All posts by Balkrishna Sharma

Teacher training: for money or for professionalism?

Teacher Training, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

                       -Ram Abadhesh Ray

      In this piece of writing, I hope to discuss English teaching profession. Teaching, professionally, is a very precarious and sturdy job. In the context of Nepal, teaching has become inferior or substandard one due to politicization on it. Because of unstable government system and its fragile education policy, the teaching career has become in miserable condition. The government of Nepal trained almost all the teachers but the teachers are still ‘literate but not educated’ , following Sajan Karn’s argument. I think most of the teachers are trained but they are resourcefully untrained because they are still facing lots of problems for effective teaching and for bringing drastic progress in the students. This article also begins with the current teaching trend of the government schools teachers’ i.e. Old Fashioned Method of teaching. Then it also mentions some solutions to the problems that are faced by the teachers.

                          Under School Improvement Program (SIP), the Educational Manpower Development Centre has prepared various instructional materials, scientific and innovative technique to make the teaching livelier in order to develop the teacher’s capability in effective teaching.  The Conceptual Framework has been prepared on the basis of the received feedbacks from national and international level workshops. At first, so many ideas and experiences were gathered from almost one hundred and fifty teachers from different seven districts. Not only this but also from the trainers of these centers, from the DEOs (District Education Officers) and from professors of related field, the ideas and experiences has been accumulated for the preparation of this TPD.

                          Due to fragile and ineffective accomplishment of teaching policies of Nepal, there has not been found more achievements in the field of training system of TPD. Though it has commenced all over Nepal, it is not in its entire height. One of the main cause of its being letdown is also due to lack of wakefulness in teachers of Nepal. Most of the teachers of remote and semi urban areas are still surviving with their old weapons of teaching in the class room for just passing the time anyway for the sake of the government’s obligation and for the sake of their earning. Generally, teachers in the context of Nepal especially in far remote areas have been junked due to lack of innovative teaching technique and due to lack of their activeness to learn something worthy for their professional development. The same means of teaching i.e. after five or ten minutes of ringing the bell of first period, they with attendance register and a stout stick go to class room as they are forcefully being sent to the class. As soon they enter the class, they as usual do the attendance and instruct the students read themselves and they instead of teaching the students with their daily lesson plan, sit on the chair outside the gate comfortably thinking and waiting for the next period. They don’t want to change themselves into modern era of teaching. They look as if they have been worried and seriously ill. Actually the system of providing training in the context of Nepal is not an apt. Here, instead of providing training the teachers are given a very handsome allowance that becomes their additional income. Their salary is not deducted from the government side so they get double benefit. It has become a sort of tendency for the government schools’ teachers to get allowance and then participate in any sort of training. When there is less allowance in any training then the teachers don’t seem even talk about such training. By this, we can assume that such teachers can never transform themselves for learning in any sort of training if it is even giving a large sum of allowance to them. They always have intension to be present in the training and after the break, they go for shopping and again next day same thing happen.

I can still remember the very first NELTA training held in the then SEDU and now ETC by Dr. Bal Mukund Bhandari, the then treasurer of NELTA, Center when I was in  M. ED. First year. Almost 60 English teachers participated in the training session. Dr. Bhandari inaugurated the session and his facilitator was Mr. Sajan Kumar Karn, the then teaching assistant of English M.ED. Program of Thakur Ram Multiple Campus, Birganj and secretary of NELTA, Birganj. The program was successfully commenced and all the teachers were very much curious to listen the speech by Dr. Bhandari. As soon as Dr. Bhandari announced that the training was without allowance, the faces of the reputed teachers of the government school were to see. They started feeling disappointment and as there was break for half an hour and then after break no government teachers were seen in training session and Dr. Bhandari was amazed and we too. Just after a year, I got another opportunity to be participated in a workshop provided by the Examination Control Office, Sanothimi, Bhaktpur at the same venue and there was a large gathering of the government school teachers but there were limited seats for participants. Everyone was wishing to be the participants and I was stunned to see that and thought it a very good workshop. But the reality was something else, I felt myself very fortunate to be one of the participant. I at that time was in Mount Edmund English Secondary School, Birganj and I was sent to participate in the training. The workshop was run for three days and on the last day, one of the head teachers said forcefully to the trainers to stop training and distribute the allowance. The trainers also agreed and within some minutes training program was postponed and then the time of receiving allowance came and asked whether I would also get something. One of the teacher asked if I was new fellow to go there and I agreed. My name was also called and I went to receive the allowance. I couldn’t believe myself that how all teachers were very much curious to take participate in training. It was all for the allowance not for learning point of view.

Now you can easily conclude that where there is allowance the teachers go there and where there is no such facilities the teachers won’t go. Since then I deduced that teachers participated in training only for earning, not for learning. Among such teachers, some bad concepts have emerged about training that government is compelled to train them and then why should they care for such training. They always ask about the facilities i.e. lodging and dining a very common term in training and then only they are ready for participating. Sometimes the teachers surprise me by asking the questions if the training is going to take place in any grand hotel or not. If it is so they are ok and vice versa. The tendency of providing allowance to the teachers by government has created lots of problems for NELTA fellows to conduct any sort of conference in local level for the teachers here demand the same too.

                            In the context of Nepal the teaching doesn’t take place as it is shown in the model  in  every nook and the corner of the nation but in some part of urban areas of Nepal, there is such teaching which is very expensive and the common people are not going to bear that. However, we can make our teaching effective by our entire effort and honesty with the help of the teaching aids which are locally available. But most of the teachers of our country have been fossilized from very beginning in the traditional way of teaching. For them the teaching aids are stout stick and ruthless sound in the classroom while teaching. Look and just imagine how the teachers in the European countries are teaching their students with great fun, scientific equipment and hovering around the students with great love and affection.

The entire teacher should be like a professional teacher and enjoy his/her work every now and then and then after there will be something new changes in the field of effective teaching. A teacher should go in training not for allowances rather for learning and being refreshed for removing their junk old traditional method of teaching. If one has to be a professional then he/she has to revolutionize his/her attitude towards scientific teaching from that of traditional one. They must understand their responsibility being honest in their teaching.

Conclusively, I can state that some of the old fashioned teachers and even some new who have been habituated to act in their teaching learning activities are to change themselves for their satisfaction in teaching. For that very purpose, the government should also take any massive action against such dead habits of teachers by improving in the education policy according to the change in pace of time. Then only something worth can be expected in the field of scientific and innovative teaching. Unless there is drastic modification in the trend and attitude of such teachers, the government, education policy maker cannot bring change in them and in their profession.

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The author is an English Teacher at Shree Nepal National Higher Secondary School, Kalaiya, Bara, Secretary, NELTA, Birganj Branch  

What-like what-like English?

ELT Humor

Parmeshwar Baral

We have boarding schools now, imparting ‘education’ in English medium. Teachers use classroom routines in English, teach lessons in English, probably not paying attention to whether the learners understand them or not. Following are some funny Nepali-English expessions you might encounter in English medium schools in Nepal. I leave up to the Choutari readers to make their  interpretations in relation to what this means to our society, identity, and role of English in the Nepalese context.

1. There is no wind in the football.

2. I talk, he talk, why you middle talk?

3. You rotate the ground 4 times.

4. You did no homework? You go and under stand the tree with one leg and catch your ears.

5. I’ll give clap on your face.

6. Bring your parents with your mother and father.

7. Why haircut not cut?

8. Why are you looking outside at monkeys when I am in class?

9. Throw paper in dustbin or I’ll throw myself.

Knowing your role as a teacher: The teaching metaphor project

Teacher Training, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes, Teaching Tips

Bal Krishna Sharma

There are several ways of learning and development for language teachers. For example, you can read articles/chapters and research reports published in journals and books, critically understand the ideas there, and import them to your classroom teaching. You adopt and adapt the textbook ideas rather than picking them up and trying to implement them wholesale. You can also talk to your peer teachers, share teaching stories and experiences, or observe each other’s class and borrow some ideas from there. A third way, which I have recently been relying heavily on is a reflection of my own teaching, critically assessing what worked and what did not in my class, and focus on improving my teaching and tasks next semester.

I taught an academic reading course to international students last year. In order to train myself in teaching reading lessons effectively, I took a second language reading course from a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. This class had several mini-assignments that proved instrumental in bridging my academic knowledge with my teaching experience in Nepal. I will explain to you one of those mini-assignments here, which was called a ‘reading metaphor project’.

Around the beginning of the semester, my professor asked all the students to think of a metaphor that would represent our role as a reading teacher. Many of us chose such metaphors as ‘mid-wife’, ‘football coach’, ‘driver’, and so on. Then the professor asked us to think about refining the metaphor and its meaning, or shifting to a more appropriate metaphor by the time we finish the course at the end of the semester. Following is a description of my metaphor:

I chose two metaphors during this semester. Metaphors are a useful way to compare the teacher’s roles and duties in a reading class. First, I compared a reading teacher with a tour guide. A tour guide shows ways to the tourists who otherwise would have a hard time to travel on their own. A guide shows ways to the visitors, takes to new places, explains the history and importance of those places, and also suggests other places to visit or stay. Then I thought this metaphor is too simplistic. Comparing a reading teacher with a tourist guide is very straightforward and gives more power to the teacher. When I believe in student-centered teaching, I thought I would need to find a metaphor that would minimize the role of the teacher. Then I compared a reading teacher with a ‘walking stick’. I remembered my childhood days and I remembered the tourists from different countries visiting our places inNepal. Everybody had a walking stick with them. Then I also remembered my reading class taught by my teacher. I also reflected on how I taught reading to my students. Obviously, there were differences in my and my teacher’s teaching styles and roles. However, a common thread I could think of was the role of a ‘facilitator’ or a ‘supporter’. A walking stick thus is a support; it does not walk in itself. Second language readers can take the support of the stick. Learning to read is a long journey. I compared reading journey with a trekking of several days. While trekking inNepalone has to climb up the hills through small trails and rarely through steps. There come plain and flat places as well. In case of those straight ways, the role of the walking stick is minimized or sometimes neutralized. Learners of reading are also similar. When there are difficult texts and words, there is a teacher to help the learners in some way: direct explanation of the meaning or teaching the students the reading strategies, for example. But when there are easier texts, the students can read on their own, teacher’s role is minimized.

So what?

Writers in NeltaChoutari have discussed the need to be careful against lifting pedagogical ideas that have been proven effective in different contexts than our own without necessary appropriation, so the concept has floated here as well quite often. I hope that you will find this concrete activity valuable towards implementing the idea into practice. Such reflective practice is useful whether we are novice or experienced because reflection and critical assessment are important for any efficient language teacher. If you are a teacher educator, or a teacher trainer, please try this out in practice and respond to this post with your thoughts so the rest of will learn from actual practice. I am always eager to hear more.


September 2011 Issue: Diversifying the topics in teaching English in Nepal

Editorial

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!

Contents

1 Teaching ESL learners through music  Krishna Bista
2 The right-based approach to ELT and ho to adopt it in Nepal Praveen Kumar Yadav
3 The use of internet in language classroom Ushakiran Wagley
4 Learner Autonomy-? Yes!!! Madhu Neupane
5 NELTA Chitwan- A branch highlight Eka Dev Adhikari
6 Reflection on English conversation in Japan Web material 
7 Sounds and images… Thinking about Teaching Shyam Sharma
8 Fun for ELT: Elevator and English Web material 

Teaching Adult ESL Learners through Music

Scholarly Article

                                   

Krishna Bista

Introduction:

It has been a tradition to take music as an integral part of teaching and learning in early days of schools. Children learn various educational and cultural activities through music effectively and there is significant emphasis on music in the kindergarten and primary levels. Children in the school tend to idolize singers and worship dance and musical bands whereas adults simply listen for fun or hobby. However, there is less focus on using songs or music in the adult education. It is true that a great number of teachers being more focused on academic curriculum standards do not think of integrating music into adult classroom lessons. Even though adult learners, contrary to young learners, are matured and have a specific goal of language learning, they could have more benefits and learn more effectively if the educators and teachers of English teach adult learners using song in the adult English as second language (ESL) classroom.

Related Literature:

There are a number of academic benefits of using songs in the adult classroom. Musical activities can serve as one of many types of instructional approaches to teach selected curriculum units. Moreover, music draws an attention of the learners by providing a motivational environment for learning.

Murphey (1992) carried out a research on lyrics of a large corpus of pop songs in relation to teaching his students. He found that the songs had several linguistic features that help second-language learners learning English: they contained common, short words and many personal pronouns (94% of the songs had a first person, I, referent and were written at about a fifth-grade level); the language was conversational (imperatives and questions made up 25% of the sentences in the corpus); time and place were usually imprecise (except for some folk ballads); the lyrics were often sung at a slower rate; words were spoken with more pauses between utterances; and there was repetition of vocabulary and structures. He believed that these factors of language learning allowed adult learners to understand and relate to the songs. Thus, since music includes personal feeling, a plot with an event, social and cultural traits, it can be successfully blended in the adult English classroom to create a learning and motivating environment, to develop listening comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing skills, to increase vocabulary, and to expand cultural knowledge.

In recent days, a number of studies have been carried out how music can be incorporated in adult ESL class activities. Neurologists have found that music and language processing occur in the same area of the brain, and there appear to be parallels in how musical and linguistic syntax are processed (Lems, 2001).  A study has reported that adult learners in South Africa exposed to instrumental music during an intensive English course showed benefits in language learning (Puhl, 1989). Bob Lake (2005), a teacher and research believes says: “There is strong evidence supporting the use of music in the ESL classroom. Language and music are tied together in brain processing by pitch, rhythm and by symmetrical phrasing.” Many educators report success using instrumental music as a warm up and relaxation tool, as a background for other activities, and as the inspiration for writing activities (Eken, 1996).

How to use Music in Adult ESL Classroom:

A number of English activities can be done using music in the adult classroom. Particularly, the following areas can be taught using music in ESL classroom settings.

Listening and Oral Activities

Songs contain rhythm, stress and intonation—the linguistic features. Adult learners from any language background can benefit from a choral or individual reading of the lyrics of the songs. Students may summarize orally the action or theme of a song or give oral presentations about a song for the class. For example the song by Neil Sedak “Calendar Girl” (January, you start the year off fine/February), you’re my little Valentine) is good for adult ESL beginners to learn the name of months. Similarly, Tracy Chapman song “All that you have is your soul” is good to teach sound in which the change of world final t+ word initial y to /ch/ can be heard (Don’t be tempted by the shiny apple/don’t you eat of a bitter fruit). 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.

Reading and Writing Activities

Adult learners can participate in several reading and writing activities such as filling in the blanks and  jigsaw puzzles during, before, or after listening to a song. This helps build the important skill of reading and writing. However, words can be deleted instead to practice a target grammar point, such as past tense verbs, prepositions, or compound nouns, or to identify key words (Griffee, 1990). For instance, in the song “Only Time” by Enya, the auxiliary ‘can’ could be omitted in classroom activity (Who can say Where the road goes/Where the day flows/Only time/And who can say/ If your love grows/As your heart chose/Only time). One popular activity is to cut the lyrics into lines and have students put them in the correct order as they listen to the song.

Adult students enjoy writing responses to songs, either in class or at home. Adult ESL learners bring diversity into language learning and provide a known context for comparing and contrasting information. Many songs tell a story, and these stories can be rewritten or retold to practice narrative or summarizing skills. For example, the Nancy Wilson’s song “Guess Who I Saw Today” is sung by a wife catching her husband having a romantic lunch with another woman.

Vocabulary Building Activities

Pop songs are written to be easily understood and enjoyed. They tend to use high frequency lyrics that have emotional content. However, the songs may also have idioms in them that might be difficult to explain, depending on the level of the students. For example, Cat Steven’s song “Morning Has Broken” (Morning has broken, like the first morning/blackbird has spoken, like the first bird/praise for the singing, praise for the morning/) can be confusing to adult ESL learners.

Cultural Knowledge Activities

Songs can be used in discussions of culture. They are a rich mine of information about human relations, ethics, customs, history, humor, and cultural differences. A song can be part of a unit that also contains poems, video footage, or still photographs. For example, Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a Dream” speech would be a powerful cultural activity in adult ESL classroom.

Selecting Music for Adult ESL Learners

Songs should be carefully selected for the adult ESL classroom. Lems (1996) and Poppleton (2001), make the following suggestions:
1. Lyrics should be clear and loud, not submerged in the instrumental music.
2. The vocabulary load for the song should be appropriate to the proficiency level.

3. Songs should be pre-screened for potentially problematic content, such as explicit language, references to violent acts or sex, or inappropriate religious allusions.

Griffee (1990) recommends using short, slow songs for beginning-level students and discusses activities such as creating song word puzzles, drawing a song, or showing related pictures. With higher levels, he suggests using songs that tell stories, moving toward short, fast songs, and finally, longer, fast songs that have fewer high frequency vocabulary items. Finally, students are often strongly motivated to learn the lyrics of a new pop song or an old favorite they have heard and never understood, so their choices for classroom music should not be overlooked.

References

Eken, D. K. (1996). Ideas for using songs in the English language classroom. English

Teaching Forum, 34(1), 46-47.

Griffee, D.T. (1990). Hey baby! Teaching short and slow songs in the ESL classroom. TESL

Reporter, 23(4), 3-8.

Lems, K. (1996). For a song: Music across the ESL curriculum. Paper presented at the annual

convention of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Chicago. (ED No.

396 524

Lake, Bob (2005). Music and  language learning. ESL Journal, 22 (5), 33-42.

Murphey, T. (1992).The discourse of pop songs. TESOL Quarterly, 26(4), 770-774.

Poppleton, C. (2001). Music to our ears. American Language Review, 5(1), 23-26.
Puhl, C. A. (1989). Up from under: English training on the mines. (Report on 1988 research

project conducted at Gold Field Training Services). Stellenbosch, South Africa: University of Stellenbosch. (ED No. 335 864)

 

 

(Krishna Bista is a doctoral student in Arkansas State University, USA. Click here for his profile: http://astate.academia.edu/KrishnaBista)

Rights Based Approach (RBA) to ELT and How to adopt it in Nepal

English as a Global Language

Praveen Kumar Yadav

NELTA Birgunj

Right-based approach (RBA) is synonymous to Human right based approach. Today human right based approach is applied in the development of almost all the programmes implemented by different organizations including the those owned by the government. The English Language Teaching profession cannot be an exception. Therefore, there is a need of English Language Teaching through human rights perspective. In the article, I have mainly focused on how right-based approach can be adopted in ELT in Nepal.

ELT through Human Rights Perspective

I would like to ask all the valued readers a very common question, “What sort of Education is our right/human right at the present age?”

We have several answers appearing in our mind. Some of them may be science, mathematics, geography, medicine, health and many more.

Of Course, it’s the education that enables us to compete globally, earn prestige and live with dignity. Competing with rest of the world is only possible if one  has developed competence and proficiency in English language. This is the language that can ensure our rights. Only we can live in the world with dignity from human rights perspective when we are able to communicate and comprehend in English.

The latest statistics shows one in every four human beings can speak English with some degree of competency. Today, English is spoken by around 14oo million populace which amounts approximately to a quarter of the world’s population. It has been estimated that some 4oo million people speak English as their first language. The same is the figure of the people who use it as second or additional language but some 6oo million use it as their foreign language. Native speakers of English may feel that language belongs to them, but it has truly become the property of those who use it as a second and foreign language.

Furthermore, over 1oo countries treat English as a foreign language, about a third of world’s newspapers are published in countries where English has special status, and majority of these will be in English and English is the medium of the vast treasure of world’s knowledge and pleasure. More than half of the world books are in English. Furthermore, some sixty percent of the radio broadcasts are beamed in English and English is the medium of some eighty percent of the information stored in the world’s computer, a figure quoted in McCrum et al. (1986) (as cited in Sajan Karn’s article in Nelta Journal).

People who are able to use English language for communication are deemed to be well educated, intelligent and so on whereas those who lack the ability to use English consider themselves to be educationally underprivileged and yearn to learn it in order to grow academically and professionally. Besides, those who use English are considered to belong to a high class society. They are believed to live their lives in dignity. This makes us realize the significance of English in today’s democratic age.

With the establishment of Durbar High School in Kathmandu by the then prime minister Jung Bahadur Rana in 1854, English Language Teaching (ELT) formally began in Nepal. Since then, the English language has been taught and learnt as a foreign language in the schools and colleges of Nepal.  During Rana Regime, only children from Rana families and higher class families had rights to learn English language.

Behind the spread of English in Nepal, Establishment of Religious Missionaries (St. Xavier’s & St. Mary’s Schools in 1950s), The Gurkhas’ return to Nepal from Anglo-Gorakha War-1814 and Privatization Policy after the restoration of democracy in 1990 are responsible for the spread of English in Nepal.

Before Nepal government introduced English Language Teaching from Grade one to Twelve (School Education) as compulsory subject, the language was taught from fourth grade. Shifting from fourth grade to first grade is because of globalization and significance of English language. This is also realization of the rights of children.

Rights Based Approach (RBA) to ELT  

A right based approach to development is a framework that integrates the norms, principles, standards and goals of the international human rights system into the plans and processes of development. This approach is characterized by methods and activities that link the human rights system and its inherent notion of power and struggle with development.

The human rights-based approach aims to ensure that projects and programmes are based on international human rights standards, that they empower those that are involved and have a strong focus on the most disadvantaged.

The Right based approach is founded on certain human rights principles. They include participation, accountability, non-discrimination, empowerment and linkages to human rights standards.

Participation:

Meaningful participation of children and individuals prioritizing from disadvantaged and marginalized communities in English language learning activities is a must when RBA  is adopted in ELT.

Accountability:

The approach identifies the “rights holders”, as well as “duty bearers” to highlight who has responsibility/accountability for ensuring rights holders’ rights are realized.

Here the “right holders” in ELT mean children, teachers, individuals, organizations like NELTA whereas the “duty bearers” mean the government. Increasing capacity of duty-bearers including governments, individuals, local organizations and authorities, different organization, donors and international institutions, they can be made accountable for ensuring their rights.

Everyone should realize their rights to learn English language. The state should also be accountable to fulfill their rights equally.

Empowerment:

Those who are  involved in ELT should be empowered to enhance their capacities so that they can claim and exercise their rights to learn English language.

Non-discrimination:

The human rights requirement for nondiscrimination demands that particular focus be given to the status of vulnerable groups (we have Children as vulnerable groups in ELT.)

Linkages to human rights standards:

The approach is linked to international human rights law and standards, which outline the minimum standards required to respect, protect and fulfill human rights. ELT should meet such standards so that they can globally compete and raise their voices for their rights.

Conclusion

Different organizations have been adopting and following Right Based Approach to development. Development does not exclude Education and, English Education we are concerned.  NELTA can play a crucial role as a key stakeholder to adopt the approach in English Education in Nepal.

NELTA is working with an aim to improve the teaching and learning of English language across the country. Since its inception in 1992 AD, it has been carrying out different activities like workshops, seminars, trainings and conference and publishes materials, journals and periodicals on English language Teaching. Today NELTA has developed into a big umbrella that can accommodate one and all English language teachers from primary to university levels.

The Government is seen as the chief provider of education through the allocation of substantial budgetary resources and regulating the provision of English education. The pre-eminent role of the state in fulfilling the right to education is enshrined in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Traditionally, education has been the duty of a child’s parents, however with the rise of systems of education, the role of parents has diminished. With regards to realising the right to education the World Declaration on Education for All, adopted at the 1990 World Conference on Education for All states that “partnerships between government and non-governmental organisations, the private sector, local communities, religious groups, and families” are necessary.

At present, Social Welfare Council (SWC) reports 191 international NGOs working on a wide-range of issues and sectors to contribute to development efforts in Nepal. Among them, more than 50 INGOs have been working in education sector of Nepal. The AIN (Association of International NGOs in Nepal) comprises more than 80 INGOs.

It is high time NELTA took initiative in raising awareness among INGO community working in Nepal for taking ELT as development. Besides, the INGOs and the government need to take English language learning from human rights/child rights perspective.

Like British Council and American Embassy, the INGOs working for rights and development should collaborate with NELTA to adopt human right based approach to English Language Teaching. The collaboration will certainly help NELTA achieve its mission, vision goals and objectives along with adoption of RBA to ELT.

 

 

(The present article is an extract of a part of the paper presented by the author on Children’s Rights to English in Nepalese Context at the 16th International conference of NELTA. Mr. Praveen Kumar Yadav is a development professional, who is currently working as Development Coordinator in Plan International, Rautahat district. The organization is an international humanitarian, child centered development organization without religious, political or government affiliation. Before he joined the organization, he was involved in teaching English to higher secondary and bachelor level students in Rautahat.  Awareness raising, empowerment and making advocacy with rights holders and duty bearers for child rights, human rights based approach to development and raising innovative ELT issues are his interests. He is presently carrying out his M. Ed. research on NeltaChoutari. He is the executive member at NELTA Birgunj. He has co-edited the ELT Today, journal of NELTA Birgunj. He has recently attended the 6th International and 42nd English Language Teachers’ Association of India (ELT@I) Conference held in Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) University, Vellore, India.)

 

THE USE OF INTERNET IN LANGUAGE CLASSROOM

Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

Ushakiran Wagle

Abstract

According to conventional wisdom the Internet consists of written materials. Therefore, it is suitable for teaching reading. Reading, in turn, has traditionally been associated with outdated grammar translation method in which foreign language was taught to enable students to read. However, in recent decades the emphasis has been put on communicative competence. Language is to be taught to enable communication. In fact, the Internet contains teaching materials which make it possible to teach every language skill. Here I’m going to write a paper on the same topic and mainly I’m going to relate it in Nepali context. At first I tried to set the scene which is related to my experience toward internet. Secondly it tries to show the things that internet is offering for the ESL classes. Then I move toward the possibility of using internet in Nepali context. While dealing with this particular topic I include something about a person; named Mahabir Pun. In fourth part of this paper I write about the things that a teacher should remember while using internet in language classes. And finally I write something about my feeling which conclude this writing.

Introduction

I did my bachelor’s degree from one of the colleges in the eastern part of Nepal. Though I lived in a municipality, I didn’t get internet access there. As the trends go, I studied all subjects through the lectures of my tutors or with the help of book written by Nepali writers. I was even not aware of using the book written by foreign writers. The use of internet for me was just checking the e-mails nothing more than that.

I finished my bachelor course and arrived in Kathmandu for my further study. I decided to join KU for my Master’s Degree. I still remember the day when I got confusion. One of our tutors asked us to write reflection and I sent that to him through mail. I was aware of writing reflection and I wrote the reflection and went to the lab. I then I switched the computer on and logged in my email but after that I was confused what to do. I was ashamed and I just looked around the lab; luckily I saw one friend near me. I approached her and asked her how to attach file. She guided me.

My first experience toward internet was only related to the means of communication, but from that particular day my feelings completely changed. Now I’m in the place where I’m using internet each and every time for my each and every work. My feelings towards internet changed gradually from the means of communication towards the tools of teaching learning. With the help of these particular experiences I collected within a short span of time of one year, and with the help of other materials and evidences, I reached at the phase where I decided to prepare one article related to the use of internet particularly in ESL classes.

The internet nowadays is really widely used device. “The internet often abbreviated to NET, has often been described as the biggest communication revolution….” (Dudeney: 2000). The internet is being mainly a free recourse and it is increasingly being used in TESOL, and the expo. However, realizing the potential of this exciting and constantly expanding medium places new pressures on the layman TESOL teacher, who very often has had no pre-service or past in-service training on how to use the Internet in an ICT language lab (http://www.englishlab.intercol.edu/papers/pdf/chris%20alexander%20jan%2019.pdf). With the advent of the Internet, language teachers now have at their disposal various learning Websites with interactive contents that can be argued to offer certain advantages over conventional teaching methods (http://jpl.e-contentmanagement.com/archives/vol/5/issue/2/article/3462/internetbased-grammar-instruction-in-the-esl). Though it is mainly being used in language classes, it might be fruitful to talk about the use of internet in ESL classes and possibility of using it. I want to discuss the possibility of using internet in Nepalese institution.

What the internet offers for English language learners

The Internet provides a wide range of reading materials which can be used in teaching reading lessons. The Internet is sometimes called the library of the poor as the information is easily accessible for all people connected to the Net. According to Ewa Czubocha, as of April 1998 there were more than 320 million pages on the Internet. This huge virtual library offers an endless range of topics to choose from. The information available is updated on regular basis. The number of Internet sites offering ELT materials has been growing. All course books are written for a given audience. Therefore, many topics may be irrelevant or uninteresting for the class. As a result, teachers may need alternative texts or topics which can be found on the Internet. There are a lot of sites from where we can collect the ideas and information on how to teach and learn in EFL/ ESL classes. Here I’m going to describe some of  the websites which are useful for the teachers and learners of EFL:

  1. www.net.language.com
  2. www.its-online.com
  3. www.englishnow.co.uk
  4. www.eslcafe.com
  5. www.stuff.co.uk
  6. www.englishtown.com
  7. www.esllab.com
  8. www.englishlistening.com
  9. www.teachingenglish.org.uk

Most of the websites I explain above are useful; I can say these websites are useful because I made the use of this website while teaching and learning. Though I didn’t get the access to the internet at first, now I can make proper use of it while teaching. Among the websites written above I’m going to elaborate the last one. I want to include the things that are being offered from www.teachingenglish.org.uk. Basically when we heard the name of the website (teachingenglish) we can guess, what might be the purpose of this particular website. Normally it provides the tips which can be useful for the ESL teachers. Not only for the teachers has it equally focused on the learning of the kids.

            There are different games which are funny and interesting to help student practice their English and others. The main slogans of those games are play- enjoy and learn. These exercises are included in the part of the teaching English because the language used in these games is quite harder and students will not understand the instruction. As we know if we get opportunity to learn something while playing then that will be permanent and we can get ideas properly without any hesitation and difficulties.

This website also offers the grammar games and exercises. In grammar and word part we can learn and practice grammar and vocabulary through explanation, activities, and games.  These grammar games and exercises can be used by the teachers while teaching grammar lessons to their students. As we know learning English as second language is quite difficult task, especially for Nepali student, learning the grammar of English is quite difficult because the grammar of Nepali is completely different from the grammar of English. But if they get opportunity to learn grammar through the games they will not think that they are learning something but they will be happy that they are playing something and they will understand much more things.

There is another button and in that button listen and watch is written. In this particular part we can listen and watch the things in our computer and we can also download video and audio files too. These audio and visual materials are related to language practice activities, that we can do on our computer. As a teacher we can download those things and we can ask our students to do the same task in classroom. The things which are downloaded can be played inside the class and students can work on that.

There is another particular place where the things are uploaded specially for the students. There are different games and exercises. In the similar way there are lots of stories, songs and many more. These tasks uploaded in this part are simple and students themselves can understand the instruction and do the task. There are different texts related to the geography of the world and at one corner there are questions related to the same test and students should tick them. If they tick in correct then the next question will come and if not the correct answer will blink. In this way they will play with the computer and learn many more things. All these things are offered by this websites and especially these things are offered for English language learners.

Possibility of using internet in Nepal

Basically using internet in Nepal is really very hard. If we consider Kathmandu city and other main cities like Biratnagar, Pokhara, and so on, it may not be hard to make use of internet. Both teacher and students can make use of internet. But Nepal is not limited within those cities; there are a lot of remote areas where it is really harder to make use of internet. How can I expect there will be access to the internet when there are places where electricity is not introduced to date ?  Though there are many exceptions I would like to introduce possibility of using internet in Nepali context. Using internet and using different activities that internet particularly offers for English language classroom are really helpful for the teachers. The teachers themselves are the users of English as second language and pronouncing the words in a proper way might be harder for them. The problem not only lies in the pronunciation part; instead there are lots of places. Producing relevant and authentic materials and activities to conduct the task is also difficult for the teacher. But if they get the access to the internet then they can make use of different websites and can download different materials and activities which will be interesting and equally beneficial for both teachers and students. If we talk about the main cities of the Nepal both teachers and students can make use of internet because they can get access to it, and in case of other remote areas, in some places teacher can get access to and it might be harder to provide the access to all students. In those type of cases teacher can browse something interesting and helpful for teaching English and can apply those things in their class. If the condition is not appropriate for using internet neither of teachers and nor for students in those places using internet in really very difficult and the possibility of using internet is Zero.

While I was talking about Zero possibility of using internet I remember one great person of Nepal; named Mahabir pun. He did really great job that he introduced internet in remote area of Nepal. The possibility of using internet for English language teaching can be a bit easier if the project of Mahabir Pun has became successful. After receiving his master’s Degree in Education at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, Mahabir Pun returned to his native village, Nangi, and founded the Himanchal Education Foundation, and now he is currently at work establishing wireless networks in rural Nepal. His project is really helpful to introduce internet in rural areas. Though at first stage it might be used as the means of communication latter on we can made use of internet as a means of reading materials.

What a teacher should remember before designing the internet activities based course

            Before designing an internet based activities it is necessary to think over many issues. The teacher should start with looking through his or her course book and pinpoint the activities that are not suitable for the class as they are not challenging or interesting enough Warschauer (1997). They are general guidelines that can also be used in an EFL context:

1.    ‘Consider carefully your goals’: It must be clear to the teacher why this tool would be more successful than a traditional one. Reasons for using the Internet range from increased motivation to learning computer skills, but we should not ask students to do something on the computer that a book could do just as well.

2.    ‘Think integration’: Simply asking students to have a computer pen pal will not ensure a significant educational outcome. Teachers must be more involved in the activities and integrate them into the overall design and goals of the course.

3.    ‘Don’t underestimate the complexity’: A number of students may lack basic prerequisites for using the Internet, and it might be very time consuming to train these students. Apart from this, technical practicalities such as having computers available, hardware and software malfunction and excessively long waiting time to access web pages., may all hinder the use of the Internet in class.

4.    ‘Provide necessary support’: We should not stop trying to use the Internet due to the problems we mentioned above, but provide support in the form of hand-outs, training sessions, set up simple log-on procedures, encourage students to work in pairs or groups and help each other, and being available to help students when they are carrying out their Internet tasks.

5.    ‘Involve students in decisions’: Because of the complexities and difficulties mentioned, the teacher must be aware of the impact of these activities, consulting them through class discussions and surveys. This does not mean a passive role for the teacher, who should co-ordinate activities, focus students’ attention on linguistic aspects of texts and assist students in developing learning strategies.

Conclusion

            I’m the example of these things whether it is important or not. If somebody came near to me and asked me whether Internet is useful or not for me (ESL student), I will definitely say that yes it is helpful, useful and important for me. As I described all my experience towards the internet and its use, with the help of this experience I can say that internet is the best way of teaching and learning English as a Second language.  When I came here I became the member of teachingenglish.org.uk and I got better ideas and knowledge about the teaching learning process that can be used while teaching and learning English. If the teacher and students became habituated to use authentic internet sources for their practice learning and teaching will not be harder. The Internet is a tool which offers unprecedented possibilities in the field of English Language Teaching (ELT). Internet assisted ELT can enhance teacher’s effectiveness and facilitates his or her work. It also increases students’ independence, motivation and provides a real information gap. Provided links lead to multimedia support material and additional information which allows expanding activities in the direction of students’ interest. Provided links enable communication. Students use the Internet to communicate sending e-mail messages and participating in news boards, discussion groups and keeping in touch with newspaper editors and so on. That’s why in Nepal also we can make use of internet while conducting the ELT class.

Reference

Singhal, M. (1997). ‘The Internet and foreign language education: benefits and challenges’. The Internet TESL Journal 3/6.

Skinner, B. & Austin, R. (1999). ‘Computer conferencing – does it motivate EFL students ?’. ELT Journal 53/4: 270-279.

Dudeney, G (2000) ‘The Internet and the Language classroom’ Cape town, Cambridge University Press 2000.

Ewa Czubocha (2007) Internet assisted English Language Teaching,(PDF)

(Ms Ushakiran Wagle, B.Ed from Dhankuta Multiple campus Dhankuta and M Ed in ELT from Kathmandu University Nepal is new comer at educational field. For her research paper in her Masters studies, she carried out an action research on developing coherence in student’s writing in Secondary level which resulted in very positive findings. She has also shown her sense of leadership by managing events at the International Conferences of NELTA (Nepal English Language Teachers’ Association) of which she is a life member. She is resourceful and methodical and trying to establish herself as good teacher. )

 

Learner autonomy?-Yes!!!

Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

Madhu Neupane

This story is based on my experience of introducing learner autonomy in bachelor level in teaching reading. Introducing autonomy in the class where the students are very much habituated to teacher fronted and teacher controlled classroom is a very tough job. They are usually highly reluctant to take responsibility of their learning. They lack confidence and motivation. In the beginning of my intervention, they tended to think that they can do nothing on their own regarding reading. When I asked them to read texts at home on their own, very few of them did so in the beginning. One of the students said “madam can you provide me with the techniques to read at home own my own. I understand nothing”.  Other students said, “There are a lot of new words in the texts. If I started to look them up in the dictionary it takes me a lot of time”. Still other said, “If you provide me with the answer I can memorize them and write in the exam. I am not sure of the answers I write myself”. There were similar views from other students as well.

In the beginning I was also frustrated because the students were unlikely to follow my idea. I kept on convincing them that they knew more than they thought they knew.  I said that if they learned any new word in any reading text they would encounter the same word in other texts as well which would facilitate their learning and the time consumed in one unit will save time for other units. Then I asked them to make flash cards for any new words they encountered. Their flash cards would contain words along with the pronunciation in one side and the meaning, one suitable example sentence where the word is used in meaningful sense and any other relevant information on the other side. They found the idea very interesting. It helped to bring a kind of variation in the classroom as well. Slowly and gradually students became habituated to keep cards. I kept on asking them to make cards of new words every day. At the end of intervention almost all students started to keep their flash cards which helped them increase their vocabulary as well as boost up their confidence in reading.

Slowly I shifted from explaining passage to providing them with the tasks and asking them to do the task in the class under my guidance. I divided them in groups and asked them to read and underline answers to the questions in reading texts. They would be happy to do so. I checked and confirmed their answers with the whole class. I did the same with true false items and other comprehension based exercises. To make certain whether they were doing the exercises sincerely, I would ask them to note down page number, paragraph number as well as the line number in the text. If it were true false item they would not only have to tell whether the statement was true or false but also why it was true or false. This made them somehow serious in their reading.

The interesting thing was that they did not think they understood the passage even if they were able to do all the exercises given in the text. They kept on demanding that I read and explain the text for them even after they had done all the exercises.  Not to make them frustrated I did the same for some texts but my explanation was always after they had finished doing the exercises. I made them write the answers to the questions discussed in the class at home. The problem was that even if they could find out the answer in the text most of them had problems in writing the answers. To improve their ability to write answers, I checked their answers (giving focus to the weaker ones) and provided them with answers.

When the students became a bit habituated in doing the tasks on their own in the classroom, I asked them to read texts at home before that was discussed in the classroom. Some students started to do the same and realized that their understanding was better. I kept on encouraging them and appreciating their efforts. From this they felt a sense of achievement. This encouraged other students to read text independently. Then the class started to be interactive in comparison to teacher fronted class. At the end of my one month intervention there were apparent positive changes.

Nowadays, slowly and gradually my students are becoming independent in their reading though there is still long way to go. I have a sense of achievement for this has brought some hope and confidence in my students regarding their study. Now I have realized that “small things matter”.

 

 

(Ms. Madhu Neupane, Lecturer, has been teaching at the Central Department of English Education, Tribhuvan University, for 6 years. She completed Master’s Degree in English Education in 2003 and Master’s Degree in English Literature in 2008. She has published some articles and books and presented papers in different conferences. She has experience of teaching English from Primary Level to Master’s Degree. She has conducted some research in the area of ELT. At present she is an executive member as well as life member of NELTA. Her interests include teaching and conducting research in ELT.)

For contact:

Phone Number:           01-4332867 (Res) 9841738920 (Mobile)

Email:                          madhukneupane@gmail.com

Skype:                         madhu.neupane2

Branch Highlight: A Complete Report on ELT Programme

Nelta branch and members

Eka Dev Adhikari

The newly formed executive body of NELTA Chitwan wanted to extend its activities in the wider level covering both public and private schools in Chitwan. The initiation of this programme was taken right after the formation of the body. NELTA Chitwan was schocked to notice a rift between NELTA and PABSON that had been developing in the past few years in Chitwan. NELTA Chitwan was also charged of treating the private schools with partiality. The PABSON Chitwan even had the misconception that NELTA Chitwan was centering its activities only for the public schools. In order to defend against the charge, NELTA Chitwan vowed to conduct the programmes in the future impartially for both the private and public schools.
Another benefit of conducting such programmes for NELTA was that we anticipated to disseminate the news about the international conference among the secondary level teachers of the district so as to unite the supporting hands together to make the upcoming conference a grand success. So, with this aim, the NELTA started lobbying with the PABSON delegates and decided to conduct a programme for private schools. For a wider coverage and inclusion of teachers from different parts of the district, NELTA decided to conduct the training in three phases. Phase I for the teachers in the central Chitwan, Phase II for the teachers of Eastern Chitwan and Phase III for the teachers in Western Chitwan. For this NELTA Chitwan decided to conduct a survey on the needs of the teachers. The survey resulted in a programme for the secondary level with the sessions mentioned herewith. A package compilation committee was formed that was led by district chair Batuklal Tamang. The other members of the package compilation committee were Mr. Minraj Bastakoti, Mr. Khemlal Pahari, Mr Dilip Sharma, Mr. Manoj Kshetri and Eka Dev Adhikari. The package was produced with the following training sessions in them.
• Teaching Poetry at Secondary Level by Mr. Batuklal Tamang (addressing the need of the Poetry to be taught the poetry in Compulsory English)
• Teaching Literature at Secondary Level by Mr. Minraj Bastakoti (addressing the need of teaching Optional English at Grade 8, 9 and 10)
• Integrating Skills teaching at Secondary Level jointly by Mr. Manoj Kshetri and Mr. Khemlal Pahari (addressing the need of integrating four skills of language together, if possible, in a language classroom)
• Teaching Grammar at Secondary Level by Mr. Dilip Sharma (addressing the need of teaching grammar in grade 8, 9 and 10)
• Teaching writing at Secondary level by Mr. Eka Dev Adhikari (addressing the need of teaching writing with special focus on Essay writing, story writing and news story writing)
• Correcting Learners: Correction Technique at Secondary Level by Mr. Minraj Bastakoti. (addressing the need and time management of assessing the student tasks in an ongoing language classroom)
The first phase of the programme (A Two Day ELT Programme: Phase I) was organized at Bharatpur English Schools Society (BESS) Office Bharatpur dated Shrawan 6 and 7 2068 (22 and 23 July 2011). As anticipated, the participants of the programme were the secondary level teachers of central Chitwan covering private schools (PABSON schools). The teachers had already mentioned their expectations in their survey form, so it was easier for us to go on with the package compilation as well as programme co-ordination. The sessions were planned to be taken as below:
Day 1: Session One: Teaching Poetry at Secondary Level by Mr. Batuklal Tamang
Day 1: Session Two: Teaching Literature at Secondary Level by Mr. Dilaraj Pathak
Day 1: Session Three: Integrating Skills teaching at Secondary Level jointly by Mr. Manoj Kshetri and Mr. Khemlal Pahari.
Day 2: Session One: Teaching Grammar at Secondary Level by Mr. Dilip Sharma
Day 2: Session Two: Teaching writing at Secondary level by Mr. Eka Dev Adhikari
Day 2: Session Three: Correcting Learners: Correction Technique at Secondary Level by Mr. Minraj Bastakoti.
The programme was duly conducted for two days. About 35 of the English teachers from the PABSON schools in central Chitwan attended the training and in the closing ceremony the participants felt and expressed their views that the sessions were aptly addressing the demand they had mentioned in the demand collection sheet filled by them. The participants also felt that since the sessions were derived by improvising the actual teaching rather than theoretical doctrines, they found the programmes really applicable in the classroom. They also said that they found the programmes to be really useful to carry out the lessons learnt from the training sessions directly into their classroom situation.
The closing ceremony was honoured with the presence of District Education Officer as Chief guest and other distinguished guests. The chief guest congratulated NELTA for initiating the short term refresher training courses for private schools. He also promised to support NELTA Chitwan and its ensuing 17th International Conference phase II in every possible way. He even promised to take NELTA in confidence in order to develop further training programmes for different level in the future. PABSON Chair, Mr. Shree Prasad Dhungana expressed that this programme has filled the rift between NELTA and PABSON that was supposed to have been built in the past few years. As the chair of PABSON Chitwan, he also promised to support NELTA and its ensuing international conference in every possible ways. Finally NELTA Chair closed the ceremony by promising to carry out such programmes in the near future in other parts of the districts as well and support with every possible way to improve and enhance the ELT situation of the district in the days to come.
The second phase of the programme (A Two Day ELT Programme: Phase II) was organized at Ekata Shisu Niketan, Ratnanagar dated Bhadra 3 and 4 2068 (21 and 22 August 2011). As the programme was cascaded to the Eastern Chitwan after its successful presentation in the central part of Chitwan. The sessions that were taken were –
• Teaching Poetry at Secondary Level (addressing the need of the Poetry to be taught the poetry in Compulsory English)
• Teaching Grammar at Secondary level (addressing the need of teaching grammar in grade 8, 9 and 10)
• Integrating Skills Teaching (addressing the need of integrating four skills of language together, if possible, in a language classroom)
• Teaching Writing at Secondary level (addressing the need of teaching writing with special focus on Essay writing)
• Dissemination of NELTA Activities in and around Chitwan and introduction to the online forums like that of NELTA Choutari, Yahoo Groups and so on.
• Correction Technique at Secondary level (addressing the need and time management of assessing the student tasks in an ongoing language classroom)
The second session of Phase I (Teaching Literature in the Secondary level addressing the need of teaching Optional English) had lost its importance as per the demand of the Eastern Chitwan. The reason was that Optional English was not in practice in Eastern Chitwan. The sessions were facilitated by the following trainers.
Day 1: Session One: Teaching Poetry at Secondary Level by Mr. Batuklal Tamang
Day 1: Session Two: Teaching Grammar at Secondary Level by Mr. Dilip Sharma
Day 2: Session One: Integrating Skills teaching at Secondary Level jointly by Mr. Manoj Kshetri and Mr. Khemlal Pahari
Day 2: Session Two: Teaching writing at Secondary level by Mr. Eka Dev Adhikari
Day 2: Session Three: Dissemination of NELTA Activities in and around Chitwan and introduction to the online forums like that of NELTA Choutari, Yahoo Groups, Teach English, etc. This was facilitated by Mr. Batuk Lal Tamang, Mr. Dilip Sharma and Eka Dev Adhikari
Day 2: Session Four: Correcting Learners: Correction Technique at Secondary Level by Mr. Minraj Bastakoti.
The programme was duly conducted for two days. A total of about 30 teachers of the Eastern Chitwan were facilitated in the training and in the closing ceremony the participants felt and expressed their views that the sessions were aptly addressing their need and they anticipated NELTA to continue such programmes in the days to come. The participants were found to be enthusiastic in working out with the lessons learnt from the sessions and expressed that they were grateful to NELTA, PABSON, SOECEBS, ECOBS and all other stakeholders of the programme.
The closing ceremony was honoured with the presence of SOECEBS Chair Mr. Balhari Devkota as Chief guest and other distinguished guests. ECOBS co-ordinator Mr. Madan Puri expressed his gratitude to NELTA for conducting such programmes for Private schools. The chief guest and the SOECEBS Chair Balhari Devkota also promised to conduct such programmes for lower secondary level and primary level as well. All the speakers also promised to support NELTA Chitwan and its ensuing 17th International Conference phase II in every possible way. Finally NELTA Chair closed the ceremony by promising to carry out such programmes in the near future in other parts of the districts and also for the other levels as well and support with every possible way to improve and enhance the ELT situation of the district in the days to come.
The third phase of the programme (A Two Day ELT Programme: Phase III) is yet to be conducted in the Western Chitwan. NELTA has taken PABSON western belt in confidence in collecting the teachers and setting the venue for the programme so that the programme can be conducted in near future.

 

(Eka Dev Adhikari working as as ELT practitioner for the last two decades. Currently he teaches at Janajagriti Higher Secondary School, Pithuwa, Chitwan. He is also The Vice Principal and English Department Head in Marigold Secondary English School, Chainpur Chitwan. He is an active NELTA activist and currently holds the position of branch secretary in Chitwan branch. He did his MA in English from TU, Central Department of English, Kirtipur and his M.Ed. In Curricullum and Evaluation From Saptagandaki Multiple Campus Bharatpur Chitwan. As an active NELTA activist, he has been presenting papers in Local, Regional and International conferences of NELTA. He has also published various articles on ELT.)

March 2011 Issue- NELTA Conference Special

Editorial

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. Teaching English in multicultural contexts: more challenges and even more opportunities by Prem Phyak

4. English, multilingualism and cross-culturality by Adrian Holliday

5. Conference reflection by a first time attender by Ushakiran Wagle

6. Letter to the NELTA President by Praveen Yadav

7. Professional value of personal blogs by Bal Krishna Sharma


Presidential Address: Sixteenth NELTA International Conference

Native Perspective

– Mr. Laxman Gnawali

Honourable Member of National Planning Commission and Founding President of NELTA Prof. Tirth Raj Khaniya,

Past President, Current

Advisor and Chief Editor of NELTA Journal Prof. Jai Raj Awasthi,

Prof. Abhi Subedi sir,

British Council Country Director Robert Monroe, and British Council Country Exams Manager Ewan Davies

RELO Kathmandu Fife McDuff, RELO New Delhi Joelle Uzarski, Colleagues from the US Embassy,

Mr. Anil Kedia, Chairman, DAV Sushil Kedia Vishwa Bharati Higher Secondary School

Distinguished Guests on the dais,

Key speakers, participants from home and abroad, publishers, NELTA colleagues, media persons, ladies and gentlemen,

I feel truly delighted and honoured and privileged to welcome you here to this 16th conference of NELTA. Your gracious presence in this august gathering has added to our belief that networking works in teacher professional development.

At this moment, I would like to begin with my sincere appreciation to those who initiated NELTA and also those who nurtured it. NELTA that now operates through its over 30 branches spread all over the country, has over 1700 life members and several hundred general members and a sizable number of institutional members.  NELTA that encompasses teachers, learners and enthusiasts of English of every kind, from schools to universities, public and private, from every walk of like. NELTA that is looked up to by ELT colleagues and other professionals of home and abroad. NELTA that does not market for membership but its size grows every year.  NELTA where we learn and let learn.

This is not just eulogizing. This phenomenon has a theory behind it.

In Sanskrit, there is a saying ‘Sanghe shaktih kalau yuge‘ which means organization holds the key to strength in modern times. Here the word organisation means association and network. Being on a network makes a crucial difference in one’s career and professional attitude. With the help of network, one not only develops and rises, but also snowballs strength to help others to move on. The members help the network to grow. This is true to NELTA. At NELTA, there has been a literal give and take. NELTA is what Emilie Durkheim calls organic bonding which acts as a tool to help the individuals grow in the profession, self-actualise and be recognized in a broader circle. It helps them realise their full potentials. NELTA provides its members with opportunities to realise their potentials and with those realised potentials, the members explore newer avenues for NELTA to grow into a bigger platform. Mike Solly rightly put at the end of his presentation in an ELTeCS meeting in Srilanka a few years ago:

Tell me and I will… Forget

Show me and I will. …Remember

Involve me and I will…Understand

Network me and I will. …Grow (and help others to grow)

This is not just a theory now. It is a reality.

How is this possible? This is possible because NELTA’s foundation is built on three ships S-H-I-P-S: membership, partnership and relationship.

First the membership: Our strength is our members who bring with them ideas and aspirations, hopes and dedications, they give and they take as I said earlier. They put pressure on the leadership and bear the pressure of the tasks assigned to them. They are the backbone.

Second this partnership, without partners we would not be where we are today. Together with the partners, we run the conferences, training programmes, English language courses, radio programmes, surveys and other research studies, disseminate the ideas, make interventions into where English is important. Together with the partners, we think and act.

Third is the relationship. We build relationship with the individuals and organizations home and abroad. We share our experiences, best practices, learn and let learn. We network with other networks.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Now I would like to highlight some of the recent achievements which are also listed in the programme that you in you in hand.

We have made progress in the ELT survey in which NELTA works with the National Planning Commission, Ministry of Education, British Council and the US Embassy.  Our survey design including the tools is almost ready to be implemented.  Now time to put together funds.

NELTA and the US Embassy have just started a two year Access Micro-scholarship program in which we teach English to the non-elite youths in Kathmandu , Gorkha and Bhairahawa.

NELTA has collaborated with Radio Sagarmatha in the English by Radio program supported by the US Embassy and it is very popular. Also, the US embassy has been very kind to supply the ELT Forum magazine to all the life members of all the NELTA branches.

Another support from the US is that we now have Senior English Language Fellow Dr. Barbara Law, who is travelling with NELTA trainers to different branches and reaching the unreached.

NELTA now manages the six ETAs in Lalitpur under the Fulbright Commission ETA program and we have planned to have six ETAs to work with NELTA next year.

We partnered with British Council to implement the English for Teaching and Teaching for English (ETTE) project at the branch level.

A cadre of NELTA trainers have received training from the British Council. They will cascade it in different parts of the country.

The NELTA participants of the British Council’s Learning Centre training now receive joint certificates signed by the NELTA and the British Council.

The British Council and NELTA are now working out how we can collaborate in teacher and learner support activities such as the Global products.

Capacity building of the NELTA leaders and members is our priority. With the support from the British Council and the US embassy, NELTA members have participated in different international courses and events, TESOL USA and IATEFL, UK. With their kind support eight NELTA speakers represented the ELT of Nepal in the first teacher educators’ conference in Hyderabad India recently. We are very pleased to share with you that the selection for the Hornby Scholarship to do a Master course in the UK is underway. This has been possible with the fresh initiatives taken by the British Council Nepal and the Uzbekistan office. The announcements will be made soon for the Bell Centre the UK’s scholarship to attend trainer’s development course in the UK. This is special arrangement between NELTA, Bell Centre and the British Council. Altogether six trainers completed a trainers’ course from EFLU India in the last three years, RELO India and the US Embassy collaborated with the EFLU on this. The TEFL International provides scholarships for the NELTA recommended individuals  to do Certificate and diploma courses.

As a decentralisation process, we have started organizing a regional chapter of the NELTA conference. Last year was in Birgunj and this year we are travelling to Pokhara.  This also shows that the branches have built up their capacity to organize the evens of this level.  NELTA Dhangadhi branch has acquired land and funds are being sought for the constructing the office building

The NELTA journal is peer reviewed and has the ISSN number. The credit for this goes to the highly dedicated editorial team led by Prof. Awasthi.  NELTAchautari is a different versions of NELTA forum; Prem Phyak, Ghanshyam Sharma, Bal Krishna Sharma, Sajan Karna, Kamal Poudel and Hem Raj Kafle work to make it resourceful and user-friendly coordinating from places of varying clock times.   The yahoogroup has been an excellent forum for our members to connect themselves with the global ELT. Please log on to these sites, learn and let learn.

We cannot sit back and rest because achievements have been made, there lie newer avenues with newer challenges.  On the one hand, NELTA has to continue the projects already initiated, on the other it has to look for un-trodden paths for newer achievements. This calls for the collaboration and coordination with stakeholders in more effective ways.  While we need a strong and leading Centre, without stronger branches we will not step ahead. The implementation of the ELT survey project still remains a plan and will need to be realized into concrete actions. Whatever the plans and ambitions, without the active participation and cooperation from all the sectors including the government, nothing will happen. I hope we will stand united in every effort NELTA makes.

This conference is richer than before with more than 150 speakers from more than 17 countries. I would like to welcome the two key speakers Prof. Adrian Holliday and Prof. John Fanselow, plenary Brian Tomlinson, Sheilagh Nelson speakers and the presenters including the representatives of our neighbouring ELT organisations like SPELT, BELTA, SLELTA, ELTAI and all the participants from home and abroad. I would like welcome you all to this Himalayan nation and to express my gratitude to you all for accepting our invitation. I wish all the participants and speakers to have a memorable time. I also wish the foreign and out of valley participants a pleasant stay in Kathmandu. Please bear with us for any discomforts you may suffer.

Finally, I take this opportunity to thank DAV Sushil Kedia Vishwa Bharati Higher Secondary School who have made such a contribution by providing the venue and facilities including human resource that we remain thankful to them. Thank you DAV team. My sincere thanks go to our sponsors, supporters and exhibitors the British Council, the US Embassy, the Cambridge University Press, the Oxford University press, the Routledge India, the Ekta Books, the Brikuti Books. I can speak here today because for the last few months, NELTA colleagues worked tirelessly day and night. I would like to document their voluntary and sincere contributions to make this event a grand success.

Thank you very much indeed.

Laxman Gnawali

Acting President, NELTA

18 February 2011

Highlights of the 16th International Conference

Miscellaneous


Prepared by Hemanta Raj Dahal, President NELTA

Nepal English Language Teachers’ Association (NELTA) 

Highlights of the 16th International Conference

Kathmandu: 18-20 February 2011

Pokhara: 22-23 February 2011


The 16th international conference of Nepal English Language Teachers’ Association (NELTA) was held on 18-20 February 2011 with the theme  ” English in Multilingual and Cross-cultural Contexts: Exploring Opportunities and Meeting Challenges” at DAV Sushil Kedia Vishwa Bharati Higher Secondary School, Jawalakhel, Lalitpur for three days.

Session I-Inauguration

Conference started with registration along with tea and snacks at 9 am. Master of the Ceremony (MC) Mr. Hemanta Raj Dahal, General Secretary, NELTA opened the session welcoming all the distinguished guests, media people and the participants from different NELTA branch of Nepal.

Mr. Dahal invited Mr. Laxman Gnawali, Acting President, NELTA, Mr. Anil Kedia, Chairman, DAV Sushil Kedia Vishwa Bharati Higher Secondary School, Honorable Prof. Dr. Tirth Raj Khaniya, Member of National Planning Commission, Founding President of NELTA, Prof. Dr. Jai Raj Awasthi, Chair of Subject Committee, Faculty of Education , Department of English Education, TU, Past President and Advisor of NELTA Journal, Prof. Dr. Abhi Subedi, Prof. Dr. John F Fanselow, Columbia University, USA, Key Speaker for NELTA conference,  Prof. Dr. Adrian Holliday, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK, Amanda Jacobsen, Cultural Affairs Officer, US Embassy, Mr. Fife Macduff, Regional English Language Fellow (RELO), US Embassy, Kathmandu, Dr. Robert Monro, Director, British Council, Kathmandu, Ms. Joelle Uzarski, RELO, New Delhi, Ms. Maya Rai, Deputy Director, NCED and Ewan Davis, Examination Center Manager, British Council on dais.

Welcome Speech: Mr Anil Kedia, Chairman, DAV Sushil Kedia Vishwa Bharati Higher Secondary School

Mr Kedia welcomed all the distinguished guests and the participants. He thanked NELTA from his core of heart for providing them opportunity to offer venue for the conference. He said that without the pressure from NELTA, they would not able to complete the conference hall on time.  He pointed out that the students of new generation feel hidden values of English language with western mind.  The theme of the conference ‘multilingual’ is really challenging.  He added DAV  school is also on that line, it does not only teach English language but also teach German,  Hindi, Sanskrit, Nepali, etc at their school. These all are different facets of language.

He praised NELTA for its development of 17 consecutive years with 30 branches where professionals are working voluntarily and he said it is a coincidence that DAV School has also the same experiences of years.  They all are the real champion of the whole years of hardworking not only of the work of one day.  In Nepal also English language has become essential as lingua-franca to explore outside world.  Therefore, based on need of new generation, NELTA has been working.  Mr. Kedia hoped that NELTA will provide all of them a professional platform to build their career and future. By saying this, he concluded his speech.

Presenting Bouquet an Conference Kits: Ms. Bhuwaneshwori Rao, Principal, DAV Sushil Kedia Vishwa Bharati Higher Secondary School presented bouquet and conference kits to all distinguished guests.

Conference Inauguration: Following dignitaries inaugurated the 16th international by lighting 16 candles to mark the 16th international conference

Prof. Dr. Tirth Raj Khaniya, Member of National Planning Commission, Founding President of NELTA, Prof. Dr. Jai Raj Awasthi, Chair of Subject Committee, Faculty of Education , Department of English Education, TU, Past President and Advisor of NELTA Journal, Mr. Anil Kedia, Chairman, DAV Sushil Kedia Vishwa Bharati Higher Secondary School, Honorable Prof. Dr. Abhi Subedi, Prof. Dr. John F Fanselow, Columbia University, USA, Key Speaker for NELTA conference,  Prof. Dr. Adrian Holliday, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK, Amanda Jacobsen, Cultural Affairs Officer, US Embassy, Mr. Fife Macduff, Regional English Language Fellow (RELO), US Embassy, Kathmandu, Dr. Robert Monro, Director, British Council, Kathmandu, Ms. Joelle Uzarski, RELO, New Delhi, Ms. Maya Rai, Deputy Director, NCED and Ewan Davis, Examination Center Manager, British Council and Mr. Laxman Gnawali, Acting President, NELTA.

Presidential Address by Mr Laxman Gnawali, Acting President of NELTA

Honourable Member of National Planning Commission and Founding President of NELTA Prof. Tirth Raj Khaniya, Past President, Current Advisor and Chief Editor of NELTA Journal Prof. Jai Raj Awasthi, Prof. Abhi Subedi sir, British Council Country Director Robert Monroe, and British Council Country Exams Manager Ewan Davies, RELO Kathmandu Fife McDuff, RELO New Delhi Joelle Uzarski, Colleagues from the US Embassy, Mr. Anil Kedia, Chairman, DAV Sushil Kedia Vishwa Bharati Higher Secondary School,

Distinguished Guests on the dais,

Key speakers, participants from home and abroad, publishers, NELTA colleagues, media persons, ladies and gentlemen,

I feel truly delighted and honoured and privileged to welcome you here to this 16th conference of NELTA. Your gracious presence in this august gathering has added to our belief that networking works in teacher professional development.

At this moment, I would like to begin with my sincere appreciation to those who initiated NELTA and also those who nurtured it. NELTA that now operates through its over 30 branches spread all over the country, has over 1700 life members and several hundred general members and a sizable number of institutional members.  NELTA that encompasses teachers, learners and enthusiasts of English of every kind, from schools to universities, public and private, from every walk of like. NELTA that is looked up to by ELT colleagues and other professionals of home and abroad. NELTA that does not market for membership but its size grows every year.  NELTA where we learn and let learn.

This is not just eulogizing. This phenomenon has a theory behind it.

In Sanskrit, there is a saying ‘Sanghe shaktih kalau yuge‘ which means organization holds the key to strength in modern times. Here the word organisation means association and network. Being on a network makes a crucial difference in one’s career and professional attitude. With the help of network, one not only develops and rises, but also snowballs strength to help others to move on. The members help the network to grow. This is true to NELTA. At NELTA, there has been a literal give and take. NELTA is what Emilie Durkheim calls organic bonding which acts as a tool to help the individuals grow in the profession, self-actualise and be recognized in a broader circle. It helps them realise their full potentials. NELTA provides its members with opportunities to realise their potentials and with those realised potentials, the members explore newer avenues for NELTA to grow into a bigger platform. Mike Solly rightly put at the end of his presentation in an ELTeCS meeting in Srilanka a few years ago:

Tell me and I will… Forget

Show me and I will. …Remember

Involve me and I will…Understand

Network me and I will. …Grow (and help others to grow)

This is not just a theory now. It is a reality.

How is this possible? This is possible because NELTA’s foundation is built on three ships S-H-I-P-S: membership, partnership and relationship.

First the membership: Our strength is our members who bring with them ideas and aspirations, hopes and dedications, they give and they take as I said earlier. They put pressure on the leadership and bear the pressure of the tasks assigned to them. They are the backbone.

Second this partnership, without partners we would not be where we are today. Together with the partners, we run the conferences, training programmes, English language courses, radio programmes, surveys and other research studies, disseminate the ideas, make interventions into where English is important. Together with the partners, we think and act.

Third is the relationship. We build relationship with the individuals and organizations home and abroad. We share our experiences, best practices, learn and let learn. We network with other networks.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Now I would like to highlight some of the recent achievements which are also listed in the programme that you in you in hand.

We have made progress in the ELT survey in which NELTA works with the National Planning Commission, Ministry of Education, British Council and the US Embassy.  Our survey design including the tools is almost ready to be implemented.  Now time to put together funds.

NELTA and the US Embassy have just started a two year Access Micro-scholarship program in which we teach English to the non-elite youths in Kathmandu , Gorkha and Bhairahawa.

NELTA has collaborated with Radio Sagarmatha in the English by Radio program supported by the US Embassy and it is very popular. Also, the US embassy has been very kind to supply the ELT Forum magazine to all the life members of all the NELTA branches.

Another support from the US is that we now have Senior English Language Fellow Dr. Barbara Law, who is travelling with NELTA trainers to different branches and reaching the unreached.

NELTA now manages the six ETAs in Lalitpur under the Fulbright Commission ETA program and we have planned to have six ETAs to work with NELTA next year.

We partnered with British Council to implement the English for Teaching and Teaching for English (ETTE) project at the branch level.  A cadre of NELTA trainers have received training from the British Council. They will cascade it in different parts of the country. The NELTA participants of the British Council’s Learning Centre training now receive joint certificates signed by the NELTA and the British Council. The British Council and NELTA are now working out how we can collaborate in teacher and learner support activities such as the Global products.

Capacity building of the NELTA leaders and members is our priority. With the support from the British Council and the US embassy, NELTA members have participated in different international courses and events, TESOL USA and IATEFL, UK. With their kind support eight NELTA speakers represented the ELT of Nepal in the first teacher educators’ conference in Hyderabad India recently. We are very pleased to share with you that the selection for the Hornby Scholarship to do a Master course in the UK is underway. This has been possible with the fresh initiatives taken by the British Council Nepal and the Uzbekistan office. The announcements will be made soon for the Bell Centre the UK’s scholarship to attend trainer’s development course in the UK. This is special arrangement between NELTA, Bell Centre and the British Council. Altogether six trainers completed a trainers’ course from EFLU India in the last three years, RELO India and the US Embassy collaborated with the EFLU on this. The TEFL International provides scholarships for the NELTA recommended individuals  to do Certificate and diploma courses.

As a decentralisation process, we have started organizing a regional chapter of the NELTA conference. Last year was in Birgunj and this year we are travelling to Pokhara.  This also shows that the branches have built up their capacity to organize the events of this level.  NELTA Dhangadhi branch has acquired land and funds are being sought for the constructing the office building

The NELTA journal is peer reviewed and has the ISSN number. The credit for this goes to the highly dedicated editorial team led by Prof. Awasthi.  NELTAchautari is a different versions of NELTA forum; Prem Phyak, Ghanshyam Sharma, Bal Krishna Sharma, Sajan Karna, Kamal Poudel and Hem Raj Kafle work to make it resourceful and user-friendly coordinating from places of varying clock times.   The yahoogroup have been excellent forums for our members to connect themselves with the global ELT. Please log on to these sites and enrich yourself through mutual sharing.

Though achievements have been made, there are opportunities and challenges ahead.  NELTA should continue the projects that it has initiated and we need to create more space for collaboration with the key ELT stakeholders. Consolidation and capacity building of the branches should remain the top priority and the implementation of the ELT survey project should be our main target for next year. In order to accomplish these ambitious targets, we need your active participation and cooperation from all the sectors including the government. I am sure if we are together we can achieve what we aim.

This conference marks the historic one with more than 150 speakers from more than 17 countries. I would like to welcome the two key speakers Prof. Adrian Holliday and Prof. John Fanselow, plenary Brian Tomlinson, Sheilagh Nelson speakers and the presenters including the representatives of our neighbouring ELT organisations like SPELT, BELTA, SLELTA, ELTAI and all the participants from home and abroad. On behalf of NELTA, I would like to express my gratitude to you all for accepting our invitation. I wish all the participants and experts to have fruitful deliberations. I also wish the foreign and out of valley participants a pleasant stay in Kathmandu. Please bear with us for any discomforts you may suffer.

Finally, in order to make this conference happen, DAV Sushil Kedia Vishwa Bharati Higher Secondary School has given us a great support without which we would not have been able to carry it out so smoothly. Thank you DAV team. Similarly, for the last few months, NELTA colleagues have worked day and night. I sincerely acknowledge their voluntary contributions and I truly feel that they deserve the credit of the success of this conference.

Thank you very much indeed.

Honorable Prof. Dr. Tirth Raj Khaniya, Member of National Planning Commission, Founding President of NELTA

Dr. Khaniya welcomed all the participants and said he thinks he did a good job in the past when he recalls about NELTA’s work.  However, comparing of today they still have to do more in the field of English language teaching.  He became nostalgic and said he always feels proud every time when he comes to the inaugural session of the conference. He said NELTA has developed a certain kind of status, which is really praise worthy.  Then he urged NELTA people to come with a good proposal to work with National Planning Commission.  It has been more than a decade NELTA has been working in the field of English language for its betterment.  Then he thanked Mr. Kedia and showed his appreciation for providing venue to NELTA also thanked Little Angles’ School for providing venue last year.  He reminded them if the new committee formed, they would have to give first priority to the government and the partners to work in future.  In the last, he wished grand success of the conference and betterment of the institution.

Prof. Dr. Jai Raj Awasthi, Chair of Subject Committee, Faculty of Education, Department of English Education, TU, Past President and Advisor of NELTA Journal

.

Prof. Dr. Jai Raj Awasthi welcomed all and expressed his emotional attachment with NELTA.  He recalled David Poteinger who was together with him to begin the journey of NELTA.  At that time members had faced many difficulties at the initial phase.  Today looking at the big mass of 30 branches of NELTA all over Nepal, he feels proud.  Therefore, they have to be serious to face all the challenges and have to take care of NELTA.

Prof. reminded what he had said in the last conference, he was young when he started but now he has become old, now young generation has to lead NELTA.  He stated that country is going to adopt federal system in future, so, NELTA has to think about opening the regional branches considering this in future.  He suggested having regional offices in different parts of Nepal.  He acknowledged the assistance given by the BC, the US Embassy and thanked the Cambridge University Press, Routledge for providing books in cheaper prices and accessible. He did not forget to mention the book written by Adrian Holliday and informed them if they want they can get the book from the stall down in the book exhibition, which is another milestone of his publication in ELT.

Prof. became nostalgic and shared with them about his meeting with Adrian 15 years ago.  He requested them whoever think to join NELTA committee, they have to think about their dedication and work and what they can contribute to  NELTA but who comes only to occupy post it will not work. He emphasized on NELTA must work institutionally and he wished great success of the conference.

Prof. Dr. Abhi Subedi

Prof. Dr. Abhi Subedi welcomed all and compared NELTA conference with the Constituent Assembly.  He said though the country is facing many problems; political social and economic, NELTA is going on.  It is an area or domain for the teachers to work.  Talking positively about NELTA he said if people are willing to work with emotion of power they are associated with NELTA. He said as an English teacher, he has remained same whereas NELTA has grown up and has become stronger.

When they see NELTA how it is evolved, out of the dedication of the people, it is a historical process developing continuously.  If they look at the society and other field in Nepal today, they will find English is growing, not the native English speakers but Nepali speakers they find everywhere speaking English.  NELTA has created those types of people who are very powerful.  Language is a means; if they do not follow the proper pronunciation, other will not perceive them properly.  NELTA is responsible for creating those people capable of speaking English language as native speakers.

Dr. Robert Monro, Country Director, British Council, Kathmandu

Dr. Robert Monro welcomed all and mentioned about Sheela Nelson who came to Nepal in 1992 to work in the field of teaching, especially in the area of ELT. Dr. Robert acknowledged that he is not an ELT expert but he knew the value of ELT.  He congratulated NELTA for working on this filed all the time conducting workshops, conference and trainings. He was glad that the British Council people have been involved in this field from the beginning. He assured them they are not promoting or only talking about English, he is talking about the interest and need of the people today.  He said that English language do not bond person to person but it bonds all the language teachers in one. They have to recognize English language as the global, internet- language that opens global opportunity for all.  If the young people of Nepal do not speak English, they will be deprived from opportunities.  He mentioned that BC has developed digital English language programme and is interested to launch it through NELTA .  He liked the idea about NELTA with three ‘ships’ and like to add one  ‘ ship’ that is leadership.  The future generation will bring this into practice through the means of English language.

Mr. Fife MacDuff, Regional English Language Fellow (RELO), US Embassy, Kathmandu

Mr. MacDuff thanked DAV school for providing the venue and all the co-sponsors.  He also thanked all the participants from home and abroad who came to participate in the 16th international conference.  He stressed on “global-English.” He said English language is no more common English, it has become a globe English. Practice of English has no longer remained as spoken English that speaks in Britain and America; it has evolved as the global English.

He mentioned the importance of English for the development of people, which gives an access and opens the door of opportunity.  He mentioned about the Access Programme for less-privileged children, English Teaching Programmes, English Language Fellow are there to provide an opportunity to people here to learn English language.  NELTA has a great purpose to improve English and to improve ability of the teachers.  

Ms. Maya Rai, Deputy Director, NCED

Ms. Maya Rai welcomed all and thanked for being invited. She said teachers have grown old, above old they have become very wise.  Though 3000 plus members are there but all did not come to participate here. NELTA has reached at the stage where it cannot afford to make mistakes. They will share their success stories not to make mistakes, NELTA is not political institution, politics is a dirty game. She talked about partners and about ‘attic programme’. which is going to be held in future.  She thanked all for being here.

Release of the Publications from the Branches:

Mr. Dahal thanked Prof. Fanselaw and invited representatives from different branches to release their NELTA journals, publication through the distinguished guests and thanked all the guests and participants for their support to make this inaugural session a huge success.  Mr. Dahal declared closing of inaugural session.

Key Speech: Prof. Dr. Adrian Holliday, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK

Prof. Dr. Adrian Holliday supervises doctoral research in the critical sociology of language education and inter cultural communication. He is also the head of the Graduate School and Research Office ,an author of Appropriate Methodology and Social Context ,Intercultural Communication and Ideology,  Doing and Writing Qualitative Research , The Struggle To Teach English as International Language and the  co-author of Intercultural Communication. He was also involved in national university curriculum project in Egypt.

His key note address was based on theme of 16th international conference “English Multilingual and Cross-cultural context :Exploring opportunities and Meeting challenges”. He began the speech with  exploration of relationship between culture and language ,with particular reference to the ability ,English as a world language to embrace diverse cultural realities .Mainly he spoke on four topics –native speaker’s fallacies , issues for the classroom , communicative approach of English ,teacher’s and students’ lessons .

According o his experience in Iran, many words are borrowed from Farsi to English.  Sometimes new expressions are used in language, which is completely alien to native speakers.  He also expressed that there are varieties of English for example Indian English , Canadian English, Australian English ,Nigerian English and others, so English has no boundaries. He also talked about code–switching in conversation between Arabic and English, which is full of local cultures. According to him, there is a massive literature growth in English.  He mentioned that English language is transforming into less complex making it much easier and often adopted as a brand.  He also focused on issues of English teaching in classroom;  the rules for correctness, and how to capitalize, how to manage multicultural and multilingual experiences of the students in the classroom.  Another area he focused on was how to educate students about the nature of English and of language and society.

Key Speech: Prof. Dr. John F Fanselow, Columbia University, USA

Prof. Dr. Fanselow is the president of the International Pacific College and international residential degree granting institution of Palmerston North, New Zealand . He holds a PhD  from teacher’s college ,Columbia University where he is a Professor  Emeritus.

His presentation was based on range of activities , he asked each person to write beliefs about learning  each activity illustrates ,their reactions to the activities and the consequences of each experience .  He believes on doing more in teacher participation programmes.

He told them with the help of simple sketches, he made the participants to write simple sentences.  He also gave abstract words to guess the meaning and to write the actual words through sketches.

He commented on the  relevance of the line “read quickly and answer the question “ of a Nepali text book and got different reactions from the participants. According to him, if students read fast they would not be able to memorize the words and pronounce them correctly, that will be simply reading.  He also gave an example of teachers who make students to underline difficult words.  Prof. said it is better not to teach the words than to underline and explain them instead he suggests making students draw the pictures of these words on their own and understand them.  He is completely against teaching grammar, explaining vocabulary and making lesson plans. He said it would be better to ask students what they want to learn before teachers start to teach in the classroom.

Concluding Remarks by Mr Hemanta Raj Dahal

Newly Elected President

Pokhara

23 February 2011

Mr Chairman

Chief Guest – Professor Jai Raj Awasthi

Ladies and gentlemen

First of all, let me allow to congratulate you for your contribution. NELTA is extremely grateful to Gandaki Higher Secondary Boarding School (GBS) Pokhara for allowing us to use the space and the facilities to convene the 16th international conference of NELTA in Pokhara. I would like to thank all presenters and participants without whom this conference would not have been a success. We are indebted to the American Embassy and British Council for sponsoring the key speakers Professor Dr John Fanselow and Professor Dr Adrian Holliday respectively and to Ministry of Education for its moral support. The RELO office in the US Embassy deserves our special thanks for bringing English Language Fellows from the region and Fulbright Commission for bringing more than 30 English Language Teaching Assistants (ETAS) for the conferences. The publishing houses Cambridge University Press for sponsoring two plenary speakers – one in Kathmandu and another in Pokhara and the conference bags and stationery items, Oxford University Press for printing the NELTA Journal and Routledge for printing the proceedings of 15th international conference deserve our special thanks. Thanks are also due to local publishing houses, media, Nepal Tourism Board, local bodies and other institutions and individuals who showed their generosity to contribute towards this conference.

This conference has aroused many curiosities among the English language-teaching professionals on numerous issues. First, Professor John Fanselow’s presentations have been so much striking in the sense if we should teach the learners of English or enable the learners to use  English.

Professor Adriann Holliday’s presentations reveal the mind of many people from multilingual and cross-cultural horizons of expectations, which are instrumental for us to explore opportunities and meeting challenges. He also focused on new grammar of culture with an emphasis on global positioning and cultural politics. This will have implications on ranges of the current trends in ELT from curriculum development, to textbooks writing to classroom practices.

Professor Brian Tomlinson’s notion of seeing images in the minds of the readers and how the readers experience while reading a text, has become insightful. He reiterated the contrast between the use of visualisation and the inner voice when using the first language with how typically becoming fail for making use of them as learners of the second language. He stressed on the need for our students to become more effective and users of English by encouraging their use of visualisation and the inner voices.

Professor Jai Raj Awasthi revealed true absence of mono-lingualism but dominance of multi-lingualism. He emphasised on the people’s perception of the spread of English to threaten the indigenous languages spoken in the developing countries. However, despite such status, English has been spreading globally. This has given insight to explore how multi-linguialism could better integrate in English language development.

The issue of becoming creative and even more creative by Prem Phyak has now given a counter to the so-called pedagogical principles and practices because the presentation has encroached the boundary of other disciplines such as sociology, democracy, human rights, psychology, philosophy, cultural studies, etc.

The title ‘How Can I Write a Poem?’ by Motikala Subba Dewan, revealed the psychological motif regarding human desires and relationships such as:

Hello holiday

Goodbye school

Hello girlfriend

Goodbye wife

Hello football

Goodbye volleyball.

These papers have seriously raised the scope of content based syllabus.

Dr  Laxmi Bahadur Maharjan referred back how his students would mispronounce the words  the words such as important, pronunciation, bury, plan,  January, February, etc. He also referred what Sajan Karn proposed the need of authentic teachers. Who to blame?  He emphasized on the need of intelligibility with regard to the English language pronunciation.

Professor Rajeevan Karal has rightly raised the issue if it would be justice for the learners to introduce to learn English within standardized curriculum, linearity (pizza model) and standardized test. It means why should all the learners be based on generic syllabus despite their diverse identity, aptitude and motivation.

Professor Karal emphasised on the needs to link learning of English with their desire to pursue a career and the opportunities available to them. Moreover, the teachers of English have been struggling to satisfy themselves for choosing the variety of English – British or American. However, he shaped the way for learning of English that is intelligible globally. Learning materials and learning opportunities are being scaled up day by day. This is the time to use such learning opportunities. Professor Karal encouraged us to find simpler ways for teaching English.

Therefore, now is the time to justify the heuristic implications of what we have begun to advocate in the different ELT forums. Does our vocation have matches between what we preach and what we practice? The presentations in the 16th international conference of NELTA in Kathmandu and Pokhara both have handed us over a great responsibility for shaping the way we practice English inside the classroom and beyond.

I am sure, while doing so, not only every teacher of English will have increased responsibility to enhance quality of English through the classroom pedagogy but the syllabus designers, textbooks and materials writers and even the parents and students.

We have had enormous discourse in 5 days in Kathmandu and Pokhara between 18th and 23rd February 2011. So, what…? Thanks God – Dr Maharjan has given tips: don’t rush – remain slow and clear than be quick. The linguistic diversity and diverse features of such diversity are inevitable resulting in varieties of English and its implications on materials and methods.

We perfectly understand what a classroom teacher can do what s/he cannot do? This is the time to practice what we have learnt.

I  believe, the 16th international conference has become insightful to us for doing justice to our learners.

Reflection by a first time attender of the conference

Miscellaneous

-Ushakiran Wagle

In the 16th international conference held on 18th, 19th and 20th February 2011 at DAV sushil Kediya Vishwa Bharati higher secondary school Jawalakhel Lalitpur, I was assigned as a rapporteur in room number ‘G’. from the very first day of conference. The first presenter in room number “G” was Nirmala Gupta from India and was going to present on the topic “including 21st century skills in teaching English in primary class but she was not in contact with us so the room was empty.

Presenter Sajan Kumar Karn was ready to present his paper about deconstructivism. He started his presentation with the introduction of old mantra OM BHURBHUWASWAHA. He mainly focused on the old traditions that are still being used in Nepal and to change those tradition he introduced the ideas of deconstructionism. The view of the participants toward the word deconstructionism was similar to the destruction, so he provided the meaning of deconstructionism and destruction and he proved that both of these terms are different.  The main theme of his presentation was related to three pedagogies: Pedagogy of particularity, pedagogy of practicality and pedagogy of possibility. He focused on the point that pedagogy includes curricular objectives, classroom strategies, instructional materials, and evaluation measures but also wide range of sociopolitical, historical cultural experiences that directly or indirectly influences second language learning.  He dealt about all those three pedagogies. The part where he dealt about pedagogy was the important issue of his presentation.  As I studied in the course applied linguistics these three pedagogies are introduced by Kumaravadevelu.  While our class was running at our university several times we discussed them and we came to the conclusion that these procedures are good. What I understood according to pedagogy of particularity the pedagogy must be sensitive to particular group of teachers teaching particular group of learners with a particular set of goals in particular setting. In the similar way the pedagogy of practicality includes the relation between theory and practice.  The teachers and theorist should practice what is theorized and should theorize what is being practiced. Not only the teacher we students as well should be aware of the reality that the theory which has never been practice should not be emphasized, if we really want to use and emphasize those things then it is necessary to practice. The final pedagogy introduced by Kumaravadevelu is pedagogy of  possibility and it  empowers participants and points the need to develop theories from knowledge and social practices that work with experiences  that people bring to the pedagogical setting. When he finished dealing with that pedagogy he introduced banking model. The term was quite new for me and I was quite excited to learn what it is about. To explain the definition of that term he cited the definition given by Paulo Frieri (1921-1997) and the definition was something like this : In banking  model, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Then he introduced the banking model of Nepalese ELT. He focused on the exam centered system of Nepal. There are different activities which directly address the examination. According to him teaching learning in Nepal is happening without the proper management and students are being oppressed. There are no such ways where students are being motivated and are being evaluated by the teachers. What I understood by his presentation was that ELT should not be banking. The banking is similar to the evil activities.  Though his topic sounds something different the main theme of his presentation was related to nativizing ELT. He finished his presentation with slogan: If not you then who? If not now then when?

The third presenters in room ‘G’ were Harimaya Sharma and Kamal Raj Devkota. They presented collaboratively and that was collaborative. They conducted the workshop and that was related to creative writing.  The topic was “Creative writing: Burden or fun?” Normally teachers are blaming their students that they are not interested in creative writing, so they catch that particular issues and conducted the workshop to prove whether the creative writing is fun or  burden for the teachers as well as students.  That workshop was really helpful for those who never conduct the creative things in classroom because of their thinking of not having proper and enough time. They started and introduced their session from the introduction of the participants by adding adjective before their name. Participants were interested and they actively participated. They were adding the different adjectives and Kamal Raj Devkota was busy on copying the adjectives on the blackboard. When introductory part finished, they asked the participants to prepare the poem by using those adjectives written on the blackboard. When they asked participants to write the poem they explained the reason of using those activity, and the reason was the students will be introduced with two things with the help of one activity. They will be able to write a poem and they will be introduced with the adjectives. In the similar way the way of thinking also will be changed.  According to them we can ask our students to change the topic and create a number of poems in the similar pattern.  The final saying of their workshop or  the result of their workshop was we can make our student creative and we ourselves can be creative with the help of simple activity without any burden.

In the second day 19th February the first presenter was P. Nagraj and he was from India and his topic for presentation was Reciprocal teaching technique in enhancing the reading skills of engineering students in English in India. But he  told that he already  presented in a first day and he wanted to exchange the presentation with her. Instead of him Pranaya Pradip presented and her topic was  Evaluation of language learning in India. She briefly discussed the reality of Indian education from Gurukul system and she moved. She talk about the learners autonomy in India. According to her survey learners study English for four different reason like: learning for the sake of learning, learning for the sake of freedom, learning for the sake of application and learning because of fear and reverence. Most of the Indian student learns English because of fear that without English whether they will be able to compete with the world or not. As she described the all learners’ type, she immediately examined the consequences why those things are happening. The things she introduced were language acquisition becomes stagnant , in the similar way the examination system is so competitive and there are prescribed texts  to bound the students. Though the learners study by following very hard and fast rules at last the result is same and that is unemployability.  According to her research Indian students never learn to study for pleasure with inner desire; instead they learn forcefully and the result is also not satisfactory.

The second presenter of the second day was Christine Stone and she conducted the workshop.  Her workshop helped us to learn the way of teaching writing with the help of imagination. At first she asked to imagine what happen or what will the participator do if the big monster comes in front of them.  I found that was something for brain storming, but later on I came to know that, the thing that she asked to do was the main thing that she was going to introduce with us. She showed different pictures and ask the participants to describe those picture. Then she asked then to write a story. When she was conducting those activities all the participants were happy and active. In the similar way with the help of simple words written in a SVO pattern she taught to write a poem which contain beautiful rhyming pattern. She told us that the imaginative power of the small learners can be better and active than that of the elder learners. In each activity she asked the participants to discuss and work hard for a 5- 15 minute according to the nature of activities, so there was more productive work rather than the monotonous speech of the presenter.

The second last presenter of second day was Somnath Jagtap from India and his topic was analysis of primary curriculum of Maharastra. He explained about the new curriculum of Maharastra which is being introduced in public primary schools. According to him normally public schools are situated at rural area of Maharastra and there only few parents are literate and rests of others are illiterate. To maintain the balance there the curriculum introduced the local stories and poems by translating in English and with the help of illustrative pictures. He explained parents can recognize and understand the story or poem by seeing the pictures and they can explain it in local language and that will help their children to understand the things properly. The use of minimal pairs of disyllabic word is another thing which they introduced in their curriculum. According to him the curriculum should be user friendly.

The last presenter were Manbahadur khatri and Ramesh Ghimire from Nepal, they presented collaboratively and there topic was risk taking in ELT. They took the case of one girl who was known as bad girl in a class. they rose the issue that, the girl named Sapana never like that school because nobody speaks in her own language there. For her the English language was very hard and she was not able to use that language properly. According to the presenters they engaged her in many activities and made her speaking in a class without editing her. After few days they saw progress within her that she started speaking but her speaking was

A friend: “By! Today, my homework is not finish.”

Next friend: “I ta doing. I go to home yesterday and doing first miss homework.”
Sapana: “I also adda doing. I ta don’t know also.”

First friend: “Miss will bit yes?”

Sapana: “Why bitting ra? Don’t know ta we can ask hainara?”

Second friend: “Sometimes ta this miss bit so badly.”

Sapana: “bite bitun. Answer not coming ta what to do ra?”

At the same time, the girls saw me and again Sapana said with a shying laugh: “abue! Sir is looking here and suning all !heeeeeeeee!!!!!! heeeeeeeeee!.  At first the conversation produced by that girl and her friend was something which looks completely erroneous. Presenters focused on the same point. According to them, after 2- 3 years she was able to use English properly and now she can take part in any kind of speaking competition. When they knew the result of that erroneous speaking practice, they named them as risk takers of ELT. Especially sapana was risk taker for them. Because, at first she was afraid of English language, gradually she took risk and used the ‘broken’ English without taking care of the audience and at last, she was able to use English properly without any mistake. The result revealed that the risk takers; whonever take care of the errors can learn English with in very short span of time.

The last day of the conference 20th February, the first presenter of the room “g” was Paige Jackins and she was from Sri Lanka and her topic for presentation was Place based learning as an effective tool in the EFL classroom. She started her presentation with the introduction of place based learning. As a warm up activity she asked the participants to say what actually they understand when they heard the word place based. The participants provided their opinion toward the place based learning and gradually she added her ideas over there.   Actually the place based education Immerses students in local heritage, cultures, landscapes, opportunities and experiences; Uses these as a foundation for the study of language arts, mathematics, social studies, science and other subjects across the curriculum; and Emphasizes learning through participation in service projects for the local school and/or community.  This is somehow related to post modern thinking of learning. Students can gain knowledge through the help of the place and environment that is situated in front of them. To make a proper use of place based learning she gave the need assessment chart and asked the participants to fill up that form. Students can learn through the help of making picture of their favorite and special place in a town and then the students can connect that town to their local culture.  her presentation make us clear that students can learn while cleaning the certain place, while dancing and while planting the trees, there are the place where they might be engaged and there is the knowledge situated within that particular place. Her presentation reveled that if we make use of place based learning strategies in EFL classroom then it will be the better and easy way of teaching.

The second presenter was Nivedita Vijay Bedadur and topic of her presentation was Innovative Ideas at work:  M learning for adult learners. She started her presentation with the problems like single teacher school,lack of sources, lesser capacity to teach English and so on. According to her normally teachers are not confident enough to teach English. She talked about the use of mobiles in English language teaching. She introduced different practical consideration of SMS. The SMS is cost effective, user friendly and can be accessed at any time and anybody can use it properly. If we use the mobile it will be helpful for the learners and teachers as well, but the problem is that the learners sometime might not use mobile in proper place which can create more problem.

The second last presenter was sagun shrestha and he introduced the new way of teaching the character of fiction. At first he introduced what fiction poem is and what are the characteristics of persona poems. As a second activity he asked the participants to write a persona poem which meets the characteristics that he introduced. He showed the different activities that were done by his own students. When the participants finished writing the persona poem he again provided them one story related to the appraisal of the King and he asked to read the story properly. When they finished reading the poem the participants were able to write the persona poem by using the certain words from the story. That was the innovative style of introducing the fictional characters.

`           The last presenter of the NELTA conference was Siddhartha Dhungana and he presented on the topic process reading and product reading.  He introduced different tips for developing the reading habit. Though we read continuously there is the bitter reality of not having proper ability to write. Whatever we should be able to write those things but actually we are not able to do so and one and only reason for that is we are not habituated to think pair and share was the main idea of his presentation. Though we are introduced about the pre reading, while reading and after reading terms, we are not aware that what should be put where? Before reading if we think for a while and if we became able to map the mind what we are going to do that will help us to read properly. After reading something if we put those things within us, the knowledge will not get opportunity to spread, so we should share the things that we learn. He demonstrated different pictures and let the participants discussed about those pictures. Those pictures contained the different reading style. The important tips that he provided was write one thing that  we learn after reading, and then discuss how the lesson that we learned or read is related to contemporary real world. In the similar way he talked about the questioning , for example if we didn’t understand anything after reading certain lesson then question yourself why you didn’t understand the things? And write one question we have about that days’ lesson and emphasize in the process of learning. With which particular process you involved in reading and why you didn’t understand that. When he finished his presentation I come to know that if we keep in a mind that we are going to read something and there is the link between the thing that I’m reading and the real world than it will be easy to comprehend the text.

For the very first time I attended the NELTA conference and I got many more thing from that. The presentation and workshop conducted by different presenters was really helpful to handle my day to day life and for my further study as well. Thank you NELTA for giving me as a Rapporteur in this Conference.

Teaching English in multicultural contexts: more challenges and even more opportunities

English as a Global Language

Prem Phyak

English is no longer the language of only so-called native speakers of English (e.g. Americans, British, Australians, and so on) because the number of native speakers is already outnumbered by non-native speakers of English. It has already become a global language which is not only a means of disseminating new knowledge in any field throughout the world but also a means for intercultural communication. English has already become an inevitable part of the education in Nepal though there are many challenges to make its teaching more effective. Those challenges include techniques of teaching to macro-level educational language planning in Nepal. One of the major challenges is how teaching of English can be made appropriate in the multilingual and multicultural context of Nepal. Nepal English Language Teachers’ Association (NELTA) organized its 16th international conference in Kathmandu (18-20 February) and Pokhara (22-23 February) where more than 500 and 400 participants in the former and the latter respectively discussed challenges and opportunities of teaching English in multilingual and cross-cultural context of Nepal. There were more than 200 papers and plenary speeches of different scholars, researchers and English teachers from home and abroad. Professor Adrian Holliday from Canterbury Christ Church University, UK and Professor Emeritus John F. Fanselow, Columbia University, USA delivered key speeches on the theme of the conference ‘English in multilingual and cross-cultural contexts: exploring opportunities and meeting challenges’.

Despite the fact that indigenous languages are on the verge of extinction, there is a craze of learning English among students and parents also aspire to educate their children in English medium schools. This aspiration has been already reflected in the educational language policy of the Ministry of Education (MoE) to introduce English from Grade One in community schools. In the same way, the MoE has already given the authority to management committees of the community managed public schools to shift themselves from Nepali to English medium of instruction. The number of schools switching to English medium is increasing every year. On the other hand, English is both subject and medium of instruction from pre-primary level in private schools. However, there are many challenges to teach English to students who come from various linguistic and cultural backgrounds. One of the challenges is that whether or not students get chance to utilize their own cultural and linguistic knowledge in schools while learning English. Some questions pertinent to the theme of the conference were: how our socio-cultural background can shape teaching and learning of English? How can we teach English while addressing linguistic and cultural diversity of Nepal? How can we foster critical and creative thinking skills? There were discussions on how learners’ prior linguistic and cultural knowledge helps in learning English. The papers presented in the conference provided a great implication that students’ cultural knowledge can be a resource for teaching and learning English.

Professor Holliday argued that the English language can foster intercultural communication among the children from diverse cultural as well as linguistic backgrounds. Focusing on the importance of children’s prior knowledge, he reiterated that teachers of English should capitalize multicultural experiences that children bring into the classroom while teaching English. He also put a significant point that teaching of English should be contextual and we need to educate children about the nature of English in relation to society. This clearly indicates that to address the expectations and experiences of children from diverse cultural backgrounds, teachers’ role as a passive-technician is not enough rather they have to be a transformative intellectual. Teachers should understand that classroom is socially constructed and historically situated and they should create such an environment where students from various backgrounds can get opportunities to utilise their prior knowledge. In general, English teachers are not simply in-charges of classroom but also agents for social change. They can also contribute to foster democracy and critical thinking skill by creative inclusive learning environment where students can exercise their values, assumptions and identities shaped by local, national and global socio-cultural settings and expectations. In the same line, Professor John F. Fanselow, another key speaker in the conference, focused on how students can be taught creatively so that they get more opportunities to use English. Breaking rules of traditional teaching, he discussed that teachers have to arouse curiosity of students to resolve various puzzles themselves rather than showing their fault while they make mistakes. Emphasising the importance of thinking process, he stated that students should be given enough time to think while teaching English. He also presented the idea of recording and transcribing learners’ classroom language which can be an abundant source for teaching English. This clearly indicates that we need to rethink the way we are teaching English in Nepal. Some crucial questions that may help us to further our debates are: How often do we give students chance to think critically? Are we aware of their socio-cultural backgrounds? Have we tried doing something new or beating the same old drum? Professor Fanslow’s presentations were all about deconstructing the old rules of teaching English and reconstructing alternative ones to engage students in doing things.

Professor Abhi Subedi, critically assessed the consequences of detaching teaching English from cross-cultural context in Nepal. Analyzing the socio-political and historical discourses, he strongly condemned that our practices of teaching English have not been able to address socio-cultural realties. He argued that ‘methods [of teaching] … failed to suture the diverse experiences of English teachers in this country’ and is critical about teachers’ resistance towards change. He showed his concern about the fact that teaching and learning of English has been confined within the classroom. This clearly indicates that there is a huge gap between socio-cultural reality and teaching of English in Nepal. He appealed that we can design syllabuses and can develop viable methods of teaching by considering our own multilingual and multicultural realities. He also mentioned that now there is no point in following British or American Standard English to teach English in Nepal. In the same way, focusing on the importance of English, Professor Jai Raj Awasthi presented that three language policy (mother tongue, Nepali and English) can be a pragmatic policy for placing English in multilingual and multicultural context of Nepal.

The reflection of the only mega event of its kind in Nepal points out some crucial issues regarding teaching of English. First, there is an urgent need of taking the ownership of English rather than considering it as a ‘foreign’ language (in literal sense, not in pedagogical and political sense). Since there is a craze of learning English even in rural areas of the country, we have to closely observe how English is being produced (Spoken and Written) to indentify our own variety of English. Second, we have to work hard on designing syllabuses, writing textbooks and producing learning materials which address expectations of Nepalese children from multilingual and multicultural backgrounds. Third, we have to explore more opportunities and should try developing alternative ways of teaching to foster students’ creative and critical thinking skills. Overall, we have to deconstruct the tradition that confines English in the classroom, break the rules that make students produce only minimal language (formulaic speech), smash the hierarchy between teachers and students to foster two-way communication, demolish monolithic and mono-cultural world view to advance intercultural communication and forget prescriptions of any method to instill critical thinking skills for independent learning in students.


English, multilingualism and cross-culturality

English as a Global Language

In his presentation, Proessor Holliday discusses the role of English in this heterogeneous world from multilingual and cross-cultural perspectives. Click the links below to download the pdf versions of his presentation PowerPoints.

 

English in multilingual and cross-cultural context


The complexity of culture

Letter to the NELTA President

Nelta branch and members

By Praveen Yadav

Dear President of NELTA,

I would like to congratulate you for being elected as a new president of NELTA unanimously. I wish you all the best as you shoulder immense responsibilities of the biggest organization of English language learners, teachers, ELT practitioners, methodologists, textbooks/materials writers, teacher trainers, etc. I believe you would put your efforts in making the dream of our advisors Prof. Dr. JR Awasthi, Prof. Dr. GR Bhattarai and Prof. Dr. Abhi Subedi come true during your tenure.

There is a very common quotation by our grandparents in our rural areas of Terai that to buy an elephant is expensive but to keep the elephant is more expensive. Likewise, it is difficult to get elected as president but to shoulder the responsibilities of NELTA as president till the term is more difficult. I hope you would shoulder the responsibilities honestly, efficiently and diligently. You have developed leadership and it is now up to you how you would lead 19 executive members, more than 1630 life members and 29 branches across the country.

All the members of NELTA across the country wanted you to chair NELTA with a lot of aspiration and expectation. I hope you would respect their aspiration and expectation and act accordingly to fulfill them.

We should not forget JR Awasthi guru’s quote, “WE ARE NELTA.” I believe this is the spirit of the organization. We should not also forget “UNITY IS STRENGTH.” Here unity means the unity of our branches. Our branches from Mechi to Mahakali and from the Mountains to Terai are the strength of NELTA. I hope you would maintain and develop mutual relationship and close coordination between NELTA central and NELTA branches. This is only possible when you visit the branches time and again and help organize different sorts of trainings, workshops, seminars, meetings, conferences and the like in the branches. Besides, representatives from respective branches could be invited in the meetings of NELTA central and circulate the minutes through yahoo mail groups or NELTA Choutari. This will make the organization transparent among all those associated with this. This is the mantra that will help us increase our new members and new branches.

Dear President, let’s develop a learning and positive organization culture in NELTA. You’d better to apply team approach, participatory decision-making practices, financial transparency and accountability and timeliness with a high quality of performance for the welfare of the organization. Participatory decision making, team building, appreciative inquiry, learning and doing, coordination & networking and collaboration with concerning stakeholders are the approaches that can make our NELTA alive and unique.

As you are the one member of last executive committee, you are familiar with its shortcomings. The then committee has already done a tremendous work, but it might have been still trying to coordinate with our branches and advisors of NELTA at the desired level. However, we are very optimistic to see minimizing the drawbacks in the past during the tenure of the newly elected Executive committee. I hope the new executive committee will bridge the gap between the central and its branches and strengthen organizational relationship.

NELTA, no doubt, explores the opportunities for English language fellows in Nepal. You are kindly advised to coordinate with all the branches while recommending our members for those opportunities. This will be an added value in your leadership in three years of your tenure.

We are well-acquainted with the fact that collaboration is a must for NELTA to explore and mobilize its resources across the country to promote the teaching and learning of English language in Nepal sustainably. NELTA has been collaborating with British Council, American Embassy, Ministry of Education, Room to Read, and SNV-Nepal.  At present AIN (Association of International NGOs in Nepal) comprises more than 80 INGOs have been working on a wide-range of issues and sectors to contribute to development efforts in Nepal. Dear President, we hope you would be able to collaborate with these organizations in the days to come during your tenure since ELT is also a kind of development and it can also be used to promote human rights.

English language in a New Nepal can stand as an icon of unity and national harmony since all other languages have been supposed to belong to specific communities. English can be an instrument to strengthen loktantra and promote human rights. To make the government of Nepal realize the facts, NELTA can play a crucial role as the nation is undergoing a transitional stage and everything is in a state of flux.  Then the government would ponder over a language policy, in general, and ELT strategy, in particular.

We hope you would learn from the mistakes of the predecessors and be able to put your efforts in minimizing them. You have the moment and the opportunity to put NELTA on the right course to achieve the mission, vision, goals and objectives of NELTA.

Wish you all the executive members of NELTA all the best for your successful tenure!

Yours Truly,

Praveen Kumar Yadav

Rautahat

NELTA Birgunj Branch

Do you know why “they” are “there”?: Professional value of personal blogs

ELT Resource

Bal Krishna Sharma

They are here because of several reasons.

Blogs have become an effective platform to share personal as well as professional ideas. I had my personal blog two years ago and I have found it as a space to communicate to a larger audience. Traditionally, people used to introduce themselves with their name, ethnicity, parents’ names and their occupations, etc. In this increasingly globalized world, the trend has changed and these traditional ways of constructing identities have become less important.

As a language teacher, what can you learn from personal blogs of people who are involved in the ELT profession? Ideally, you can learn these people’s’ biographies, interests, works and publications as well as their reflections on their teaching and research. Most of them give good resources for teaching and learning of English that you can either download or copy for your purpose. Here, I list some “good” blogs by ELT professionals, researchers and linguists, and I leave it up to you regarding what you can learn from them. Among them are people like David Crystal, Jeremmy Harmer, and Ken Wilson. Don’t forget to leave your feedback.

Click on https://eltchoutari.com/elt-resource-bank/, and navigate what they offer to you.

Writing thesis or academic papers? Read this…

ELT Resource

Evaluating Online Resources

-Bal Krishna Sharma

Students doing research work (esp. master’s thesis) often ask whether it is “okay” to quote/cite sources from the Internet. The answer to that question is very complex, because the Internet is a whole university that contains the most scholarly materials (e.g., online databases of academic journals) as well as the least authentic sources (including completely false facts, scam businesses, vulgarity, and random web pages posted by people who either know little on the subject or just copy text from other places). But that doesn’t mean that websites outside of academic databases don’t contain authentic material: it means that students must be able to analyze and distinguish authentic from inauthentic material.

In this brief essay, first I will discuss the need for evaluating online resources for academic purposes, reflecting on my experience with “academic writing” as a university teacher in Nepal, instructor of academic English in a university in the US, and an editor of a refereed ELT journal published from Nepal. And then I move to offer some tips on how to evaluate academic resources available online for students of academic writing (e.g. thesis, dissertation, term papers, article manusripts, etc.). I conclude the essay with some useful links and their brief annotations for further reading on evaluating resources online.

When I was teaching M. Ed. students at Tribhuvan University and supervising their theses, I found that students plagiarized language as well as content of their theses from open sources like Internet. Using questionnaire and interview, I carried out a study on why and how students plagiarized academic works when they were writing their theses. Findings revealed that students lacked their evaluative skills on judging the authenticity of online resources, among other reasons. From 2008, I have been teaching academic reading and writing courses to international graduate students  in the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I have found my students having hard time to evaluate relevance as well as authenticity of online resources in their areas, in addition to struggling to deal with plagiarism issues. As one of the editors of the Journal of NELTA, our editorial team has had to deal with issues of plagiarism as well as authenticity of our authors’ manuscripts in using online resources while preparing manuscripts. One of the major reasons of manuscript rejection is the author’s inappropriate use of unreliable web resources.  Based on this experience, I realized that offering some tips would be helpful for students of academic writing (e.g. theses, dissertation, articles, term papers, etc.) as well as any individuals involved in the business of academic English. Also as Coordinator of “Resource Building/Collection” section of NELTA Networking team, I have provided hyperlinks for academic journals available for free in applied linguistics/ELT accessible in this link: http://neltachoutari.wordpress.com/downloads-and-links/. Journal of NELTA’s previous issues have been achieved in Nepal Journal’s collecction website. http://www.nepjol.info/index.php/NELTA/issue/archive
Readers can use the criteria below in order to assess those web resources. The present essay will complement this endeavour of mine.

The World Wide Web offers immense amount of information and data from all over the wold in multiple languages. Because so much information is available, it is necessary to develop skills to evaluate what is useful and relevant for your purpose. For example, if you type “learner autonomy” in Google search, finding hit reaches  to 1,71000 in 0.4 seconds. What will you do then? Do you cite everything that you find? Or do you use the first 10 or so findings for your purpose? It is difficult to answer this question. It is not a big problem for printed resources like books, chapters or journal articles because such resources have been evaluated before by reviewers or scholars in the field. However, because anyone can publish on the web, you need to evaluate the materials in terms of their authenticity, relevance as well as their reliability. Scholars have offered a number of criteria to evaluate such resources. I  briefly discuss their summary below.

Criteria for Evaluating Online Resources

Authorship
Who wrote the page?

It is necessary to find out who wrote the material/text that you are reading. Find out the name of the author as well as his/her affiliation to the institution. You can also see the home page of the author by googling. Then ask a question: Does the author seem to be qualified to write on the topic? You can see the list of publications by the author in order to assess the author’s expertise. If you find some resources particularly useful to you but cannot access for free online, you can request the resource by emailing to them. Though this is not guaranteed, I have used this strategy when my library does not have the copy I want. If you are convinced that the author “knows” what s/he is writing, then you can use that resource.

Publisher
Who is the publisher?
You can access resources from multiple locations: personal websites, official websites, blogs, etc, but all of them are not equally useful for your research purpose. For example, if the resource is published by a university press (e.g. Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, etc.), it is likely to be authentic and reliable for you scholarly purpose. Academic journals are published by different university presses as well as publishing houses. Read the submission guidelines of the journals and find out if they are peer reviewed, refereed journals. Articles published by refereed journals are reviewed and evaluated by usually two other reviewers to ensure quality. Journals that accept contributions without review can be poor in their scholarly quality. If you locate the material in websites, blogs or Wikipedias, they can be useful, but they are usually not scholarly. Google search, for example, often leads you to Wikipedia pages, and while information there is useful for review, it might not be too appropriate for your academic work.

Intended audience
For whom was the information written?

Remember that every information is not written for academic purposes– for example to help you write thesis or term papers. The publication could be aimed to general audience (e.g. magazine readers) or specific audience (e.g. students/researchers of applied linguistics). Therefore, the source can be very superficial lacking depth, or too technical accessible only to the experts on the topic or just right for your needs and purpose. Therefore, different resources design their content to fit their audience’s interests in terms of format, style, complexity of ideas and amount of details. Make sure that the resource you are using is for the audience like you and for the work that you are pursuing.

Currency
When was the work published?

Journal articles published online are dated and they are identified with volumes and issues. You need to use recent works as much as possible. Because knowledge changes every day, older publications can be less useful and sometimes misleading. For example, if you have an article on “second language acquisition”  published in 1987, you need to question its relevance in 2011. You might want to look for an article that has been written pretty recently, for example in 2010. Because authors usually tend to provide their list of publications in their home pages, you can access recent publications from their personal websites as well. For using information from web pages, you can see when the work was last updated. If the web page was written in 2001 and has never been updated, information there can be obsolete.

Fact or Opinion
Is the information fact or opinion?

Any information included in publication is rarely neutral. In addition, it is necessary to first verify if the content contains author’s opinions or proven facts on the topic being written about. Authors usually tend to take a position in their writing and they believe in their opinions. Therefore, it does not mean that you also agree with that opinion. Even the so-called facts are used “selectively” to support the author’s opinions. While evaluating resources, it is important to examine “who” is providing the information you are reading and what could be their point of view or bias. Because the Internet provides larger space for publication, people find it as a perfect venue for commercial or political agendas. Even the facts included in the information can be incorrect or misleading. Just to give you an example, David Crystal in 2008 assumes that 15 million people in Nepal can speak English. This is a statistical assumption from one of the most well known linguists. However, you can ask a critical question: Can 15 million people in Nepal speak English where literacy rate is only 48 percent and total population is about 27 million? What happens if you present Crystal’s assumption as a fact in your thesis? In order to avoid any risk that results from biased opinions or selective facts, you need to collect other sources and compare and contrast them against each other.

Coverage
Does the author give diverse opinions on the topic and list references and further readings?

Academic topics are hardly non-disputable. There usually is more than one opinion on the topic you are writing. Then you need to make sure that the author is presenting more than one opinion or previous literature on the topic and then only taking his/her position. When you read different approaches or perspectives on a topic and find controversies and differences, it is difficult to decide which source is accurate or reliable. In such a situation, you need to locate more resources and do more readings. Good academic sources mostly provide reference lists and further readings. You can also judge the reliability of the information on the basis of those reference and reading lists. If they are directly relevant to the topic and are current in their publication, then the resource you are using is likely to be authentic and reliable for your purpose.

Annotated Bibliography/Further Readings

1. University of Maryland Library for Evaluating Web Resources (http://www.umuc.edu/library/guides/web.shtml#Evaluate) : This website provides five separate criteria for evaluation of web resources for research purposes– particularly presenting a series of questions to determine if a web resource is of high quality.

2. Cornell University Library (http://olinuris.library.cornell.edu/ref/research/skill26.htm): This website offers critical tips on evaluating print as well as web sources before writing any academic paper. It addresses three main components: author, title, and publication information. It also offers how a website can be evaluated by examining home pages.

3. Johns Hopkins University Webpage: (http://www.library.jhu.edu/researchhelp/general/evaluating/index.html)
Information provided in this webpage presents a set of criteria that can be used to evaluate print as well as web content to assess information.

4. Duke University Library (http://library.duke.edu/services/instruction/libraryguide/evaluating.html)

This webpage provides you some basic principles on evaluating resources while writing research papers. By posing a series of questions, readers and researchers can determine the quality and reliability of resoruces before using them.

5. University of Albany Library (http://library.albany.edu/usered/eval/evalweb/EvaluatingWebContent.pdf)
This document offers tips for evaluating the quality and reliability of web content for academic purposes. It comprehensive discussion of web-content from sources like web pages, blogs, wikis, social networking sites, free research sevices and mulitmedia types is helpful for the students to figure out which content is trustworthy for academic purposes. The following link is helful to access those useful tips.

You can also download full article by clicking here: Evaluating Online Resources

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