NELTA Palpa Conference Vibrated Teachers in the Area
by Gopal Prasad Bashyal, Chair, NELTA Palpa Branch
NELTA Palpa organised a two day Conference (19-20 Nov. 2010) and also conducted Annual General Meeting that formed a new Executive Committee under the Chairmanship of Gopal Prasad Bashyal. The Conference was attended by teachers from Palpa, Gulmi, Syangja, Rupandei, and Dang. The Conference was attended by 103 teachers who found it really a useful and practicable. The theme of the Conference was “Towards Learner Autonomy”.
NELTA Acting President Laxman Gnawali presented workshops on i) Becoming a Professional Teacher, and ii) “Developing a Reading Habit in Children” and focused on access to reading materials for extensive reading. The textbook is not enough and to develop reading habit newspapers, other journals or magazines or books are helpful for the students. He inspired teachers collect reading materials for their students.
NELTA Secretary Kamal Poudel made a pair presentation with Sharala Bhattarai. The couple also presented two workshops: i) Language games: vocabulary games, guessing games, 20 questions, and classroom quiz, Simon says etc which were enjoyed by the participants a lot. ii) Songs and chants: The couple presented different songs and chants downloaded from websites. The songs were printed and sung following the cassettes. The action and melodious singing made all allured of their voice.
Padam Chauhan, a handsome Central Member, made teachers review on SLC exam papers and they got lessons regarding developing quality test papers. It was quite practical and they realised their own mistakes while developing test items.
Shyam Pandey presented on “Interactive Reading in the EFL Learners”. He focused on the ways of making reading interactive. For example he made the teachers read pictures and describe.
Durga Pandey, the Central Member, presented on teaching materials and proved that the surrounding environment and context setting are useful resources for communication. The teachers realised that we need not grumble at shortage of teaching materials but we can use everything available in the classroom. For example, students and teacher’s clothes can be the teaching materials for teaching colour words or adjectives etc.
Kamal Lamsal from Syangja presented English and American English based on his Bell study and illustrated the differences at spelling, pronunciation, grammar, meaning and social level between English and American variety of English.
NELTA Palpa Chair Gopal Prasad Bashyal presented “Autonomous Learner Model” and focused on the supremacy of the learners in teaching learning process. The more the learners are depended upon the teacher the less they become creative and they become low level learners. There is a saying. You can take a horse to a river bank but the horse must drink water to satisfy its thirst. It signifies the importance of learner role in teaching learning process. The focus now shifted to the learners and constructivist ideology of building knowledge. The jug-mug model of teaching is now rejected and replaced by child centeredness so that their potentiality is used in learning. The task of the teacher is to make the challenges right so that the learners can overcome the possible problems in the future. Let’s minimise the learner dependency and let their capacity foster.
To conclude, the Conference became a practical exercise for the teachers who could definitely replicate them in their classrooms. They evaluated the Conference as a grand successful event to vibrate them. The sessions involved the teachers very much and there was a good use of multi-media presentation.
