Lekhnath S Pathak
Tribhuvan University/QUEST-Nepal
Introduction In a previous entry that I contributed to this blog (where I am delighted to see many responses from readers since it was published two years ago), I had focused on Quality Circles within the context of ELT. This entry deals with how tools and techniques as used in Quality Circle may also be used in various aspects and stages of life. If you are wondering why the larger issues of life matters to us as English teachers, the simple answer to that is that enhanced motivation, productivity, and satisfaction in life outside shape and influence students’ learning and success in school. So, let’s see the implications and application of QC in life at large.
From Industry to Education
The concept of Quality Circle originally extended from the industry in which the focus was on the enhancement of the quality of the products in the industry to the educational institutions in which the focus is on the enhancement of the quality of the human resource. Japan, an emerging super power during Second World War which could destroy one of the strongest frontiers of the USA, Pearl Harbor, got a severe jolt when America destroyed its two big cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The subsequent years saw the depression among Japanese and it took them over a decade to get back to its feet. From military, Japan began to focus on economy. But the Japanese products around that time were very poor and didn’t have world market. So, one of the things that the Japanese did in order to come out of that desperate situation was to invite a brilliant American scholar named Dr. W. Edwards Deming, who, in his famous lectures “urged managers, engineers and scientists to adopt 14-point principle which called for everyone to look at quality management from different perspective which we today know as Total Quality Management” (Chapagain, 2006:137)
It is this adoption of TQM that revolutionized the Japanese industry and we saw the emergence of Japan as a leading economy in the world market. Many educational leaders around the world then adopted and adapted concepts of TQM to enhance teaching and learning. Prof. Dinesh Chapagain has been its harbinger in Nepal, who introduced it into Nepali academia in 1999. Since then it has been growing rapidly in the schools across Nepal through QUEST (Quality Circles in Education for Students’ Personality Development) –Nepal established in 2006
Slowly, in the development of SQC movement, a further possibility of extending the concept to different stages of life is also being explored. The concept seems to have tremendous possibilities. Let’s try to explore whether this concept can be made to work to make our life better managed and more qualitative.
The four stages of life
If we apply the four stages of life – brahmacharya, grihastha, sanyasa and banaprastha– as outlined in Hindu philosophy, in our life, which seems to have a universality, it can be broadly discussed in the following ways. It is in these four divisions that the possibility of applying quality circles is explored in this essay.
1. Brahmacharya ashram:The Life of Preparation
Brahmacharya means celibacy, or a stage meant for preparing oneself for intellectual life, abstaining from any other attractions of society. In our case, a student’s entire academic life from day care to post graduate degree may be considered to constitute this stage.
At this backdrop, we have initiated Students’ Quality Circles (SQC) in Nepal and other parts of the world where this approach is applied at the school level among the students in the age group roughly 8-18 years. In our case, so far, we have started as early as with grade five students to grade nine students, with some higher grade students also undertaking the case studies and now attempts are also being made with lower grade students as well.
The main focus of SQC has been on human resource development, by teaching students to solve their own problems, be it at home or in the school. “That the problem gets solved is only a by-product of this approach, the end product is the evolution of a child into a complete human being” (Pathak, 2009). This is what we have started to call in the field of SQC as TQP, Total Quality Person.
In this approach, likeminded students form a circle of 4-10 students, who identify the problems that they are facing either at home or in the school, by brainstorming. Once the problems have been listed, they are prioritized in order of importance by collecting data from around the school and narrowed down to ultimately on one problem. The main causes and root causes are identified using Ishikawa (also called cause-and-effect or fish-bone) diagram. Countermeasures are planned after identifying the causes and implemented and monitored using control chart and the result compared after certain period as planned before. If the problem has been solved, another cycle is started otherwise further future plans are made to eliminate the problem completely.
The kinds of problems that the students take up are like bullying, use of filthy language in the school, excessive TV watching, exam phobia, dirty school premises and so on. They are taught to start with their own problem only which can be solved by their own initiative. For example, they are not encouraged to work on problems like too much theoretical classes or strict teachers, unless they can solve the problems on their own.
The children learn the steps of problem identification, analysis and solving. Use of basic Quality Control tools is what the children began to work with. Using check sheet to collect data, plotting and organizing data using line graph,bar graph and pie-chart, using Pareto diagram to prioritize the problems, fish bone diagram to systematically summarize the relationships between problem characteristics (the effect) and their causes, control chart at the solution implementation level to check whether a method adopted for an activity or a process is within control or not, scattered diagram to check for correlation between the sets of data. It is the ability to play with these tools in problem solving that makes children smart and infuses in them the skill of scientific problem solving attitude. The ability to use these tools also prepares them for higher order professional skills.
Brainstorming for ideas at different stages of problem solving, adoption of PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) cycle as suggested by Deming to continuously improve the situation, the use of 5W1H questions at the level of implementation plan are basic to Students’ Quality Circles.
SQC movement that is spreading in schools in indifferent parts of the word is preparing students with scientific problem solving mind set and thus is making them GOOD and SMART so that they can embark on the second stage of life as adults more successfully and meaningfully.
2. Grihastha Ashram: The Life of Settlement
This is the most active and most meaningful stage of one’s life: when an individual marries, settles down in life, has children and has taken up a job or started one’s own enterprise to be able to live the life well. The stage can fall roughly between the age of 25 and 50. In our case upto around 60 years (58 years is the retirement age for bureaucrats and 63 for teachers). If this stage has not been managed well, life becomes a complete waste. This is the stage of family and profession (which is to sustain the family). It can be called the age of Responsibility, in which one is to take upon the responsibility of the family: spouse and children and also of parents; the responsibility in the workplace, no matter what kind of job or profession one holds; the responsibility towards oneself for one’s own growth.
At this stage, one will have to manage home and work well. Both are complementary to each other. Therefore, a balance of professional and personal life is necessary. It is here that the adoption of Quality Circle to suit the situation might come handy.
Quality Circle at home
The domestic problems at home need very sensible handling so that the problems are solved without blaming anyone at home and maintaining the family harmony. The problems that can occur at home can be sibling rivalry, too much demand in children from the parents to perform better, parent dependent children, eating habits of children, too much of TV watching by children, paying less attention to the studies, children wasting food, eating junk food rather than home cooked food and so on.
Forming a circle at home: The circle can be formed consisting of both the parents or parents and grandparents depending on their relationship and presence and among the children. Or, the entire family can form one circle since the problem relates to everybody at home, every member can become involved in problem solving. This will also increase understanding and bond in the family. The most assertive member, be it the father or the mother can become the leader of the circle to ensure implementation of the solution. It will not require presentation at the end but final evaluation and further steps will be useful.
The same tools, techniques, and steps would be applicable.
Quality Circles in work places
Quality Circles, actually, started from the work places. When Ishikawa introduced it in Japan, it was in the work place only – in the industries, where the workers and supervisors worked on improving the quality of the goods produced.
What kind of Quality Circles can we have in work places? It depends on the profession we are in. So we can have Teachers Quality Circle, Principals Quality Circle, Managers Quality Circle, likewise circles for doctors, nurses, engineers, journalists, cooks, police, army, traffic, clerks, politicians and so on.
Each of these works and professions will have their own kind of problems. Teachers may have the problem of how to make the class more effective, how to relate more effectively with the students and management. Principals may have the problem of how to mobilize and make the best use of the resources, how to keep the teachers and students happy, how to get the most of their efforts. Grihastha Ashram is the most active and productive stage of one’s life. It is managing this stage more effectively that ensures the future of oneself and one’s progeny. The tools and techniques of Quality Circles can be easily modified to suit any of the profession. The circles can be formed based on the size and sections of the profession.
3. Sanyasa Ashram: The Life of Retirement
This is the stage of Retirement. This stage can last after your retirement till you can lead an active life. Let’s say this could mean 60 to 75 years. This leaves us with more than half a decade of active life even after retirement. This is the stage when we are done with the responsibility towards family and work place. The children by now are mostly grown up and settled. And one is free with one’s life. This stage can be managed well by making voluntary contributions to the society, to improve the situation in and around.
In this context, it is pertinent to recall the Senior Quality Circle initiated by Prof. Richard Ennals of Kingston University, UK. In the paper, he presented in the 13th International Convention of Students’ Quality Circle, in Kathmandu in 2010, he writes:
We argue the case for a new structure towards the end of working life, as older workers, including teachers, prepare for the transition to life outside work, or after work. Older workers accumulate experience, skill and tacit knowledge, which may be lost to the education system when they retire. Senior Quality Circles could have an important role in intergenerational learning. Furthermore, they provide a filter and translation facility between the technologically driven world of younger generations, and the human-centred concerns of older generations, whose lives could indeed be eased by the appropriate use of technologies to assist living (Ennals:2010)
This stage can be used to fulfill the realization of one’s dreams of making some substantial contribution towards society. Prof. Ennals’ experiment was with the senior faculty of the university as to how they can contribute to the society as senior citizens. Senior citizens and retired people, specially, the ones who retire from quite influential positions, they can make tremendous contribution to the society.
4. Banaprastha Ashram: The Life of Departure
Literally, banaprasthameans ‘towards forest’. Here, ‘forest’ is a metaphor for ‘the unknown’ into which we disappear after life. Hinduism talks about mokshya which means ‘liberation’. This liberation is, liberation from life. Buddhism talks about nirvana, which translates as ‘extingushing’. Both mokshyaand nirvana refer to the point of exit from the world. How does Quality Circle help in this stage? In many cultures, there are old age homes for old people, whereas in many they are at the mercy of their children or government.Like-minded old people like to sit together and ruminate about the ‘good old days’ or deliberate on spiritual matters, especially in the East. There is also a concept of Satsang which means ‘good company’ in which the spiritual aspects and moral and ethical ways of life are deliberated upon. There is also the concept of going for tirthatan, that is, pilgrimage, visiting holy places. The idea of Quality Circle is related with intervention but it also works very well in this stage of banaprastha, because it can be used for self-management of the old age. The tools to be used for this stage may not necessarily be all the tools used in the previous three stages where all the tools are used.
Conclusion
The epoch-making concept that started with Deming’s Statistical Quality Control (also SQC) got extended to Quality Control Circle by Ishikawa. This translated into Students’ Quality Control Circle as an innovation by Jagdish Gandhi in academic circle and finally only as Students’ Quality Circle as visualized by Nepal’s SQC movement by Prof. Chapagain with the concept that unlike machine made products, human potentials are unlimited.So the human promises and potential for growth need not be controlled, has seen a continuous improvement or Kaizen as inherent in the concept of Quality Circle. As discussed above the concept of Quality Circle does not only make each stage of life more manageable but also helps, as pointed by Prof. Ennals, in making transition from one stage to the next. This might usher in a new approach to life which is based on time tested and proven scientific ways of problem solving. Let’s give this possibility a chance.
References
Chapagain, Dinesh P. (2006). Guide to Students’ Quality Circles: An Approach to Prepare Total Quality People. NQPCN: Kathmandu
Ennals, Richard (2010). Creating Collaborative Advantage: Students’ Quality Circles. A paper presented in the 13th ICSQC 2010, Nepal.
Pathak, Lekhnath S. (2009). Evolution of a Child into a Complete Human Being. In The Convention Handbook of 5th National Convention of Students’ Quality Circle 2009. QUEST-Nepal: Kathmandu
Pathak, Lekhnath S. (2009) Guniya Chakrako Sambhavana (Possibility of Quality Circle). Kantipur National Daily, November 27, 2009. Kantipur Publications: Kathmandu
Pathak, Lekhnath S. (2010). Students’ Quality Circle for Language Development. A NELTA Monthly Talk Series in British Council, Nepal on May 15, 2010
Pathak, Lekhnath S. (2010). SMART and GOOD: What does it mean? In The Convention Handbook of 13th International Convention of Students’ Quality Circle 2010. QUEST-Nepal: Kathmandu
Pathak, Lekhnath S. (2011). Shaping the Minds of Young Children through SQC. In The Convention Handbook of 7th National Convention of Students’ Quality Circle 2011. QUEST-Nepal: Kathmandu
About the author
Krishna Bista, krishna.Bista@gmail.com
This essay reviews the major features of learning-centered English Language Teaching (ELT), also known as English as a Second Language (ESL) Programs at the selected colleges in the U.S. In the context of Nepalese ELT, the author suggests the possibility of developing learning-centered ELT programs applying the features of American English programs where instructors highlight learning environment, goals, performance and feedback, and rubrics.
What is a Learning-Centered College?
The learning college puts students’ learning first. Every single activity, program or decision carried out in a learning college is focused on learning. The learning college offers educational programs and experiences available for learners based on individual need. The learning college explores the full potential of learners, and provides them with support systems to meet their goals. The model is based on the assumption that educational experiences are designed for the convenience of learners rather than for the convenience of institutions and their staff. Boggs (1999, p. 9) identified four tenets of the learning paradigm that support a learning centered college concept:
Instructor-Centered Teaching versus Learning-Centered Teaching
Teacher- centered teaching is focused on the process of teaching and less concerned with what is learned or how it is learned. In teacher centered teaching, according to Wagner and McCombs (1995, p.32), “teachers decide for the learners what is required from outside by defining characteristics of instruction, curriculum, assessment, and management to achieve desired learning outcomes.”
In contrast, the learning-centered teaching focuses on student learning. This model emphasizes a variety of teaching methods in which the teachers facilitate student learning. It can be problem-based learning and focused on creating an effective learning environment so that students achieve at high levels of learning, and teachers offer more feedback on student work. In this approach, students become active participants in the learning process. The learning college, according to O’Banion (1997, p. 47), “engages learners as full partners in the learning process, with learners assuming primary responsibility for their own choices.”
How to Create a Learning-Centered ELT Program?
This section examines learning oriented materials and activities are used in the ELT classroom. If the learners are given the opportunities to be responsible for their learning according to their needs and choices, the learning would be more fruitful and students would be responsible for their own learning.
A Learning-Centered ELT Classroom
In ELT, classroom setting plays a crucial role in addressing issues of diverse students. Classroom environment has a great impact on learning. Students learn better when they are in brain-friendly classrooms. Students feel actively engaged and motivated if they are in an open classroom setting. The more materials that are displayed in the class, the better the classroom outcomes. One of the examples of the learning-centered classroom is seen in the English as Second Language teaching classroom at Tompkins Cortland Community College in New York. The language class is structured in such a way that the physical environment stimulates learning emotionally, socially and physically. Wide windows, circular furniture and live plants in the classroom improve the physical aspect of the ESL/ELT classroom.
Student/Faculty Interaction
There is not enough interaction between students and faculty on learning models in ELT departments. Instructors should be familiar with updated pedagogies concerning teaching diverse students. Interaction, meetings, seminars and peer teaching would strengthen the concept of learning-centered model in colleges. When teachers are friendly, cooperative and collaborative in their teaching, they can seek innovative and effective ways to apply learning based principles in their classes.
Prince George’s Community College is an example of a learning college and has launched a program called “PGCC Faculty Members Model for Excellence” to improve courses and revise curricula in their academic divisions and departments (“PGCC faculty,” n.d.) Faculty participated in workshops, conferences, read journals on teaching, used appropriate technology and fostered student success.
Learning Technology in the Classroom
Internet and computers should be the cornerstones in English learning programs. Technology based activities help motivate learners and increase critical thinking. In ELT courses, learners actively participate in classroom learning when they are asked to use software applications for listening, reading, writing and speaking activities. Students can develop sound files by using multimedia software. Various Internet websites and online learning forums create a community of collaborative work for both teachers and students. Language emersion and user-friendly translation programs are a must for ELT students.
Software based-learning helps these students work on their fossilized language errors and learn grammatical aspects of a new language. For example, students in the NLII Project at Arizona State University used audio, video, simulation and technology-based presentations in the classroom as a part of the learning activities to help these special students (“Mapping the learning space” n.d.).
Syllabus and Rubrics
The ELT syllabus should include materials related to learners’ background, nationality, work place, language, and culture. Lessons that integrate multiple areas related to the student would increase student participation and create fruitful learning environments. Syllabi that include integrated activities place the course emphasis back on the learner.
Rubrics in ELT courses should be clearly written in order to provide feedback to the learner to promote student growth. King’s college and Inver Hill College, for example, have focused on rubrics in their ESL curricula. Many students do not get helpful feedback that they can use to improve their language skills.
Learning Communities for Students
Where can a student practice English? Is classroom interaction enough practice for students to learn another language which is not their native tongue? Do our ELT programs combine language learning theory and actual practice? How can we make second-language learning a lifelong experience? Many colleges have developed learning communities across academic disciplines and outside the college. In American colleges and universities, programs such as Home Stay, Happy Families, and Community Outreach are available for English language students. In Nepal, schools and colleges can request native English speakers who come to visit Nepal as volunteers or scholars from Fulbright programs so that students would get opportunities to interact with native speakers. The main goal of learning communities is to offer student active engagement and reflection. For example, the learning communities at Kingsborough Community College in New York began in 1995 with the Intensive ELT program (“Learning communities at Kingsborough,” n.d.).
Rewarding Goals and Motivation
ELT programs should make the connection between the classroom materials and the outside classroom activities, which may support intrinsic motivation. At Olivet College, for example, every incoming student affirms a commitment as “I am responsible for…my own learning and personal development… “(Tagg, 2003, p. 137). It is important to understand the goals of the students who join the ELT program. Program goals should support student goals and not just be a cash cow project for universities.
Student performances
In ELT programs, the instructors should develop an active curriculum with extracurricular activities to emphasize student’s performance. Language learning should be collaborative, service-based and practical. Alvrno College’s curriculum, for example, has included eight abilities—communication, analysis, problem solving, decision making, social interaction, global perspectives, effective citizenship and aesthetic responses (“English as Second Language,” n.d.)
Conclusion
ELT teachers in Nepal can make their classes and materials student-oriented to engage learners while teaching English. Without changing the traditional structure of the college, the teacher can make some changes in his or her classroom the way I have observed in English language classes at American colleges. The debate of the instruction versus learning paradigm, even in American higher education, is not over because of a number of barriers in the implementation of the learner-centered approach. Yet pieces of the learner-centered college can be put immediately in place, and instructors, who have access to the learning resources and skills to modify the culture of learning, can implement learning-centered activities to help their learners in ELT and other academic programs thrive. ELT instructors should change their hearts and minds to bring a culture of learning-centered program. In traditional context of Nepal, teachers should be “the change” to cultivate a new learning environment in their colleges.
References
Boggs, G. R. (1999). What the learning paradigm means for faculty. Learning Abstracts 2(4).
Barr, R.B., & Tagg, J. (1995). From teaching to learning: A new paradigm for undergraduate
education. Change: The Magazine of Higher Education. 27 (6), 13-25.
English as Second Language (n.d.). Alvrno College. Retrieved Nov. 10, 2010 from
http://www.alverno.edu/campus_resource/Academic_support/english2.html
Learning communities at Kingsborough. Kingsborough Community College. Retrieved on
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