Bal Krishna Sharma

We have included diverse topics related to the teaching of English in this issue. Krishna Bista describes the value and importance of using music in teaching English. He provides examples of possible activities (oral, reading and writing, vocabulary building, etc.) that can make use of music. He adds that to involve the whole class, students can fill out response sheets about each presentation, answering questions about the featured topic, something new they learned, and something they enjoyed.

Praveen Yadav takes a right-based education approach to the teaching of English of in the Nepalese context. He argues that learning English is everybody’s right, possibly implying that marketizing and commodification of English in our context may create a barrier to the economically disadvantaged stratum in our society. In addition, he also suggests that ELT profession take a right-based approach as one of the values in pedagogy.

Ushakiran Wagle recollects her development as a learner and writer as she witnessed the innovations in technology. First coming form a relatively less preleviged background, she says she did not know how to send an email attachment. Now, Ushakiran has became the member of teachingenglish.org.uk and is getting better ideas and knowledge about the teaching learning process that can be used while teaching and learning English.

Madhu Neupane’s story reports an intervention in enhancing learner autonomy in her English reading class. She moved from teacher-fronted class to a relatively student-centred class, asking the students to prepare cards for learning word meaning, pronunciation and use and asking them to read texts before they come to the class. She reports positive changes and encourages other teachers to try out similar pedagogical practices.

As a branch highlight, Eka Dev Adhikari presents a report of a comprehensive training that took place in Chitwan. The NELTA with a partnership with PABSON delegates conducted a programme for private schools in three phases. From the experience and insights gained in this program, other branches can also draw implications for their similar programs.

In a brief reflection on the subject of changing paradigms of education, Shyam Sharma invites us to think about the larger social and historical forces that change education and which we need to intellectually and pedagogically respond to. Shyam concludes by asking us to think about the small things that we can do in the classroom with the big ideas about educational paradigms in perspective.

In addition to this, we also have two resources from the web: reflective narration of teaching conversation in Japan and fun with elevator English.

Please read and leave  your response!

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