FEATURE STORY by GANGA GAUTAM                                                                                                                                        

Those who teach English are taken as busy teachers in Nepalese context. Having abundant opportunities for English teachers is probably the key reason for their busier schedules. And many of them claim that they cannot just make their earning sufficient, teaching at just one institution.  

“For busy teachers like me, the americanenglish.state.gov is the hub for resources,” said Praveen Kumar Yadav, an English teacher who participated in a training facilitated by me in December. Yadav, who is working for King’s College and Republica English national daily simultaneously, said, “I found the website not only useful for English language teaching but equally for English language learning.”

Even though he has been surfing internet and exploring online resources for English language learning and teaching for the last five years, he had never come across the americanenglish.state.gov before the workshop, Yadav said. 

Like him, fourteen English teachers from primary to tertiary levels attended a three-day teacher training workshop organized in King’s College, Kathmandu recently. The main objective of the training ‘Maximizing American Space Resources for English Language Enhancement’ held with assistance of the US Embassy Nepal, was to make the participant teachers familiar with online resources managed by the US State Department, especially americanenglish.state.gov, which are freely accessible all over the world.

Divya Nakarmi, another participant English teacher at DAV School, used to spend most of her time in developing materials for her classroom to teach primary level students. She felt herself over the moon after she came to learn about the americanenglish.state.gov

“This website is incredibly awesome with number of materials I can use in my classroom. I find americanenglish.state.gov an amazing site to solve all my problems,” Divya said. “I don’t have to worry about the materials required for my classroom as I can download them easily from the site itself.”

Immediately after learning about americanenglish.state.gov, one of the participants, Prajwal Singh Thapa, who is pursuing his masters in ELT from Kathmandu University, said that he would constantly browse it.

“To avoid the monotonous class environment, the online resource could be very helpful for me to find various techniques to make the class interactive,” Thapa said.  

The website ‘americanenglish.state.gov‘ is a very useful online resources many teachers like me find user-friendly. Once you visit this site, there are two main gateways: Teach and Learn.

The Teach site offers the materials to teach English that include activities, lesson plans, games, songs, stories, reading and writing activities. It also contains the professional development materials including the webinars and teacher training materials. You will also find announcement of the webinar series and other e-teacher training opportunities on this site. Similarly, there are activity books, interesting games ready-to-use materials for busy teachers.

Once you explore the site, you will be addicted to it ! If you would like to make your English class effective, interesting and you would like to have fun while teaching English, this is where you find the wonders !!! 

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The author is Reader in English Education at Tribhuvan University. He is also an executive member (Immediate Past President) of NELTA.