Teacher’s Travelogue PEMA KALA BHUSAL Travelling is something I’ve always craved for since my childhood. My passion for travelling has led me travel to many places across the country and recently abroad, fortunately. In the autumn (October-November) of 2014, I visited Eugene, Oregon, USA, to participate in a three-week-long E-Teacher Professional Development Workshop sponsored by the U.S … Continue reading My Professional Trip to the US
We log on to Facebook–or at least many of us do–when we want to find out what member of our social network are doing. But how do we learn about what the most experienced Nepali scholars and emerging professionals in our field at home and abroad are doing? One of the things we’ve always tried … Continue reading More Than Status Updates: Choutari Chat with Some ELT Professionals
Prem Phyak, Bal Krishna Sharma and Shyam Sharma The subject of this post is our shared recognition that there is a tremendous need for Nepalese ELT practitioners to build on what we already have and what we already do, rather than focusing on what we lack and what we don’t do well. We highlight the … Continue reading Shifting Focus: Building ELT Practices and Scholarship from the Ground Up
Compiled and Edited by Ushakiran Wagle and Lal Bahadur Rana The value of a venue like this lies in the conversation that follows the publication of the community’s ideas. Just imagine that no one responds to what we publish! Fortunately for us, in the last one year, we have had a lot of new conversation, and … Continue reading Quick Survey with Choutari Audience
Reflections on MLE Conference 2013 Praveen Kumar Yadav We not only use language for daily communication; we also use language to express our identities and cultures and to represent our lifestyles and communities. So, as we all know, the loss of language is loss of both culture and identity of the community speaking the language. … Continue reading Towards Multilingual Education in Nepal
Madhav Kafle So what happens when a place gets deterritorialized? Does the local expand beyond its borders and become global or does it evaporate all the localness because the borders disappear? And I could ask similar questions about language too: what happens when we teach a language as a separate entity with fixed meanings rather than … Continue reading Editorial, July 2013: Local Pedagogies in Multilingual Settings
Ofelia García* Introduction English language teaching throughout the world has suffered from a monoglossic bias; that is, the view that English could only be taught in isolation and separated from the languages spoken by students. This was, of course, the pedagogical tradition that emerged from the West, and especially from North American and … Continue reading Translanguaging to teach English in Nepal
Shyam Sharma* When School Leaving Certificate (SLC) results were published earlier this month, quite a few of my friends and family members posted happy messages such as the following on Facebook: “Congratulations to our nephew ___ for securing 8* percent!!!” But whenever I come across such messages, I am reminded how privileged these friends and … Continue reading SLC, ELT, and Our Place in the Big Picture
Madhav Kafle Penn State University, USA In this brief post, I share my rumination over the concept of ‘a language’ and concept of correctness in language teaching and learning. Historically, neither did human beings claim a language by the virtue of belonging to a place nor did they police communicative endeavors of the learners as … Continue reading Monolingual Policies in Multilingual States: Implications for Language Teaching
. Editorial – Shyam Sharma. First of all, thank you for being with Choutari another year, for contributing your work, for reading, and most importantly for posting your comments and contributing to the discussion. The conversation is key to the forum. . The world of publication is changing–and it should. In journalism, bloggers usually report the … Continue reading Third Anniversary Issue (January 2012)
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 … Continue reading Millennium Development Goals, Education for All and the Issue of Dominant language
This page contains annotated links and introductions to significant ELT-related publications, websites, and other resources that are locally produced in Nepal. Journal of NELTA: First published in 1996 and fully peer reviewed from 2009, this is the flagship journal of Nepal English Language Teachers’ Association (NELTA), an organization to which Choutari’s editors and most of the … Continue reading ELT in Nepal
Ram Ashish Giri, PhD EIL, Monash University, Melbourne Introduction As the Nepalese politics remains entangled in developing a process of political reform, the academia has embarked upon reforming the education sector in order to meet the changing socio-political and educational aspirations of the people. They are looking into the ways of reforming … Continue reading Examination as an Agent of Educational Reform: Re-iterating some issues of debate
Dear Colleagues, We have special issue highlighting the 16th NELTA Conference that took place in Kathmandu from February 18-20 and in Pokhara from from February 22-23, 2011. We have the following table of contents. Please read and leave your comments. Contents 1.Presidential Address by Laxman Gnawali 2. 16th International Conference: Highlights by Hemanta Raj Dahal 3. … Continue reading March 2011 Issue- NELTA Conference Special
Introduction: NeltaChoutari June 2009 Issue The global spread of English has given rise to a new form of global power to the English speaking countries through worldwide ELT industry “serving the interest of English speaking-countries as well as native speakers and native-speaking professionals” (Kumaravadivelu, 2006:13). These countries have a firm grip over textbook production (Gray, … Continue reading June 09: Problematizing English Language Teaching Methods
