Category Archives: Teacher’s Experience/anecdotes

Developing creative- linguistic abilities through classroom poetry

Native Perspective, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes, Teaching Tips

 Dinesh Kumar Thapa, Lalitpur

 

“Poetry and hums aren’t things which you get; they’re things which get you.  And all you can do is go where they can find you.”-Winnie.

Classroom poems are funny and full of variety. They make a class really lively and motivating. Poetry can be oral or written, or both. They can be read aloud for developing oral- pronunciation ability, or they can be written to develop creative- linguistic abilities in English. Poems demand a lot of expressive ability on the part of the learners, so they engage the learners for the creation of meaning. Besides, using poetry in the class allows the children to express in the ‘little English’ they have developed in the beginning years of learning. It develops confidence in the learners for producing English and motivates them to learn more English. Poems are interesting for all, and even more interesting for the little kids.

For the purpose of this article, I have used the term poetry to encompass all English teaching activities which involve musical quality, which are aesthetic and expressive, and which do not demand rigid grammar rules to carry them out. Activities such as rhymes, songs, riddles, musical compositions, jingles, etc. have been included under classroom poetry here. The teacher here does not need to worry about such concepts as the theme, form, metaphor or the criticism of poetry, as they are not such academic poems for critical study. Rather, for us, poems are simply a tool of developing English in the learners! The activities suggested here are appropriate for junior/ primary level students, yet they can equally be employed in the higher levels with modifications.

1.     Naming poems: This technique involves creation of a poem out of the names of the students with some additional details for the name.

Laxaman is always late and Geeta is great,
Hari becomes hungry, but Rabin becomes red.

The list goes on for each student. Here, the initial sound of the first name has been matched with the corresponding initial sound of the adjective that tells something about the person.

2.     Event- making poems: Here, learners create a poem based on the theme of an event, e.g. making a party, celebrating the school day, organizing a cultural show, etc. Each line in the poem will be telling who will be involved in the event in what way.)

Making a Party
This is Bina with a big banana,
This is Suman with some soup,
This is Rabina with red raspberry,
And this is Kanchhi with a clean cup.

Each upcoming line here includes the necessary preparation to be done for the event including each student’s roles. Here, the initial sound of the name has been repeated with the corresponding initial sound of the adjective and the noun that tell about the event.

3.     Attribute poem: It is a technique which involves creation of a poem using common adjectives and nouns in a pattern of rhyme.

My Family
My mummy is thirty- nine
But she is very fine.
My dad is good,
But he has a sad mood.
My puppy is nice,
But it eats much rice.

The lines continue until all/ most family members are included through with appropriate attribute words. Here, common nouns and adjectives have been used in patterns, both in structure and rhyme; the use of conjunction, ‘but’ shows a contradiction in meaning.

4.     Chain poem: It is a technique to create a poem expressing as much as possible on a single topic, possibly adding something on each upcoming line.

Wai Wai Noodles
Wai Wai,
Wai Wai is delicious,
Wai Wai is delicious, marvelous,
Wai Wai is delicious, marvelous, satisfying,
Wai Wai is delicious, marvelous, satisfying, so tasty,
Sweet Wai Wai for all.

Here, more and more words have been added to tell different feelings about the topic.

5.     Narrative poem: In this technique, a poem is created for telling a story, a past experience, a journey or an event.

Lagankhel Trip
I was going to Lagankhel,
And I was carrying my favourite bag,
My little, brown beautiful bag,
My father had recently bought for school,
And it was the rainy time,
I was looking my head downs and ups,
Into the tall houses and big shops,
And I slipped on the banana cover,
Very painful, I felt so bored,
Because me and my new bag got splashed in the muddy road.

The lines go on until the complete story is narrated. Here, more and more past experiences and feelings are added to the initial beat.

7. Instructional Poems: for creating a poem using instructional lines, students here think of diverse ethical/ moral codes of conduct and write either positive or negative statements with expression of results intermittently. 

Mind Your Manners
Don’t drum on the table,
Don’t play with your food;
Don’t talk while you’re chewing;
Because it’s terribly rude!

Don’t litter the room,
And don’t slam the screen door.
Don’t throw dirty laundry;
Because it’s making mom angry more!
Don’t fight with your young sister,
And don’t pull the cat’s tail;
Don’t pelt stones on the street,
It might be more dangerous than a nail!

8.     Metaphorical poems: in this technique, the teacher and the learners work together to brain- storm ideas and create a poem using poetic devices like metaphor and simile.

[Theme: My Country; associated adjectives: small, famous, peaceful, amazing, historic, etc. Other nouns associated to the descriptive words, as for the adjective ‘small’- doll, fingers in the hand, etc.; for ‘famous’-  our president, Meri Bassai Serial, Pele, etc.]

My country is small
Like the doll in the bag and the fingers on my palm;
My country is peaceful,
More silent than the market and school.
My country is amazing,
With so varied cultures, languages and mountains.
My country is so beautiful,
I must feel proud and grateful.

Here words (especially noun words) related about a theme are collected first; then adjective words are associated to each initial noun words, and further extensions are made until students’ vocabulary permits. Then the associated words are stated in sentences attempting a higher order of imagination.

9.     Bio- poem: Employing this technique involves creating a poem using biographical information of persons/ places using WH- question probes, real or metaphorical.

[Topic:  Nepal; Some words that describe the place: beautiful, peaceful and romantic

What it has? Who loves? Who gives? Who feels? Who wants? Who fears? Etc.].

Nepal
Beautiful, peaceful and romantic;
Has a lot of mountains, lakes and rivers;
Who loves the varied races, cultures and people;
Who gives education, peace, security and progress;
Who wants us all to grow and to learn the best to live happily;
Who fears war, insecurity and national challenge;
My motherland Nepal.

 Here the teacher arranges for a brainstorm using different WH- bio probes in order to include most salient pieces of information as they are needed for a biographical understanding of a place/ person or thing. After having adequate information, lines are composed in line with the probes.

10.  Other techniques

We can also use jingles, rhymes, mimes and other expressive techniques. We can also ask the students to tune the poems with the local rhythm, like folk song- tune, pop- tune, etc. and to perform to the whole class individually or in groups.

Some thoughts about teaching English in Nepal

The English language is the most important international language in this century. These days, English is not only the language of Britons and Americans; rather it has become a world language. It is now the language of international trade, business and diplomacy, language of higher education, wider cultural understanding and more job opportunities. Recognizing the very importance, the public and the Government have also given due consideration in the promotion of English in Nepal. Expenditure on teaching English is also huge for developing courses, materials, assessment and so on. Besides these, every workplaces and classrooms are also ripe with the talks of learning English. Today’s parents also demand at least communicational literacy in English for the children. Also, many Nepali medium community schools have started teaching through the medium of English at different levels. Besides, the charm of English medium school is quite obvious for us. But, despite all these assets, the result of our children is not so encouraging. The exam results and different assessment studies show that the proficiency of learners’ English in Nepal is not on par with the expectation; be it in the primary or tertiary grades.

The low level of student achievement, however, is the result of multiple factors. The teacher alone is not and cannot be made responsible for such. It is true that our children come from difficult backgrounds; parental level of conscious is low. We also may not have audio- visual support in the classroom. Besides, we are also not well trained in teaching English. These are our realities. However, we cannot get free from our responsibility; neither can we skip from the problems. So it is wiser to search for the bright side of the dark cloud. At least our parents have believed in us and have sent their children to us; at least we have the physical presence of the child, so we become teacher. If there would be no children, whom would we be teaching to? So, it is upon us, specifically the English teachers, and all teachers in general, to realize the aspiration of the parents and the students. Our sincere efforts and dedication are the only solution for the time being, as we cannot expect a drastic change overnight. Our small initiatives will definitely result into the improvement of English teaching scenario. The future of the innocent ones is in our hands, is not it English language teachers!

[I was inspired for writing this piece by the Asian English Teachers Creative Writing Group Seminar held in Nepal in 2009, especially from the presentation by Mr. Lekhanath Pathak and Ms. Maya Rai.]

Towards Multilingual Education in Nepal

Miscellaneous, Teacher Training, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

Reflections on MLE Conference 2013

Praveen Kumar Yadav

We not only use language for daily communication; we also use language to express our identities and cultures and to represent our lifestyles and communities. So, as we all know, the loss of language is loss of both culture and identity of the community speaking the language. Because communities that lose their languages–and thereby their culture, identity, and pride–also lose their status and confidence in society, the process of language loss often leads to broader and adverse social consequences such as marginalization, poverty and poor health, social evils such as drug abuse, and so on. Hence, it is important to preserve languages in the world, especially the languages of the minority groups.

Those who are ignorant about the value of language diversity tend to believe that communities that adopt a more dominant/mainstream language “gain” new power and opportunity; they even go to the extent of arguing that linguistic minorities shed the burden of multiple languages when they leave behind their local languages. The truth about multilingualism, however, makes such understanding absurd. Language is the key to engagement and therefore to sustainable development. The World Bank Research Report titled “Assessing Aid: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why” (1998) showed that development initiatives that sought beneficiaries’ involvement achieved 68 percent success, while those that did not achieved a success rate of just 10 percent. Engaging with the beneficiaries needs the use of their local languages. Such a linguistic and cultural immersion with the target communities contributes to establish two-way communication for people’s meaningful participation and to adopt bottom up approaches in order to achieve sustainable results. Trying to supplant local languages with outside language (whether that is done for efficiency or in the name of “empowering” local communities) is like trying to make one’s neighborhood greener by cutting down existing trees and planting new ones–or worse.

Language is the key to inclusion and inclusion is a must for democracy. For instance, Nepal being a multiethnic and multilingual country will become a true democratic nation when it fully overcomes more than 250 years legacy of linguistic and cultural discrimination against indigenous and minority groups. It is only possible when children of minority groups are provided with the access to education in their mother tongues. Promoting multilingual education in the country–where minority language communities can build upon their local linguistic, cultural, and knowledge resources even as they learn new languages–is a roadmap for true democracy.

In particular, the promotion of local languages is the key to effective education. Education is a basic human right in international law, widely accepted by governments throughout the world, and language is a medium of instruction as well as a subject matter to achieve the basic human right of expression and self-realization.

MLE Conference in Bangkok

Insights like the above brought together hundreds of educators, linguists, government and civil society delegates and development workers from the Asia Pacific region and beyond at the fourth international conference on language and education recently convened by the consortium of organizations ‘Multilingual Education Working Group (MLE WG)’ in Bangkok, Thailand from Nov 6 to 8, 2013.

Representing a development activist and educationist from Nepal interested in MLE, I attended the conference on the theme ‘Multilingual Education for All in Asia and the Pacific: Policies, Practices and Processes’. The theme was very relevant as it provided a common platform to adopt a common understanding of MLE and its importance in Asian context. This conference did showcase promising practices so as to increase understanding of the importance of expanding access to effective MLE and strengthen the momentum for this issue in the AsiaPacific region. The event did not only determined the factors that enable effective, efficient and sustainable MLE by sharing challenges and lessons learned from current MLE practice but also identified recent policy developments in the Asia-Pacific region. The researches and papers presented in the conference revealed that the role of MLE network and collaboration with the governments, non-government organizations, universities and language association played a significant role in making the government formulate and revise education policies in respective countries and putting the MLE practice into action at schools.

Towards Multilingual Education in Nepal

The research studies and papers on policies and practices towards multilingual education in Nepal occupied a substantial space in the conference. Altogether eight different research studies and papers were presented by Nepalese MLE practitioners, academician and NGO activists. Director General Dr. Lava D. Awasthi from Department of Education, Nepal and profound linguist Prof. Dr. Yogendra Prasad Yadava from Tribhuvan University, Nepal talked on multilingual education in terms of policy manifestations and pedagogical practices in Nepal and MLE policies and practices in Nepal as an appraisal respectively. Both the papers showed the variations, challenges and gaps in MLE practices introduced by Government of Nepal as well as national and international agencies in the country.

Even though Nepal is a multilingual and multiethnic country with 123 languages and more than 103 ethnic communities, children in most ethnolinguistic communities are deprived of basic education in their respective mother tongues. Teaching in unfamiliar languages has hindered cognitive development in the children. Language not only helps promote equality and empowers people but also is a key factor for the social inclusion in ethno-linguistic communities. MTB-MLE is the most important mechanism for achieving the goal of education for all among minority communities. However, the policy adopted by the government is not conducive for such a purpose. Curriculum and textbooks as well as reading materials are not compatible to the socio-cultural setting of the communities. Making these arguments in her paper, Dr. Ambika Regmi from Tribhuvan University concluded her sharing claiming that only appropriate strategies can access to MTB-MLE be guaranteed in all ethno-linguistic communities of Nepal.

Reviewing the education policies addressing minority language use in basic education in Nepal, Pushker Kadel, director of Language Development Centre, an NGO shared the impact on the community, students and teachers of pilot MLE programs initiated by Department of Education in eight languages and MLE projects initiated by I/NGOs. Blending his own experience of MLE initiatives taken by local NGOs and the reported outcomes of the existing MLE projects, kadel made recommendations for effective MLE practices in Nepal.

MLE Practice: Case of Rajbanshi

Pamar Rajbansi from Nepali National Languages Preservation Institute

(NNLPI) an NGO and Kimiko Abe from Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) Nepal presented a case study of a multilingual education (MLE) program implemented in the Rajbanshi speaking areas of Jhapa and Morang in southeast Nepal. This case study showed how a quality MLE program can provide efficiency, effectiveness, and sustainability of education for students who speak non-dominant languages. The case study also illustrated that high quality program can persuade local governments of the value of providing education in the students’ strongest language, creating a sustainable policy and funding environment for MLE program. The three key factors that made the Rajbanshi program successful included community involvement as implementers of the program, child-friendly teaching methods and environment and capacity building and professional development support to the teachers.

Similarly, undertaking another case study of a Rajbanshi medium school in Jhapa of eastern Nepal, Surya Prasad Yadav from Tribhuvan University Nepal shared MLE practices in Nepal through his paper. The findings of his studies showed that children from Rajbanshi-medium school are more motivated towards education and are more regular in class attendance. Owing to the use of the mother tongue, the rate of their dropouts has decreased and there has been a reduction in the number of out-of-school children. Finally, he discussed the ways to address the challenges of MLE practices in that case and further claimed that such a case could be replica for other similar schools in the country.

MLE: A Case of Rana Tharu

The Rana Tharu language spoken by Rana Tharu community, indigenous inhabitants of Kailali and Kanchanpur districts from far western Nepal, is gradually being lost due to dominant language Nepali, which is only medium of instruction used in schools and literacy class. Children from such community face difficulties in education due to Nepali and English being the medium of government and private schools respectively.  Literary rate of the community is lower than that of Nepali-speaking communities. Presenting the above linguistic contexts, Prithivi Chaudhary from Transformation Nepal, an NGO shared another case of MLE practice from Rana Tharu Community, which showed a perspective on language development for the sustainable use of Rana Tharu in schools and literacy classes. The findings carried out from a linguistic survey utilizing participatory tools, informal interviews and observations conducted in Kailali and Kanchanpur in 2012 show that Rana Tharu community lacks access to education, particularly in the mother tongue and lags far behind other Nepali communities in awareness, development and technology.

MLE for Adult Literacy in Nepal: A Case of Lhomi

Literacy programs in rural Nepal are quite common, but practitioners often experience low literacy rates among these rural communities. One difficulty related to literacy programs in Nepal is that many people do not speak Nepali as their first language, but literacy programs are required to teach literacy in Nepali. However, the joint presentation by Yee-may Chan fromSIL Nepal and Chhejap Bhote fromNepal Lhomi Society (NELHOS), an NGO strongly argued that literacy programs are allowed to teach literacy in another language, as long as literacy in Nepali is included at some point. Their paper explained how the Lhomi Mother Tongue-based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) Adult Literacy program applied principles from MLE programs designed for children to literacy programs for adults. For instance, culturally appropriate mother tongue teaching materials relevant to the participants’ daily lives were created and used; teaching materials used in the classrooms moved from simple to complicated, from known to unknown; the participants’ mother tongue was the medium of instruction. The experience of the program showed that participants mastered basic literacy, numeracy skills, and simple mathematics within five months. Their experience further showed that after participants learned to read in Lhomi, they quickly learned to read Nepali (which uses a similar writing system). Some participants went even further, learning English, which uses a different writing system. The Lhomi program has demonstrated that best practices of language acquisition for children can be relevant for teaching adults as well, a finding that makes the local community, funding partners, and government authorities satisfied.

Alternative models of MTB-MLE for multilingual classrooms in Nepal

The language composition of the local communities in Nepal shows that most of the schools are linguistically diverse, with the presence of two or more languages. And, the mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTB-MLE) program with a single mother tongue as medium of instruction fails to ensure equal access to quality education and linguistic rights for all students. Effective implementation of a MTB-MLE program depends on the appropriateness of the model in each school environment. Some innovative strategies have emerged in the multilingual classrooms from the continuous interaction between the principles of MTB-MLE and classroom language situations during the initial phase of program implementation. These strategies shared by Laxman Ghimire from Tribhuvan University, Nepal include development of multilingual textbooks, preparing multilingual teachers and allocation of school hours for each language in the classroom. His sharing added another insight that some other strategies were employed informally, such as policy negotiation and reformulation in the local context. Although these strategies have been emerged in the local context, it can be crucial for the development of an appropriate model of MTB-MLE in the linguistic and sociolinguistic context of Nepal.

Conclusion

Education acquired through mother tongue alongside other languages, which is termed as multilingual education (MLE), is stable, that it greatly bolsters children’s cognitive development, and that it prepares them to face the challenges of real life through education in much more effective ways.  The practice of MLE has shown that it is very useful for addressing global educational challenges like low participation and high dropout rates. The studies have already shown that use of mother tongue has powerful pedagogical and social justifications. Recognizing the profound importance of language for education and development, British Council has recently changed its position to English language teaching with a multilingual framework.

Nepal, where about ten dozen languages are spoken as mother tongue can serve both as opportunities, and by virtue of it being a developing nation with limited resources and sticky political problems, as challenges for the implementation of MLE. Despite of linguistic diversity, Nepali is the sole official language used as the medium of instruction in primary education throughout the country. However, there have been recent initiatives on multilingual education in Nepal’s primary and adult education. The MLE policy is enshrined in the various constitutional and legal provisions in Nepal in relation to MLE-related international laws and human rights obligations. Nepal has recently shifted the monolingual ideologies and established linkage between Nepal’s MLE policies, plans, programs, and interventions and their manifestations in schools. MLE piloting and local-level initiatives have significantly contributed to developing models for MLE expansion and mother tongue based pedagogies in different languages with the focus on creating indigenized materials, setting strategies and processes, and identifying good practices that have shown visible results in multilingual classroom settings.

In the context where community schools are shifting their medium to English from Nepali languages and guardian’s growing tendency of sending their children to English medium private schools, there are a lot of challenges of multilingual education in Nepal. However, the replica of best MLE practices along with local linguistic and cultural immersion, substantial awareness and advocacy at grassroots level and extensive MLE intervention for basic education and literacy class followed by proper joint monitoring by concerned GOs and I/NGOs could be the ways for effective MLE in Nepal.

Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Mahidol University, Thailand and Multilingual Education Working Group (MLE WG) for providing me the scholarship to attend the international conference in Bangkok. I am equally thankful to Plan Nepal for creating conducive environment to attend the event.

Socio-Cultural Identity of EFL Teacher in Nepal

Miscellaneous, Scholarly Article, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

Ashok Raj Khati

Many school authorities rejected Shiva Luitel, a member of one of the teachers’ union and a 15-year teaching professional, when he sought for confirmation for his transfer from the present workplace. Moreover, he was immediately provided permission for transfer from his present workplace. Shiva Luitel, who holds a strong sense of socio-cultural facets of Nepalese society, is not understood as a ‘professional’. Manushi Dahal, a young EFL teacher, on the other hand, is much concerned with her students, English language teaching (ELT) pedagogy, content and new trends in the field. Despite of being highly professional, she had to quit teaching job in her 3rd year, as she was not ‘preferred’ by a community in Nepal for several reasons. She faced the problem of identity reformation in a new situation. Many teachers face socio-cultural and professional challenges in different stages of their career. It is more significant in Nepal where the sense of professionalism is very weak and the writ of the concerned authorities is ineffective. If someone gets him or her jobless and failure in other professions, then he or she is expected to join teaching. Further, majority of teaching professionals bring fixed assumptions, beliefs and attitudes to the profession which remain unchanged throughout the career.

This write-up attempts to provide a basic insight on teacher identity. It further examines the socio-cultural identity of English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher in Nepal.

Teacher identity

Identity generally refers to special characterization of something or someone. Wenger (1998) views identity as showing social, cultural and historical aspects of a person. She stresses the role of social settings; through our attendance in social situations, we construct our identities and learn to understand ourselves, our actions and our mind. Identities are therefore temporary, constructed in social settings, constantly in process, containing historical, present and future experiences of a person. In many respects, identities are about negotiating new subject positions at the crossroads of the past, present and future. Individuals are shaped by their socio-histories but they also shape their socio-histories as life goes on (Block, 2007). Hence one’s identities are products of the culture that one is born into or one’s identities can be considered to exemplify cultural aspects (Wenger, 1998).

EFL teacher identity in recent literature has been described as an immensely complex phenomenon and a profoundly individual and psychological matter. EFL teacher identity is closely linked with foreign language learning itself. Becoming a teacher is often considered a constantly moving and developing process; one needs to develop constantly and adapt to new situations, development and changes in the area. Many foreign language teachers are migrants. They have traveled and lived in other countries either to learn or to teach a foreign language. Language teachers in any setting naturally represent a wide array of social and cultural roles and identities: as teachers or students, as gendered and cultured individuals, as expatriates or nationals, as native speakers or non-native speakers, as content area or TESL /English language specialists (Duff and Uchinda, 1997). EFL teachers, like other groups, also get stereotyped which may be based on gender, age, ethnicity, race, religion, sexual orientation, social class. In many instances, socio-cultural identities of teachers have been found split, hybrid and mixed.

Native and Non-native Identity

Teachers’ identity is not fixed but is developed and accentuated by being compared with others. Native vs. non-native is related to the center and the periphery. The Center/Peripheral dichotomy was imported into ELT by Philipson (1992). To the center belong to powerful Western countries where English is native language, whereas, the periphery is constituted of underdeveloped countries and English is the second or foreign language. In recent years, the glory once attached to the native English speaking teacher (NEST) has faded, and increasing numbers of ELT experts assert that the ideal teacher is no longer a category reserved for NESTs.  It is becoming a generally accepted view that outstanding teachers cannot be squeezed into any pigeonhole: all outstanding teachers are ideal in their own ways, and as such are different from each other (Medgyes, 2007). Nonnative teachers usually feel a sense of threat and otherness with a marginalized line that might be given by themselves and their students; as in a lot of English as second language (ESL) programs, the majority of the students showed a decided preference for White teachers over non-White teachers (Amin, 1997). When the students put out a message that they consider their teacher to be a nonnative speaker and therefore cannot teach them “native-like” English, the teachers are unable to effectively negotiate a teacher identity. Their confidence that teachers are supposed to have before their students is harmed, resulting in their construction in the identity of teacher less successful. The concept of native and non-native English speaking teachers has been gradually declining in Nepalese contexts; nonetheless there are many occasions, when these EFL teachers and even students themselves do prefer NESTs. However, in recent decades, there has been a greater global mobility of people for education, and Nepalese EFL teachers seem to be fully confident in diverse socio-cultural settings in terms of proficiency in English, content and pedagogical knowledge. Some theoretical and historical foundations interest me to examine primarily the socio-cultural identity of Nepalese teachers from inside and outside perspectives.

‘Homogeneous’ identity

An inside viewpoint entails a more uniform and pre-scientific nature of professional identity. Connelly and Clandinin (1999) have studied teacher identities from a narrative point of view. They stress that identities and stories depend on the life situation and social situation one happens to be in. There are multiple identities that appear in different situations, e.g. at work, home, with friends and relatives and so on which are considered to be fairly fixed but in case of tensions or conflicts they can change. The narrative approach has similarities with the structural stage approach. There have been multiple ways of analyzing structural stage approach of identity but the main thing remains the same; identity is considered to develop through stages over time (Kroger, 2000). These stages change and develop but the basic structure remains the same.

A teacher brings certain qualifications, training skills and experience when he or she is employed. University degree or pre-service training plays the most important role in building teacher identities where content knowledge, pedagogy, teaching philosophies and practice become interwoven. But there are always some gaps between teacher education and what teachers actually do in their classrooms. Teachers’ personal beliefs and attitudes toward truth is also important part of it. They hold a set of moral values, and right and wrong concepts in Nepal. They commonly bring some positive attitudes to the profession, love of children, for instance. They are passionate, creative, fair, kind and happy. In the psychosocial philosophy, professional identity is seen to be developed and internalized gradually. It is  considered as a part of one’s individual development. Thus, personality also plays a huge part in one’s identity formulation. For instance, the choice of a profession can be taken as an expression of one’s personality. Each teacher’s personality can affect the way they perform and the way they feel their roles. But this view does not take account of the social settings, past experiences, each school, class and students separately, culture, socially set ideals. In our context, female teachers are more favored in lower grades as they are supposed to be loving and they handle children with care, it seems to be uniform as the gendered identity across the country. Another inside perspective of identity is the necessity to choose teaching for survival. Teachers live in a highly competitive and materialistic world where ‘helmet teacher’ identity is popular in urban areas. At their workplace, they find themselves as actor, poet, author, manager, singer, dancer, researcher and orator and so on.

‘Heterogeneous’ identity

This outside perspective contradicts with earlier one. It is not the teacher who creates his/her identity, it is made by others. Teachers primarily exist only because of students. Students not only in inside the classroom but also outside the classroom create teacher identity through different interactional discourse. This dialogical perspective emphasizes that teacher identity is formed in social situations, particularly in interaction with others; hence it is constructed in dialogues. Feedback and other’s responses frame conceptions of oneself as a teacher and according to those they mould their future identity (Kroger, 2000). Therefore EFL teacher identity is always relational, dialogical and, socially and culturally constructed. Perception and approval of teachers’ identity around them is always inconsistent. Approval of teacher identity in surrounding assists for more life satisfaction and enhance greater effect in different social activities.

University lecturers, researchers and schoolteachers are perceived differently in terms of recognition and different roles they perform in the society. At the other side, teachers at private English-medium institutions seem to be more hard working and result oriented than government aided ones. Many novice EFL teachers grow professionally in these English-medium institutions in Nepal. Government appointees enjoy more financial and in-service training opportunities as well as complete job security. Teachers in urban setting enhance more professionalism, they enjoy more economical opportunities, they are more techno-friendly and they have adequate teaching resources than those of rural settings. In the past, there was a common belief that Sanskrit language teachers and teachers from Brahmin communities seized more prestige and they were more accepted in the society. But this trend has shifted to the teachers of English education background.  Scholars educated in western universities and in Darjeeling are equally preferred particularly in private institutions nowadays. In Nepalese multicultural context, there are very less instances of comparing each other. They are different in terms of ethnicity, topography and schooling, rankings and so on, which ultimately lead the different identities of teachers. This seems to be the most suitable to state that teacher identify is discursive as it takes into account several crucial issues such as history, social settings, interactive relationships and the possibility of reformation. Accordingly, it considers identity to be under constant reformulation where one’s past, present and future have important roles and they together affect the formation of identity. In our society, teacher’s positional and authored identities retain power as an active change agent, and sole source of knowledge and information. They bear more social responsibilities in Nepal like countries in the east than in the west (Poudel, 2013).

Likewise, professional identity of a teacher is formed and reflected through the policies and guidelines of the nation-state, which outlines definite values, duties, and structures of basic education and it gives frames for teaching. When these policies, values and duties are not identical for all teachers, teacher identity will be more heterogeneous. Mid-term evaluation report of SSRP (2012) has raised concern over the substantial variations in pay structures, perks and privileges, opportunities for career advancement and professional development of teachers in Nepal. Multiple identities of teachers ‘manufactured’ so far have deepened ‘endorsed’ divisions in the same profession in Nepal.

Nevertheless, EFL teachers in different social and cultural situations are contributing the society in a larger frame.  Rima Magar, an EFL teacher in Ramechhap, leads a language association for Magar community. She is investing her effort to preserve and promote Magar linguistic identity. Another EFL teacher in next village is an active member of association for managing the product of sweet oranges (Junar). Bishal Shah, an EFL teacher in Lalitpur promotes the sale of handicrafts. Shusila Karki from Bhaktapur empowers girls in her community through education and vocational training. Madan Raut in Pokhara, in his free time, guides tourists and arranges their visits to different places. Padam Sapkota from Chitwan advocates for child rights. Kalpana Singh donates to a childcare centre. These different social responsibilities, roles and activities definitely affect the way EFL teachers think and the way they perform in EFL teaching and learning situations. Kalpana seems to be kind and more supportive to the students. Rima always provides the place for learning English for instrumental purposes. Bharat Shah inspires his students for drawing, painting and preparing handicrafts in school where as Madan always gives focus on fluency in spoken English. Shusila always supports the girls in schools who need especial cares and assistance. Teachers carry certain social values, attitudes and aptitudes into their profession. It shows that sociality, ethnicity, gender and other socio-cultural aspects form distinct identities of EFL teachers.

Conclusion

Teacher identity is both an individual and social matter. The discipline of teaching one comes into has its own history, and it cannot remain apolitical. Going back to recent decades, teachers retained charismatic identity in 80s, they were regarded as liberator, inspirational teacher and guardian. In 90s teachers held the role of educator. They were reflective practitioners, teacher as learners and theorists. Later teachers became trainers, skilled craftsperson, organizers and technicians for novice. In post 2000 teachers holds the pragmatic identity as an effective and eclectic teacher, and teacher as a non-political agent. Though the notions of being a teacher are much more personal, they sit inside these historical, political and social discourses (Moore, 2004). Teacher identity is an evolving construct as it is constructed and reconstructed in particular time and context. At this hour, socio-cultural identity of Nepalese EFL teachers is markedly dominant contributing in a wider socio-cultural milieu.

References

Amin, N. (1997). Race and Identity of the Nonnative ESL Teacher. TESOL Quarterly, 31, 580-582.

Block, D. 2007. Second language identities. London: Continuum.

Connelly, M.F. and Clandinin, J. D. (1999). Shaping a professional identity: stories of educational practice. New York: Teachers College Press.

Government of Nepal (2012). Mid-term evaluation of school sector reform programme. Kathmandu: Ministry of Education.                                                                                

Kroger, J. (2000). Identity development. Adolescence through adulthood. California: Sage Publications.

Moore, A. (2004). The Good Teacher. Dominant discourses in teaching and teacher education. London: Routledge.                                                                                      

Morgan, B. (2004). Teacher identity as pedagogy: Towards a field-internal conceptualisation in bilingual and second language education. Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 7(2/3), 172-188.

Phillipson, R. (1992) Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.                   

Poudel, T. (2013). Class notes: Facet of English studies. Kathmandu: Kathmandu University.       

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice. Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Mr. Arjun Basnet, a research scholar at Kathmandu University for his insightful ideas and comments on the topic.

 

My Experience of Learning English: A Reflective Account

Miscellaneous, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

*Kamlesh Raut

NELTA Birgunj

It has been more than seventeen years when I began learning English. Today when I am ready to step into the higher level of education, i.e. Master Degree in English education, I have mixed experiences of learning of English. Having chosen M. Ed. for my study, my future career of teaching English further makes me think and rethink on teaching situation. I look back and try to recall from my memory how I began learning English, how my teachers oriented me to the journey of learning English, how I went through the ups and downs in my journey of learning English and how I feel at this stage. Familiar with the paradigm shift in English language teaching in the global scenario, I try to compare the ways I was taught English in those days against the backdrop of new global trends in the field.

It is still vivid in my memory when I was admitted to a pre-primary grade popularly known as the sishu class then, now they call it playgroup in private schools. I think my learning of English almost began with learning of my mother tongue. It is because before I was put into a school my father taught me some basic things of English at home. They included English alphabet and some English words. Though formally English started from grade IV, one period per day was allocated for English and we were taught names of some objects then. Today, many government-aided schools are being converted into English medium schools. However, it was not the case then. Being a native speaker of Bajjika, I perceived both Nepali and English as new languages for me and was so curious to learn both of them. My time of learning language was divided into English and Nepali both. Sometimes, Bajjika helped me learn these languages at other times it affected my learning of these two languages badly. At home and in neighborhood, I spoke and heard Bajjika and could hear both Nepali and English only within school premises. The exposure to English and Nepali both was very limited for me. Until grade IV, my teacher taught English, i.e. letters, words, and some simple sentences such as Ram is a boy; Sita is a girl, etc. My teacher spoke each sentence with translation in Nepali but Nepali was also not so familiar to us. So he translated the sentence into Bajjika also. In grade IV, when I could see the textbook I jumped with joy. The book contained some pictures, stories and many more things. It was the first book in English I had ever seen. I had higher regard for English than any other subjects. First day of that course, our class teacher wrote some words with their pronunciation and meaning on the blackboard and we were asked to parrot them. Parroting vocabulary was almost regular. So was the case with most of the subjects. Most teachers would ask us to parrot as homework whatever they taught us. I hardly tried to understand things then. By education, I meant parroting and reproducing before teachers or in exams. The more the students parroted the contents, the more they were rewarded by teachers. Language teaching or let us say English language teaching was also like parroting. I could hardly realize ever that language is a means of communication. My teacher never talked to us in English, my friends never talked to me in English and nor did I. We mugged up English at home and school most of the time because we considered it as a hard subject. Once we were finished with mugging up the vocabulary, the teacher would select the text and would translate it into Nepali and also sometimes into Bajjika, sentence by sentence. This practice of word meaning teaching and translation continued up to grade IX.

When I reached grade X, we got a new teacher to teach English. First time in grade X, I studied basic grammar such as article, voice, narration, preposition, tag question, causative verbs, etc. Our teacher gave priority to those things which were likely to be asked in exams and omitted those which were not important for exams. The teacher would tell us “These are VVI questions for exams, so prepare them well”. “Leave those topics, they will not be asked in exams”. I can still recall those days vividly now. We studied to pass exams. All subjects, including English were taught from the examination perspective. I had to appear for practical exam of English during my SLC exam. First time in eleven years of learning English, I came to know that there are four language skills–listening, reading, speaking and writing. I could understand that all language skills are equally important. Alas! I wasted my ten years in memorizing vocabulary, their spelling, pronunciation, meaning, understanding the text, mugging up the questions and their answers and reproducing them in the exam papers. I wish my teacher had opened my eyes in those early stages of my life. I could hardly speak any good sentence in the speaking exam. Similarly, I heard things from the cassette but could hardly understand more than 30 percent.

I could understand English as a language only when I joined my Proficiency Certificate Level. On completion of school study, I joined Thakur Ram Multiple Campus, Birgunj for my higher study majoring English. I could see and understand that the teaching and learning of the college was quite different from my school. In the campus, I was taught by five university teachers but I could not be very much satisfied with their way of teaching either. Again there, many of the teachers were exam-oriented and more authoritative in nature. We were not allowed to answer the questions according to our wish. According to them, we had to supply the same answer as given in the book –all words and sentences. Even the medium of instruction was either Nepali or Bhojpuri and sometimes English. Some days later I came to know that many of them were using the same notebooks that they had prepared ten years back. Dictation was the pet technique of most teachers. This shows we had two types of teacher.

I do not claim that English language teaching and teachers are the same everywhere. However, I suppose that many of you (especially those who were taught in government aided Nepalese schools) might have faced the situation similar to mine. When I have learnt that English language teaching in the world has seen a lot of changes in theories and practices, I recall those days, the poor state of affairs of teaching English. When I see and read the changes brought in education and ELT by technology, I remember my own poor classrooms with blackboard. When I hear people speak English fluently and eloquently, I recall my teachers’ broken English and its effect upon my own learning of English. When I read others’ beautiful and powerful English, I just curse my own poor English. When I see teachers teaching English involving students in interaction and activities, I recall my own days when teacher hardly allowed us to speak anything in class. I wish I were taught English differently.

*Kamlesh Raut is a budding multilingual poet. He writes in Nepali, Bhojpuri, Maithili and English. 

Feedback and Language Learners

Miscellaneous, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

*Khem Raj Joshi

Tribhuvan University, Kirtipur

In this brief blog entry, I have made an attempt to highlight the significance of feedback for language learning. This article presents with the feedback from the theoretical aspects, followed by different types of feedback such as negative feedback, negation and recasts and concludes with awareness for language learning.

Feedback

It is self-evident that language learning is not possible without input or evidence. In the literature on language learning, this evidence is discussed in terms of two categories: positive evidence and negative evidence. Positive evidence refers to “the input and basically comprises the set of well formed sentences to which learners are exposed” (Gass, 2003:225). In other words, well- formed sentences that provide learners with the input are called positive evidence. These sentences are made available to learners from spoken and/or written language. Such sentences provide learners with what is possible in the target language and they are also called models. But positive evidence cannot be a sufficient condition for language learning.

Learners should also be made aware of what is not possible in the target language as well. In other words, they need negative evidence in the form of feedback. Feedback comes as a result of interaction. When the learners come up with L2 output, we can see what sort of feedback they need. This interactional feedback is a very important source of knowledge for learners because it provides them with information about what further rules they need to learn. Feedback could be explicit or implicit.

Now I would like to briefly present some sorts of feedback that play an important role in L2 teaching learning process.

Negative evidence

Negative evidence is some kind of input that lets the learner know that his or her utterance is deviant and is unacceptable in the target language. It refers to “the type of information that is provided to learners concerning the incorrectness of an utterance” (Gass, 2003:225). Negative evidence can be explicit in the form of direct correction (e.g., ‘That’s not right’; No, we say……). It can also be implicit (e.g. ‘What did you say?’) in the form of indirect question. On the basis of when negative evidence is provided to the learners, it is of two types: pre-emptive (that occurs before an actual error) or reactive (that occurs after the error has been committed).

Negotiation

It is also a way of providing learners with feedback. When learners face communicative difficulties, they struggle to overcome them. It is the joint effort made by the interlocutors. It is defined as “those instances in conversation when participants need to interrupt the flow of the conversation in order for both parties to understand what the conversation is about” (Gass and Selinker, 2009:318). Since the teacher and the students negotiate to understand what is not understood, this is also known as conversational adjustment. In other words, learners come across several difficulties due to their limited L2 knowledge. In this case, the teacher provides them with the scaffolded help to make them understand the L2. The teacher provides them with feedback. This feedback obtained through negotiation serves a corrective function. As negotiation specially focuses on incorrect forms, it is said to serve as a catalyst for language learning, which facilitates L2 development.  Negotiation requires both attentiveness and involvement. In other words, for successful language learning, a learner should actively be involved in the negotiation process and s/he should also be attending to the incorrect forms.

Recast

A recast is another form of feedback. Mackey (1999) says that recasts are the responses to non-target non-native speaker utterances that provide a target like way of expressing the original meaning. It is the reformulation of a learner’s incorrect utterance without losing the original meaning. In other words, it is such instance in which an interlocutor rephrases an incorrect utterance with a corrected version, while maintaining the integrity of the original meaning.” (Gass, 2003:239). It is an implicit feedback. Philp (1999:92) gives an example of recast:

Non native speaker: what doctor say?

Native speaker: what is the doctor saying?

In the above example, the native speaker is correcting the non-native speaker implicitly by adding the auxiliary.

There arise some challenges while discussing the types of feedback mentioned above.  For example, if the negative evidence is provided implicitly, the learner may not understand that he or she has committed an error and the feedback is intended as a correction. When the teacher tries to correct the learner’s error implicitly by repeating his or her utterance along with correction, the learner may even think that the teacher really did not hear what was said. As a result, the correction may not be accepted and incorporated in the subsequent utterances. Here I would like to cite an example from a class I recently observed in which the teacher was trying to provide the students with feedback in the form of recast but it was not noticed by the students:

S: I used to play marbles in the past but now I use to play videogame.

T: Now you play videogame.

S: Yes, I use to play videogame.

So, in many contexts, explicit feedback is relatively more helpful to raise learners’ awareness of what they have done. Similarly, many teachers prefer to provide feedback in the form of negative evidence before an actual error is committed by the learner. This is probably due to their wish to prevent the learners from committing the possible errors. But until and unless learners take part in interaction and commit the actual errors, it cannot be a pertinent feedback. Once the learners’ output exhibits some deviant forms, the teacher comes to know what feedback is relevant in such contexts. So, in my opinion, reactive feedback could be more helpful than pre-emptive feedback.

Raising learners’ awareness

Interactional feedback certainly focuses on learners’ attention on those parts of their language that deviate from the target language norms. It helps them notice the mismatches between the correct target language forms and the forms produced by them. Schmidt (1994) argues that attention is essential to learning. He distinguishes the attention into two types: i) Noticing– It refers to the process of bringing some stimulus into focal attention. For example, when one notices the odd spelling of a new vocabulary item and ii) understanding and awareness– It refers to explicit knowledge: awareness of a rule or generalization (p.18).

Through feedback, teachers can help learners be attentive. And through this attention, the learners notice a gap between the target language forms and their own inter-language system. For this reason, language teaching methodologies earlier engaged learners in consciousness raising activities provide direct and explicit means of making learners aware of L2 forms. In other words, feedback makes learners aware of the incorrect forms they have produced. They modify their output on the basis of feedback they receive during interaction. The more learners are made aware of their unacceptable speech, the greater the opportunity  for them to make appropriate modifications. Learners’ awareness on any aspect of language (e.g. phonology, morphosyntax, lexicon) could be raised.

To conclude, I argue that second language is not simply learned from positive evidence alone. Learners should also be provided with negative evidence which provides them with information about what is not possible in the target language system. Raising the learners’ awareness on different aspects of language leads to better language teaching learning process.

*Mr. Joshi teaches at the Department of English Education, Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal. He is an executive member of NELTA Central Committee.

References

Gass, S.M. (2003). Input and interaction. In Doughty, C.J. and M. H. Long (eds). The handbook of second language acquisition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Gass, S. M. & L. Selinker. (2009). Second language acquisition: An introductory Course. New York: Routledge.

Joshi, K. R. (2012). English Language Teacher Development. Kathmandu: Intellectual’s Book Palace.

Mackey, A. (1999). Input, interaction and second language development. Studies in second language acquisition. 21:557-581.

Philp, I. (1999). Interaction, noticing and second language acquisition: An examination of learners’ noticing of recasts in task based interaction. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Tasmania.

Schmidt, R. (1994). Implicit learning and the cognitive consciousness: of artificial grammars and SLA. In N. Ellis (ed). Implicit and explicit learning of languages. London: Academic Press.

Creative Writing for Students and Teachers: Some Practical Ideas

Creative Writing, Creativity, ELT Resource, Miscellaneous, Teacher Training, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes, Writing

 Alan Maley

UK

 

Writing creatively is a joyful component of learning a language in real life. Creativity, as creative writers have tasted, adds flavor to writing. Many more language teachers might have a rigid mindset because of having had to be bound to the framework provided by syllabi, textbooks, exams, etc. Anyway, they can be hopeful for the change they really wish by introducing at least some elements of creativity in their teaching.

 

There are a number of general points which will help make implementing creative writing activities more likely to succeed:

Try to establish a relaxed, non-judgmental atmosphere, where your students feel confident enough to let go and not to worry that their every move is being scrutinized for errors.

Ensure that the students’ work is ‘published’ in some way. This could be by simply keeping a large notice-board for displaying the students’ work. Other ways would include giving students a project for publishing work in a simple ring binder, or as part of a class magazine. Almost certainly, there will be students able and willing to set up a class website where work can be published. Performances, where students read or perform their work for other classes or even the whole school, are another way of making public what they have done.

Encourage students to discuss their work together in a frank but friendly manner. We get good ideas by bouncing them off other people. Help them establish an atmosphere where criticism is possible without causing offence.

Explain regularly how important accurate observation is, and encourage ‘noticing’ things. They also need to be encouraged to be curious and to follow up with ‘research’ – looking for more information, whether in books, on the Internet or by asking people.

Make it clear that what they do in the classroom is only the tip of the iceberg. To get real benefit from these activities, they need to do a lot of work outside class hours. Most of what we learn, we do not learn in class. You can capitalize on that fact.

Do the activities regularly in order to get the best effects. Maybe once a week is a sensible frequency. If you leave too long between sessions, you have to keep going back to square one. That is a waste of time and energy.

The following are simply a sample of some possible activities:

Hello/Goodbye poems

  1. Tell the class that they are going to write a poem. It will have only two lines, and each line will have just two words. The first line will start with ‘Hello’, the second with ‘Goodbye’.
  2. Give students one or two examples:

 

Hello sunshine,

Goodbye rain.

 

Hello smoking,

Goodbye health.

 

Hello paper,

Goodbye trees.

 

Then, ask if they can think of any new ones. Note them on the board.

  1. Ask students to work in pairs (or alone if they prefer), and try to come up with at least two new poems. Allow 10 minutes for this task.

 

  1. Ask for their examples and put them on the board. Ask students to give feedback on each other’s examples.

 

  1. Collect all the poems. Display them on the class notice-board or upload them onto the class/school website.

The activity is very simple yet it does require students to call on their vocabulary store and to think about words that have a mutual or reciprocal relationship of meanings (smoking/health etc.) If you prefer, this can be used as a short warm-up for other activities.

Stem poems

  1. Explain to students that they will be writing some lines that will fit together into a poem. Then, write up the stem you intend to use. For example: I wish I could…

Elaborate further by eliciting samples of completed sentences, as in these examples:

I wish I could have an ice cream.

 I wish I could speak French.

 I wish I could visit Australia.

 

Then, ask each student to write three sentences following the same pattern.

  1. After about 10 minutes, ask students to work in groups of four and to share their sentences. They should choose six sentences that they think are most interesting and then decide what order to put them in to form a 6-line poem. There is no need for the poems to rhyme but if they do, fine. Lastly, tell them to add one final line, which is: But I can’t.
  2. Ask groups to read their poems aloud to the class. Can they suggest any ways to improve the poems?
  3. Collect all the poems. Display them on the class noticeboard or upload them onto the class/school website.
  4. You can decide on other stems to use in subsequent classes. For example:

 

Loneliness is…

 I used to… but now…

 I love the way…

 Nobody knows…

 Who knows…?

 I don’t know why…

 

It would be a good idea to choose stems that give practice in language points you are working on with the class at that time.

Acrostics

An acrostic poem is based on a word written vertically. The letters then each form the first letter of a word, and all the words are related to the meaning of the original word. For example:

Docile

Obedient

Growling

 

  1. Explain what an acrostic is and write up one or two examples on the board. Then, ask them to write an acrostic based on their own name or the name of someone they know well. The words they choose should somehow describe the person. For example, Vuthy:

 

 V Very

 U Unlikely

 T To

 H Help

 Y You

  1. Collect all the poems. Display them on the class notice-board or upload them onto the class/school website.
  2. Ask students to write at least one more acrostic before the next class. This time, they can choose any word they like (it doesn’t have to be someone’s name). For example:

 

Lying

Everywhere –

Autumn

Falling.

 

Acrostics involve a kind of mental gymnastics that engages students in reactivating their vocabulary in an unusual way. Acrostics do not usually produce great poetry but they certainly exercise the linguistic imagination.

Acknowledgement: Some of the ideas were developed by Tan Bee Tin.

If you were …

  1. First you make copies of this outline:

If I were a fruit, I would be ….

 If I were a vegetable, I would be…

 If I were a tree, I would be…

 If I were a flower, I would be…

 If I were a fish, I would be…

 If I were a bird, I would be…

 If I were a book, I would be…

 If I were a song, I would be…

 If I were the weather, I would be…

 If I were a season, I would be…

 

Then distribute the sheets that you have prepared. Ask students to work individually for about 10 minutes, completing the outline of the poem with words they prefer. For example: If I were a fruit, I would be a grape.

  1. Let students share what they have written in groups of four. Then conduct a class discussion and go through the poems line-by-line, asking for examples of what they have written.

 

  1. Ask students to think of someone they like and to write the person’s name as the title of their poem. They then write a 12-line poem addressed to that person using the following format:

Line 1: describe the person as a kind of food.

Line 2: describe the person as weather

Line 3: describe the person as a tree

Line 4: describe the person as a time of day

Line 5: describe the person as some kind of transport

Line 6: describe the person as an article of clothing

Line 7: describe the person as part of a house

Line 8: describe the person as a flower

Line 9: describe the person as a kind of music/a sound

Line 10: describe the person as something to do with colour

Line 11: describe the person as an animal

The last line should be the same for everyone: ‘You are my friend’.

So, their poem would look something like this:

 

For Sharifa

You are mango ice-cream

You are a cool breeze on a hot day

You are a shady coconut palm

You are dawn

You are a sailing boat crossing the bay

You are my comfortable sandals

You are the sunny verandah

 You are jasmine

 You are a soft gamelan

 You are light blue

 You are a playful kitten

 You are my friend.

 

Metaphor poems

  1. Make copies of this list of words and phrases for use during the class:

Love an egg Hate a tooth brush Disappointment a vacuum cleaner Marriage a spoon Friendship a knife Hope a mirror Life a window Work a cup Time a banana

  1. Check that students know what a metaphor is – a form of direct comparison between two things. Give examples of metaphors in everyday life:

 

  • A blade of grass
  • A sharp frost
  • Spending time
  • Save time
  • Opening up a can of worms
  • She’s a snake in the grass
  • He clammed up
  • He shelled out
  • A wall of silence

In fact, everyday language is so full of metaphorical expressions that we hardly notice them. They have become an accepted way of speaking. Explain that poets make great use of metaphor to make their words more vivid and easier to visualise.

  1. Hand out the sheets. Tell students to write three metaphors by combining one item on the left with another on the right (students will have to join the words using ‘is’). They should not spend time thinking about the combinations. For example:
  • Life is a window.
  • Friendship is a knife.
  • Love is a vacuum cleaner.
  • Marriage is a banana
  • Hate is a mirror.

 

  1. Now, ask them to choose just one of their new metaphors. They should now write two more lines after the metaphor to explain what it means. For example:

Marriage is a banana:

 when you’ve eaten the fruit,

 only the skin is left.

 

 Hate is a mirror:

 it reflects back

 on the one who hates.

 

Tell students not to use ‘because’ as it is unnecessary, and to keep the lines short.

  1. Ask students to share their metaphor poems with the class. Students should then make an illustrated display of their work. Acknowledgement: This idea is adapted from Jane Spiro’s brilliant book, Creative Poetry Writing (OUP)

Now we can have a good start to enjoy learning some ‘real’ language.  Creative writing promotes self-motivation and makes language teaching and learning effortless. You are always curious to find out something and encounter new things and learn them willingly. How interesting this can be! Good luck and happy writing!

Motivation Through Writing

Creative Writing, Creativity, ELT Resource, Teacher Training, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes, Teaching Tips, Writing

Myrtis (Doucey) Mixon, Ed. D.

University of San Francisco

 

How can we motivate our students to be excited about their classes? One way is to tell them stories. Another way is to ask them to write stories.

 

Stories educate, enrich, and entertain everyone.  Find easy stories in English.  But for now, I will whet your appetite by sending you two of the stories that will be published in the forthcoming book of stories called “Untold Tales” written  by English ACCESS Microscholarship Students in Nepal, These are the stories that they wrote at the winter camp in 2013 in Pokhara.

 

These anecdotes and tales of exprience provide an enjoyable opportunity to increase vocabulary, reading comprehension, listening and speaking and, ultimately, writing. The stories and exercises together are a whole-language anthology designed to improve communication skills. These stories include exercises that employ the cooperative/collaborative learning philosophy and address multiple learning styles.

 

Using stories is a magical way to teach, effective at any age.  Here’s a summary of how stories aid language-learning:

  • provide motivation for reading
  • heighten listening skills
  • develop speaking skills
  • use cooperative learning strategies
  • foster creative language growth
  • provide content-based material
  • Serve as model for further writing

All learners, from babies to grandmothers, learn better with stories; they are energizers. Integrating stories as an adjunct to the teacher’s repertoire in the classroom setting is not only simple, but makes perfect sense.  We hope you use these stories to open new worlds of content and learning possibilities.  We also hope they serve as a springboard to motivating your own students to write stories.

 

Enjoy the stories. If you want some more, write to me at “myrtis101@mac.com” and I will send you more. These two are from Kathmandu and Gorkha, but I have many  others, some from Butwal and Birgunj.

 

My Story

 

One early morning, on my way to temple, I saw sparkling eyes in ragged clothes.  I saw their creative hands and bright smiles.  These children are strangers to me but no different from our own children whom we always love and support.

 

Two days later, I visited the prison of Sundhara, Kathmandu, for my class in social work.  I saw many such faces who reside in prisons alongside their incarcerated parents and I became sad.  These children have done nothing wrong.  They are simply caught up in something they don’t understand.

 

I couldn’t forget them so a few months later, along with some friends, we opened up a child daycare centre in a rented house.  My parents were not happy and they told me to leave it.  However, I was determined to take those children out of prison and look after them and educate them for the future.

 

When I started this, I was 21, and nobody believed in me.  People thought I was crazy.  They laughed at me.

 

After two years, in 2005, I established The Butterfly Home for the children.  Then, I travelled to many other places, speaking with jailers, parents and authorities, preparing to bring children out of prison.  My own parents now understood and helped me.  We were so touched by the children’s plight, that they are forced to live with their impoverished, incarcerated parents because there is no one to look after them on the outside.

 

It has been eight years since I began gathering the children from Nepali prisons and bringing them to live in a centre in the capital, Kathmandu, providing them not only with food and shelter, but also education and motherly love.  I am happy to be recognized as their mamu.  Now I have become the second Nepali woman to win the 2012 CNN Hero Award at the star-studded award ceremony held in Los Angeles.  But still 80 children are living in prison and I am going to take them out of the prison soon.

 

My name is Puspa Basnet and children are my hope.  I believe the world is their place where they can carve their future with their own hands.

Prashanna Mahat, 15

Kathmandu

 

Exercises

Understanding the Story

How did Puspa Basnet get involved with helping the children?

 

Vocabulary

sparkling    reside    incarcerated         determined   plight    impoverished  carved

1. The stars were ______________________________________________ in the sky.

2. The children’s parents  are __________________________________ in the prisons.

3. The children have nowhere to ____________________________ out of the prisons.

4. Puspa Basnet was _______________________ to get the children out of the prisons.

5. Many people were affected by the ______________________ of these poor children.

6. To make something out of something can be to ____________________________ it.

7. The parents in the prison have no money; they are __________________________ .

 

Now you Talk

1. What would it be like to be one of those children living in the prison?

2. Where do they go to school?

3. Is there a way you could help these children?

 

Now you Create

1. Write a letter to the mayor of your town asking for help.

2. Draw a cartoon strip about this problem.

 

Role Play

1. Mother in prison, her son: talking about his going to school.

2. That son, another student: talking about where he lives.

3. Two Girls who live with parents in prison: talking about their lives.

4. Two guards in prison: planning to help the children

5. Puspa Basnet, mayor of town: talking about helping more children.

 

 

 

The Kidnappers

 

This is a true story that happened in Dada Gaun village near Laxmi bazaar in 2012.

 

One Saturday, Rina and Rehan, a brother and sister asked their  parents if they could go to the park.  Their parents said, “Please, go safely.  There are so many bad people in the road.”

 

Rina said, “Don’t worry.  We will be careful.”  They crossed one town where many busses went here and there.  They went to the park.  While they were walking on the road, a micro bus stopped just beside them.  The door opened and a man jumped out, grabbed them both and put them in the micro bus.

 

They were taken to the jungle which is near the park.  They were so afraid and they cried a lot.  Many hours went by.  The kidnapper went near Rina and laughed. Rina asked, “Why are you laughing?”

 

The kidnapper said, “You are my one corore rupees.  That is the ransom we will get from your parents.  Give me your phone number.  But Rina didn’t give it to him.  He slapped her and said, “If you don’t give me your father’s phone number, I will kill you right now.”

 

Rina was afraid of him and gave the number.  Meanwhile, the children’s parents were worried when they didn’t come home by evening time.  Then their mobile phone rang.  The kidnapper demanded one corore rupees as a ransom.  The kidnapper said to him, “If you don’t give me the ransom money, you will see your children’s dead bodies.”

Hearing this, the father became more afraid.  Then the father thought of a trick.  “Where are you?”  asked Rina’s father.  The kidnapper said, “I am in the jungle near the park.”

 

While the father kept talking to the kidnapper, the mother called the police station and said,  “Please save my children.  They have been kidnapped.  They are in the jungle near the park.  The kidnapper demands one corore rupees as ransom.  I don’t have even thousands.”

 

The police hurried and drove very quickly.  They stopped the car in the park and walked into the jungle.  They surrounded the microbus and caught the kidnapper.  The children were saved.

 

Their parents gave many thanks to the police.  They told the police not to let the kidnapper free because if he is free he would kidnap other children.  After that he was put into the jail for his whole life.

 

Kasam Ale,  15

Gorkha

 

Exercises

Understanding the Story

What is a moral for this story?

 

Vocabulary

Fill in the blanks of the summary with the words below.

ransom     surrounded      kidnappers     tricked

microbus     worried      careful      grabbed

 

The children wanted to go to the park.  Their parents were __________________ They said, “Be very _________________ .  While the children were walking, a _________________ stopped and a man jumped out and _______________________ them.  The men were __________________________.  They demanded  a _____________________ .  The father ________________  the bad men.  The police ____________ the kidnappers.

 

Now You Talk

1. What would you do if a kidnapper grabbed you?

2. How can you solve a crime with a mobile phone?

 

Now You Create

1. Draw a picture of the kidnappers.

2. Write another ending to this story.

 

Role Play:

1. Mother, girl: warning about bad people.

2. Girl, kidnapper: he asks for her phone number.

3. Sister, brother: planning how to get away from kidnappers

4. Father, police: planning to catch kidnappers.

5. Mother, girl: talking about their capture.

Technology Resources in English Language Learning

ELT Resource, Miscellaneous, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes, Technology

Gretel Patch

USA

 

Introduction

I’ve been kindly asked to contribute a few words for this month’s blog edition. I have had the privilege of meeting many of you, though not all, so let me briefly introduce myself. Online I am known as the EdTech Didi and I blog at www.edtechdidi.com. I have my Masters of Educational Technology and am a Technology Integration Specialist. I have a passion for using technology in creative and innovative ways, especially to support education and learning. I work hard to help parents, students, and teachers use the best resources for their learning adventures.

We recently lived in Kathmandu for two years and I was able to assist in what I call “technology outreach” with several of the English Access Microscholarship centers throughout Nepal. I tried to expose teachers and students to technology basics that could support them in their English studies, and I tried to instill a broad overview of what 21st Century learning is all about. In my limited time with the students, and also within limited classroom connectivity, only so much was possible. Still, I tried to lay a foundation to help them realize that technology is much more than texting, Facebook, and YouTube, and that there are many tools to help  them reach their educational goals.

Language Learning from Native Speakers

We currently reside in Washington, D.C., while my husband studies Kurdish, a language spoken in northern Iraq. In his profession he routinely receives language training before moving to a new country. Before we moved to Kathmandu, he studied Nepali for one year. The facility where he receives his training has 100,000 enrollees annually and offers courses in roughly 70 foreign languages

[source 1=”<a” 2=”2="2="href="http://www.state.gov/m/fsi/">http://www.state.gov/m/fsi/</a>""” language=”:”][/source]

. As you can imagine, this is no small undertaking. If you roamed the halls, you might overhear phrases in Urdu, Thai, Swahili, Croatian, Hungarian, Chinese, Arabic, French, or Armenian. While there are many language learning models and strategies, one requirement for this particular program is that only native speakers are allowed to be instructors.

With larger world languages, there are many qualified candidates to choose from. With small and regional languages, however, sometimes it is difficult to find qualified instructors. With specialized languages or dialects, sometimes there are limited resources to use as course materials and instructors must rely on current newspapers, for example, instead of established textbooks. Sometimes the teacher hasn’t lived in his/her native country for many years and the vocabulary and issues have changed. Nonetheless, this model places significant importance on learning a language from a native speaker.

In Nepal, it is not feasible to utilize a similar methodology, so what can be done to help ensure that students learn English with the proper dialect and vocabulary?

Technology Resources

Fortunately, there are many online resources and software that can help students be exposed to native English speakers. It is of critical importance that students are encouraged to use them and take advantage of such opportunity.

http://prezi.com/axirm4my1qbf/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share

I created this Prezi with you in mind. It includes the problem, integration strategy, relative advantage, and the expected outcome for using each type of tool with the students. Various tools and resources are provided as links, such as:

Using the Internet for instruction, e.g. tutorials, eBooks, and videos

Tool software, e.g. word processing and presentations

Instructional software, e.g. vocabulary games and drill-and-practice activities

Productivity software, e.g. concept and word mapping to strengthen writing skills

Some other excellent resources are:

Voice of America: Includes lessons, videos, idioms, audio, and practice activities using current events.

Yale Center for Language Study: Links to various websites students can use to practice grammar, punctuation, spelling, slang, listening, speaking, writing, and reading.

Cultural Resources

There are a variety of other resources that can expose students to cultural awareness, values, and traditions as they explore the world “virtually” in a way they may not ever get to do otherwise. I am a Google Certified Teacher, which basically means I received some great training at Google’s offices and am an ambassador-of-sorts for the power of Google’s products in education. A few of my favorite resources are:

Google World Wonders Project: Virtually explore many of the great wonders of the world.

Google Art Project: Explore and experience many of the world’s great art museums

Here are two other virtual tours that help students “travel” to Washington, D.C., for example:

Interactive White House tour: Go inside the White House through photos and videos

National Museum of Natural History: Students may not be able to visit this Smithsonian, but you can download this interactive tour and learn as though they were there.

Conclusion

It is not possible to try everything, especially with limited computers, Internet access, and connectivity. However, with a little effort and determination, English language teachers can choose a few resources and technology tools that will greatly enhance student experiences and expose them to native English speakers. When used purposefully, technology can be very engaging and exciting for students. Teaching, especially teaching well, is not an easy task, but it is a crucial one if we are going to make a difference and ultimately change the world – one student at a time.

I wish you the best in all of your efforts with the wonderful students entrusted to your care. They truly are the future.

For more resources created with Access students and teachers in mind, please visit: http://www.edtechdidi.com/outreach.html

Effective Practice for Vocabulary

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

William Wolf

Chittagong, Bangladesh

Students often ask me, “How can I learn English better and faster?” and I have trouble giving them an answer. I have taught English for more than 20 years and I have been a student of languages for more than 30, but I am still not sure how to answer their question. The problem, I think, is that they are looking for the one way to learn a language. But learning a language effectively requires that we use a number of different methods. In this blog, I want to address what I think is the single hardest part about learning a language to a high level—vocabulary—and to suggest a number of ways that learners can improve their knowledge and skills in this area.

Learning vocabulary is a real problem

In my experience as both a teacher and a student, the most time-consuming part of learning a language is usually vocabulary. People often worry about the problems of learning a new alphabet, script or other writing system, but although this is a problem in the beginning, it is really something in which we can make a lot of progress in just hours. There are some exceptions, Chinese being the most famous. But if someone wants to learn Arabic, Greek, Russian, Burmese, or some other script, ten or twenty hours of careful practice spread out over a few weeks will usually be enough. People also often worry about grammar, and it’s true that this will take longer. Here, it’s a matter of many months of practice.

But when it comes to learning vocabulary, it’s a matter of years, not of weeks or months. Many language learners discover that when they’ve reached a high intermediate level, they’re able to discuss, with some difficulty, many topics, but that even books written for ten-year-old native speakers are often too hard for them to understand. Why? When I ask students to take a page from a text and then to use two different colors to mark the grammar and the vocabulary problems they have with this text, they quickly see that they usually have only a small number of grammar problems per page, but they might have 20 or 50 or even more words whose meanings they cannot understand.

Reading even a book for a fifth grader requires a knowledge of thousands of head words. Ordinary conversation probably uses no more than one or two thousand head words. This means that simply relying on conversation will not give us a vocabulary large enough to read even texts that teenage native speakers can understand. If our goal is to be able to read university level materials, our work will be even harder.

Of course, if the language we are studying has a vocabulary that is closely related to a language we already know, then learning vocabulary won’t be so difficult. Spanish and French share a large percentage of their vocabulary. Both are descended from Latin and both have borrowed many technical words from Latin, so a person who knows one will find it quite easy to learn the vocabulary of the other. Similarly, most North Indian languages are closely related. Hindi, Bengali, Nepali, Gujarati, and many other languages are both descended from Sanskrit and have borrowed many of their specialized words from Sanskrit. A knowledge of one of these languages helps immensely in learning any of the others.

But when we are learning a language whose vocabulary has few connections with other languages that we know, we will have to spend hundreds, if not thousands, of hours reading, using dictionaries, memorizing, and practicing if we want to be able to function at a university level.

Learning vocabulary is a real problem. So what to do about it?

1 – Choose the right things to read

The simplest piece of advice for learning any skill is “practice…a lot.” But it’s not enough to simply practice, we must use effective practice, and this is where things start to become more difficult. In addition to the problem mentioned above—the very large number of vocabulary that must be learned—there’s another problem, namely, that to effectively learn vocabulary we need to concentrate on words that are appropriate for our level. The best way to do this is to find texts that are at the right level. If the texts are too easy, we won’t find enough new words to learn, but if the texts are too difficult, there will be too many new words and these words will often be too hard for us to use (that is, to practice) in our own speaking and writing.

The most important thing we can to do make learning vocabulary more effective is to choose texts that have about the right number of new words. Dr. Willy A Renandya is a senior lecturer at Singapore’s National Institute of Education, and he has done a great deal of research on extensive reading. He argues that the best texts to use are ones that are rather easy for the learner. What does “rather easy” mean? In percentage terms, this means that for extensive reading we should be using texts where only about 2% of the words are unknown to us. A paperback novel might have about 250 words per pages, so he suggests the Rule of Five. If the text is the size of a paperback novel, count the number of unknown words on page, and these should be fewer than five. If they are more than five, the learner will probably only be able to read a small number of pages before giving up in frustration.

There are several ways we can find such “rather easy” texts. One way is to use texts written for younger native speakers or language learners. Children’s books and school textbooks are two obvious choices. Poetry and songs will usually be harder than prose, and comic books are often not a good choice since they use so much slang.

Another source is graded readers. Graded readers are books that are written to match different levels (here called “grades”) in terms of both vocabulary and grammar. There are many publishers of graded readers: Oxford, Cambridge, National Geographic, as well as South Asian publishers. Most of them use some form of a 6-level scale to describe the difficulty of a text. They also publish a wide range of titles and genres; there’s fiction (both original and adapted), travel, science, geography, history, and many other topics. I urge my learners to start with a book at level 3 and read a few pages and apply Dr. Renandya’s Rule of Five. If the book is too hard, then they should choose a level 2 book and try it. If the book is too easy, then they should try a level 4 book.

But choosing the right level is only part of the solution. It’s also important that we chose the right kind of book. If we have a very specific purpose in learning a language, we should concentrate on texts connected with that purpose. For example, if our only interest in learning a language is to read biology texts, then we should focus on vocabulary connected with that field. Of course, we need to find levels at the right level of difficulty, so we could use graded readers about science and the environment or books for primary and secondary school students. However, if our goal is to function at the level of an educated person, we should not limit our reading. Instead, we should read texts from a variety of genres and about a variety of topics: science, fiction, travel, politics, religion, movies, food, sport, family, holidays, everything.

2 – Find the definitions

Finding the definitions sounds easy but actually can be the most boring part of learning vocabulary. There are a number of common mistakes people make but also several solutions.

The worst thing to do is to stop everyone time we find an unknown word and to then look it up in a dictionary. This completely breaks our attention. What should we do? I recommend using a highlighter (I happen to use an orange one for this purpose) to mark the unknown words as one reads. After I reach the end of the chapter, I’ll then go back and choose which of the highlighted words to actually look up in a dictionary. If I’ve chosen a book that’s not too difficult, there should be no more than five unknown words per page, which would mean perhaps 20 to 100 words per chapter.

I am a big believer in using flashcards. These are pieces of stiff paper on which we can write things that we want to memorize. I should emphasize three things. First, many language learners think that all they need to do is make flashcards and memorize the words in order to learn a language. That’s not true. We also need to practice how to use these words correctly, an issue I’ll address a bit later. A second problem is that many native speakers of English don’t like using flashcards and urge their students not to use them. In my experience, these native speakers tend to recommend that learners simply use context to guess the meanings or that they just absorb new vocabulary from books, TV, movies or other sources. In my experience, such people very often fail to learn any language to a university level. Although using context to guess meaning is very important, most learners are not able to learn thousands of words simply through methods like these. Third, many monolingual native English speakers insist that their students only use English-English dictionaries. I have little patience with this. Although once we reach an advanced or superior level, we might use such dictionaries, for lower levels the best choice is a bilingual dictionary.

Once I have finished a chapter or some other part of the text, I will choose which of the highlighted words to learn. Often I will try to learn all the words, especially if I’ve chosen a text with not too many unknown words. I use flashcards that are 3 centimeters by 6 centimeters and that are made of stiff paper like that used to make business cards. Some people prefer to use larger cards, but I find that this size, although small, is easy to hold in my hands. I write the unknown words on the cards and then I organize them alphabetically. Next, I use a dictionary to find definitions and I write these on the cards. I know that the next point will sound foolishly simple, but it’s important. When you write the definition on the card, make sure you write it on the back of the card (English on one side, and your own language on the other) and also be sure to turn the card upside down. Having the words on one side written upside down with respect to the other will make it much easier to flip the card for learning and reviewing.

3 – What kind of information to include on the flashcards?

For learners of English, it will often be necessary to write the pronunciation of the word on the flash card. If you are right handed, you will probably be holding the cards in your right hand, so I suggest writing the English word in the center of the card and then writing the pronunciation in the bottom right corner. This way, you can hide the pronunciation with your right thumb and use it to help to guess and study the pronunciation.

It also makes sense to write irregular forms (especially for verbs), and for this I recommend also using the lower right corner. And for the small number of irregular plural nouns (child – children, ox – oxen, woman – women, etc), you can do the same.

Another kind of information to include is derivatives. For example, for the card with the word reason on it, you might also want to write reasonable and rational on the English side and then to give the definition of each on the back.

It can also be useful to include together words that you often confuse. For example, beginners often have trouble with kitchen and chicken. Putting both on the same side of one card can help you practice them and can help you remember that they’re different.

4 – Collocations are important, too

Learners should certainly also include collocations. A collocation is a fancy word for a group of words that often come together. Some of these might be phrasal verbs: get over, get across, break up, break through, come off, drag into, see off. Others can be phrase: have a good time, be on top of the situation, find a solution to the problem. It’s not possible to learn all of these, but when we’re making flashcards, we should probably include some collocations.

5 – Moving beyond the dictionary: finding useful phrases

A dictionary won’t have every phrase that we want to say, but a could source to find this is our extensive reading. When we are reading, many times we’ll see a phrase or a sentence and think, “I didn’t know this before, but I can guess the meaning and I really need to learn how to say this!” When I read, I underline these useful phrases with a green ink pen (green = “go forward” in my mind, so I use green since I want to be able to go forward with these phrases). For example, when I was studying Bengali, I didn’t know how to ask “What does this word mean?” but one day I saw a sentence in a Bengali book and I was able to use context to understand that sentence. I immediately underlined it in green and also made a flashcard so I could practice it.

6 – Going from the discrete to the holistic

So far, most of the things I have emphasized have been discrete skills or discrete pieces of knowledge. “Discrete” means “in small pieces”. Although important, we also have to practice more holistic kinds of language. “Holistic” means “in wholes, not in pieces”.

One way to do this is to make short sentences from the words we see on our flashcards. We shouldn’t always just memorize these words as discrete (isolated) items but should also use them holistically (to make sentences, to have conversations). It’s especially easy to do this with collocations, but we should also try to use individual vocabulary items in sentences.

And what next?

Learners will find that after they get about a thousand or more flashcards, they will have trouble organizing them. It will no longer be possible to review all of these cards each day, nor will it be effective. Many words won’t require daily review to be remembered. In a future blog, I’ll consider the issue of how to organize one’s flashcards. I’ve been using flashcards regularly since the 1980s and for at least half a dozen languages I have more than 5,000 flashcards (for each of these languages). I agree that organizing them and also using them to maintain one’s knowledge of vocabulary is a real challenge, but I think I have some useful ideas. But that will have to wait.

English Language Teaching and Larger Pursuits of Life

Critical Outlook, Miscellaneous, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes, Writing

Indra Bahadur Ter

Far Western Development Region, Nepal

For decades we have been teaching the English language primarily as an end in itself. The question whether English should be taught as an end in itself or as a means to achieving larger pursuits of life has been a matter of constant debate among ELT scholars, language experts and language theorists. Equally mighty question is whether larger pursuits can be achieved only after gaining a proficient command of the English language, or any other language for that matter, or, the desired proficiency comes only after we engage in larger pursuits of life.

By larger pursuits of life I mean all those creative sorts of activities that demand either field-specific professional excellence or that bring happiness to our lives with a sense of well-being or euphoria which I take art and literature for preciseness. The latter sort of pursuits become imminent from the very idea that the chief end of everybody life is the pursuit of happiness. Undeniably, this type of happiness derives from self-actualization, the highest level of need in Maslow’s hierarchy, and art and literature are the best ways towards self-actualization.  In this article I shall attempt to establish a relationship between language command and these larger pursuits of life with special reference to the English language.

Field-specific professional excellence

In the past English was taught solely as a language of communication and was by and large used as a means of communicating with the world community, and its secondary application was for literary activities. However, within the last two decades, the world has undergone a vast transformation with its explosion of knowledge and English has pervaded our life and culture. The world has been anglicized, so to speak, and new types of professional needs have emerged. Now, the scope of the English language has broadened. In this changed context an ESL/ EFL teacher has now not only to deal with English and its grammar, linguistics, ELT but also there are a number of disciplines like philosophy, literature, anthropology, psychology, mass communication, journalism, and above all those registers of English that are used in an indeterminately large number of fields and situations, that most often pass over the heads of a majority of English teachers.  As a side note, English teachers need  to acquaint themselves with all those varieties of English used in different English speaking communities and different professional contexts so they can help their students deal with world realities in relation to English use.

English for Specific Purposes: English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is the English for professional needs of learners and requires field-specific knowledge of English. Why ESP? This question should be clear from the following anecdotes from my own life.

I had just passed Master’s in English when my spouse complained of abdomen pain during her last months of pregnancy and we visited a doctor, who noticing my flaunting of English, replied in English. He used medical register: “She has a minor cervical fissure. Miscarriage might result if we don’t resort to caesarian.” I didn’t have the faintest idea of what he said but I just uttered a faint “Yes”. So deplorably I wished I could have a dictionary handy then.

At another time I was invited to write a bank guarantee for an organization for a loan that would be sanctioned to the organization on their written request along with the collateral. I spent the whole day trying and re-trying and ended up with what looked like an abstract literature. Ah, it was a horrible experience.

As a matter of fact, some of us might aspire to write a proposal for an organization that might bring up ludicrous incomes to us; some of us might aspire to write an influential article for a newspaper, a film script, a dissertation, a legal document, an advert, or a book, for that matter. But our own English comes as a barrier when we proceed. We lack the knowledge and skills of field-specific register of English. In a world where knowledge is a measure of power and where English sells as a commodity, why can’t we sell our knowledge of English? Why in certain vacancy announcements where sound knowledge of English is a must, preference is given to other disciplines rather than English? Rarely have English language graduates got the posts like manager, project coordinator, executive officer, proposal writer, and the likes solely on the basis of their English skills. Why can’t we sell our English skills in larger world markets? It may be perhaps because we don’t study/ teach field-specific professional English that can in technical terms be called ESP. Certainly ESP is a lot different from General English.

So what? Teaching the English language as merely an end in itself is not the demand of time. The demand of the hour is teaching need-based English. For this, whole the programmes and curricula of English right from beginners’ level have to be re-looked and revised.

English for art and literature: a euphoric pursuit

After so much reading of the English language, grammar, linguistics, research articles, critical theories, newspapers, journals and so on and so forth, we should be prepared to create something of worth for the real world audience – a poem, a piece of fiction, an essay, a travelogue, or a book worth reading. Well, yes, we do really well when our audience is our students but our ability starts to answer when our audience is the literati from the world community. Many of us might even fail to interpret and appreciate a piece of art or literature written in the current trend, for we are still reading/writing structured literature of the romantic age and modern age. Facing postmodern literature is a challenge for us. If we cannot read and enjoy art and literature, we have no right to call ourselves connoisseurs of art and literature. Reading, appreciating and creating art and literature to cultivate a sense of well-being or euphoria is what I mean by “euphoric pursuit”. Art and literature are something that make our life meaningful and worth living, and there is no gainsaying the fact that these entities are the stairs that lift us towards self-realization and self-actualization. These pursuits should be at high end of ELT/ ELD.

However, the way we teach literature in English classes is no way better than spoon feeding – mere discussing the gist or summary of the literary text, dictating the summary or a stereotypical summary to them and getting them to learn the end-of-the-text question answers, which WILL only blunt their creative potentialities rather than sharpen them. When shall we encourage our students to read, interact with and appreciate the literary texts, making out their own enquiries into the text to distill their own interpretations of the text, and generate their own critical thinking and creative writing?

Is There Any Best Approach, Method and Technique for ESL Classes? I Like all; I Like none

Critical Outlook, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

                                                                                                                                                 Jagadish Paudel

Nothing is right, nothing is wrong; everything is right, everything is wrong.

Nothing is best, nothing is worst; everything is best, everything is worst.

One day, I asked my B. Ed. students, “Which is the best method for teaching English?” They quickly responded in a single voice that the communicative method (CM) is the best method. I remained silent for a while looking around the class.  All the students had the same answer. Even the students who did not respond seemed to agree in the same matter. Similarly, when I went to Bhajhang, Bajura, Doti, Dadeldhura for examination conduction and research work, I asked the same question to some English teachers there. They also answered that CM is the best method. Like them, I had the same understanding when I was a student, and before familiarizing myself with the concept of postmodernism and post-method pedagogy in ELT.

They do not seem to have postmodern mind. They were guided by the truth; rather than by a truth. They did not strive for potential perspectives and alternatives in ELT. They did not become critical rather became blind supporters. They viewed CM from BANA perspective. Postmodern mind believes that everything considerably varies according to contexts. In this connection, Tarnas (1993) writes, “There is an appreciation of the plasticity and constant change of reality and knowledge, a stress on the priority of concrete experience over fixed abstract principles, and a conviction that no single a priori thought system should govern belief or investigation.”

In this world, nothing is final, nothing is absolute and fixed; everything is relative and fallible. Postmodernism accepts multiples truths and realities in everything. The concept of postmodernism also applies in ELT. Many teachers and students are still unaware of this fact. Like in many spheres of life, innovations are also being explored in the field of ELT. Teachers and students should be familiar with the changing trends of ELT around the world. They should not be guided by the fixed ideas and values. This is the world of postmodernism; it is the world of options, possibilities, and alternatives. There are many options in every sector, for example, in education, media, communication, auto-mobile, mobiles, business, transportation, politics, manpower, politics, and fashion, etc. There is no hegemony of a single thing. The same applied in ELT. Postmodern pedagogy allows ELT to be flexible and contextual. It gives freedom to use teachers and students’ experiences, values, cultures. It also considers socio-economic status, political realities and local circumstances. Hence, we need to teach in local realities in which we find our values, cultures; rather than following others’ practices blindly. Teachers and students should keep abreast of the new trends and best practices of the world emerged in ELT, but act locally and contextually. Pertaining to it, Freeman (2008) has rightly remarked ‘think globally, act locally’.

In the past, ELT was virtually led by methodologists and experts. What they told was followed strictly by the teachers and students. The teaching learning activities which followed certain methods strictly would be counted as the good teaching. In the field of ELT, different methodologists have introduced different approaches, methods, techniques one after another rejecting and criticizing the previous ones and claiming theirs as the best ones. Over the last 100 years, the ELT professionals searched for a single, ideal method, generalizable across widely diverse student bodies around the globe. They vainly searched for the absolute method that would serve as the panacea in language teaching. However, they always failed to do so.  It is because they had wrong the assumption that they could find a universal method. As a matter of fact, searching a universal method is like peeling off an onion and never getting into its core.

During 1990s, the ELT professionals came to realize that no approach/method/technique can be ideal. Actually, all approaches, methods, techniques are context specific. They can be very effective, depending on a particular context, place, students, purpose, etc.  It is the context which determines how teaching and learning should take place. Hence, while teaching we should consider the contextual factors such as the place where teaching learning activities are taking place, the students and teachers, culture, time, available resources, socio-economic condition, purpose, motivation, etc. Teachers need to be able to use approaches, and methods flexibly and creatively based on their own judgments and experiences. They should look for alternatives, question the existing practices if they have doubts and explore their own practices that best befit in their contexts.

Going through the literature of language teaching, we find myriads of methods, approaches and techniques discussed by methodologists. Grammar translation method, direct method, audio-lingual method, communicative method, nativist approach, functional approach, oral structural situational approach, task-based approach, behaviorism, rationalism are to name but too few. All these have own importance in their own places. Most of these have well-established background and theory. Yet, they cannot be regarded as the best methods in all the places, for teaching all language items, and for all teachers and students. There are various views regarding the best way to teach a language. Prabhu (1990) writes:

…no single method is best for everyone, as there are important variations in the teaching context that influence what is best. The variations are of several kinds, relating to social situation (language policy, language environment, linguistic and cultural attitudes, economic and ideological factors, etc.), educational organisation (instructional objectives, constraints of time and resources, administrative efficiency, class-size, classroom ethos, etc.), teacher-related factors (status, training, belief, autonomy, skill, etc.), and learner-related factors (age, aspirations, previous learning experience, attitudes to learning, etc.). (p.162)

Regarding the best method, the prevalent notion is that if a method yields the best results in terms of learning outcomes that is the best method. Different methods are best in different teaching and learning contexts. A method which is regarded best in one context can be far removed from classroom reality, and become impractical in another context. Brown (1994, p. 15) maintains that “the best method is one which you have derived through your very own careful process of formulation, try-out, revision, and refinement.”  Likewise, Tarnas (ibid) writes: “One must try the new, experiment and explore, test against subjective and objective consequences, learn from one’s mistakes, take nothing for granted, treat all as provisional, assume no absolutes.”

Brown (ibid) says that different philosophical theories have appeared and disappeared in history, so have language teaching methods ‘waxed’ and ‘waned’ in popularity. Likewise, Harmer (2008, p. 48) writes: “Both             abstract theory and practical techniques have been debated,    have gone in and out of fashion, and have influenced what was and is included in classrooms and teaching materials.”

The above mentioned discussion implies that no approach or method or technique, etc. can be best or worst in its own right. It is the context which makes it effective or ineffective. None of them is universal.  Brown (ibid) mentions that no method can guarantee success, because every learner is unique, teacher is unique and every learner-teacher relationship is unique.

No single method can suffice to fulfill all the needs and expectations of all the learners at all times. If we talk in the context of Nepal, it is more complex. It is difficult to meet all the widely differing expectations held by individual students and too difficult to ensure that everyone learns by a single method. If we glance at most of the Nepalese ELT classrooms, we will find heterogeneous learners in terms of levels, competence, age, academic background, family background, economic background, mother tongue, personality, sex, language aptitude, learning style, culture, geography, etc. . Hence, it is a big challenge to teach ELT effectively and successfully by a single method. Hence, teacher needs to practice “enlightened” eclecticism. The teachers of English can use different approaches, methods, and techniques that can be suitable for their own classes. Therefore, some professionals started to speak death of the methods and the term ‘post-methods era’.

Richards and Rodgers (2002) have made some criticisms of approaches and methods.

 The top-down criticism

Almost all the methods typically prescribe for teachers what and how to teach; they fail to consider their potential application to practical situations. The role of the teacher is sidelined; his or her role is to understand the method and apply its principles appropriately. There is often little freedom for the teacher’s own personal initiative and teaching style.  Likewise, learners are sometimes viewed as the passive recipients of the method and must follow the prescribed exercises and activities strictly. But, today, it is commonly acknowledged that learners bring different learning styles and preferences to the learning process that they should be considered in the process of developing a teaching program, and that teaching methods must be flexible and adaptive to learners’ needs and interests.

Role of contextual factors

Pedagogical experts often propped up their approaches and methods as all-purpose solutions to teaching problems that can be applied all over the world and under any circumstance. That is to say, they regarded their approaches and methods as universal.   In the application of approaches and methods teachers ignored the context in which teaching and learning takes place, including the cultural context, the political context, the local institutional context, and the context constituted by the teachers and learners in their classroom.

The need for curriculum development processes

Curriculum planners view debates over teaching method as part of a broader set of educational planning decisions.  A careful examination of all available sources of knowledge, objectives, piloting of those methods and materials which are judged most likely to achieve the objectives which teachers agreed upon, the assessment of the work and objectives and feedback of all experience gained are to be taken into account in the process of curriculum development processes (Nicholls and Nicholls, 1972 as cited in Richards and Rodgers, 2002, p.248). Choice of teaching method cannot, therefore, be determined in isolation from other planning and implementation practices.

Lack of research basis

Approaches and methods are often based on the assumptions, claims, and assertions, without research evidence, so as to have the understanding of second language learning process. There is lack of clear evidence to be believed. Assumption cannot always be true in all contexts. Most of the approaches and methods are not empirically tested. Hence, there is the need of research over these approaches and methods.

Similarity of classroom practices

It is very difficult for teachers to apply approaches and methods in the ways that precisely mirror the underlying principles of the method. Theory and practice are not consistent with each other.

For Brown (1994) language teaching and learning should be “a principled approach” that is, having a finite number of general research-based principles on which classroom practice is grounded. He has mentioned the twelve principles, for example, automaticity, meaningful learning, the anticipation of reward, intrinsic motivation, strategic investment, language ego, self-confidence, risk taking, the language-culture connection, the native language effect, inter-language and communicative competence. This principled approach is oriented to diagnose the needs of students, to treat the students with successful pedagogical techniques and to assess the outcome of those treatments. For him, a teacher has to be engaged in diagnosing their learners’ needs, offer treatment as per the needs and assigning the effectiveness of their own practices.

Conclusion

To conclude, we can say that all approaches, methods and techniques cannot work in all contexts. We should not take them for granted. We should raise vital questions if we have some doubts and adapt them as per our contexts instead. Therefore, we should remake, reset, rethink, revisit, and reinvent the teaching learning activities for our lessons ourselves.

Author:

Mr. Paudel is a teaching assistant at Dandeldhura Campus ,Dandeldhura and he has been teaching English for Nepalese learners of English over the last seven years.                     

REFERENCE

Brown, H. D. (1994a). Principles of language learning and teaching. London: Prentice Hall.

                ___(2002). English language teaching in the “Post-method” Era: toward     better diagnosis, treatment, and assessment. In Richards and Renandya

(eds.). Methodology in language teaching. Cambridge: CUP.

Harmer, J. (2007). The practice of English language teaching. London: Longman.

                   (2008). How to teach English. London: Longman.

Prabhu, N. S. (1990). There is no best method- why? TESOL Quarterly Journal.

Richards, J. C. and W. A., Renandya (eds.) (2010). Methodology in language teaching. Cambridge: CUP.

Trana, R. (1993). The Passion of the western mind: Understanding the ideas that have shaped our ideas. Random House Publishing Group

Reflecting on the Talk on the ‘Critical’ in Language Education

Critical Outlook, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

Ashok Raj Khati

I attended a guest lecture on The ‘Critical’ in Language Education delivered by Bal Krishna Sharma on the 3rd of July 2013 at the School of Education, Kathmandu University. Bal Krishna is a one of the past editors of the Journal of NELTA and a doctoral candidate in applied linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA. There were 24 students of MPhil in English Language Education. In this brief reflective essay, I am going to share some key points of the lecture and discuss how the ‘critical’ aspect of language education is an important for language teachers and researchers.

I had come across the term ‘critical’ many times during different courses in MPhil and discourses of English language education; however the talk made me broaden my perspective particularly on how we can introduce ‘criticality’ in the classroom in Nepalese ELT settings. Before the class, he had assigned us to read an article on ‘the practicality and relevance of second language critical pedagogy’ by Graham Crookes (2009) so that we could have better perspective on the topic and better participated in the talk session. I found that the article (see appendix)  addresses eight different areas including EFL critical pedagogy and it also highlights the practical relevance of critical pedagogies of second language (L2) in several areas. This write up is very relevant and useful to see the practicality of critical pedagogy in EFL or ESL classroom.

The aim of his talk session was to introduce the ‘critical’ in language pedagogy. Nevertheless, his talk did not only introduce the term ‘critical’ but also illustrated with examples giving practical insights on how it can be integrated into language education. Bal Krishna’s talk mainly focused on four kinds of the ‘critical’ in language pedagogy. They were critical discourse analysis, critical pedagogy, critical language awareness and critical literacy organized together in the talk. He first presented the general overview of such terms and then the examples. Each of them contained an assignment or project work for the audience. Firstly, critical discourse analysis (CDA) takes place through an analysis of how power and inequality constructed through different discourse like naturally occurring interactions (e.g. classroom), photographs, images, media (movies, newspapers and documentaries), websites, textbooks, policy documents, etc. We critically observed the cultural and authenticity aspect in some examples of English textbooks. Finally, we attempted to explore possible critical discourse analysis through a list of assignments given as follows:

  • Collecting naturally occurring interaction data in a language classroom and analyze how the teacher and the fellow classmates treat a stuttering student.
  • Analysing how professional roles are represented in terms of gender in English textbooks of Grade 9 and 10.
  • Analysing how ‘Nepali’ culture is constructed in English textbooks.
  • Critically analyzing how VP Paramanda Jha’s oath in Hindi is constructed by media.

It was an exciting discussion in the sense that the instances taken in the talk were of Nepalese context.

Secondly, Bal Krishna discussed critical pedagogy. He defined, following Freire (1972), Giroux (1981) and Apple (1982), critical pedagogy is primarily concerned with critiquing existing educational institutions and practices, and subsequently transforming both education and society. I came to know that critical pedagogy has several names like radical pedagogy, feminist pedagogy, pedagogy of possibility, pedagogy of empowerment and transformative pedagogy. I understood that Social Responsibility Interest Section in TESOL and Global Issues Specific Interest Group in IATEFL are address the concerns of critical pedagogy. I realized that there are two important aspects of critical pedagogy—Give students voice and Critical analysis skills. At the end of the discussion on ‘critical pedagogy’, he introduced an example of the Tamang Project entitled ‘Privileging Indigenous Knowledges: Empowering Multilingual Education in Nepal’ led by two Nepalese and a foreign researchers. The major focuses of the project are on:

–          herbal medicines and healing practices,

–          traditional and modern knowledge and skills,

–          History, numerical systems, weights and measures,

–          Relations, belief systems and practices and

–          Life rituals, feasts and festivals, songs, lyrics and poems.

Thirdly, in his presentation he defined critical language awareness as it refers to importance of ‘noticing’, applicable to marginalized language speakers and it argues to deconstruct the standard language ideology. It covers dialect awareness, non-standard language awareness, pidgin and creole awareness native/heritage language awareness (think of internal migrants). The following assignment was given at the end.

–          Develop a lesson or activities which ask all of the students to discuss and present on their languages and cultures and how they make use of their languages in their lives, both in and out of school. The students can bring in an artifact from home which represents their home language(s)/culture(s), and they can be encouraged to teach the class some expressions in their home language. The Tharu language in Chitwan, for example. The students should also be encouraged to work with their parents.

I found the discussion on critical literacy was more useful from the perspective of global citizenship. I was highly interested in the issue. We came to know that critical literacy as an educational practice that focuses on the relationship between language, social practices, citizenship, intercultural relations and global/local issues, with several implications for our understanding of language, our pedagogical practices and the role of teachers. I occasionally used issue-based teaching in my class but came to know this time that it was critical literacy. To teach life skills to the learners through critical literacy was quite convincing to me. The inspiring examples for critical literacy like makingsmall scale interventions within the existing institutional constraints (Shin and Crookes, 2005), raising students’ consciousness on matters relevant to their lives (Konoeda and Watanabe, 2008) and connecting ESL pedagogical practices to issues of power, equity, and social justice (Ajayi, 2008) added value to the discussion.

The assignments based on different ‘critical’ in language pedagogy were so useful on the part of the students since they worked as clue to prepare theses, design project work, develop a lesson plan or activity and organize a workshop from critical perspective. Besides, I found his talk very relevant to Nepalese context where there is a need to look into such issues and bring a change in traditional chain of learning. It has really enabled all of us who attended the talk and made us really thoughtful on such issues with reference to multilingual context of Nepal. Following the talk, we some of our friends had larger discussion and interaction realising our concern to work together for this. I will largely incorporate such issues at different professional avenues in the days to come.

Before he concluded his two-hour talk, he shared with the audience his research project and opened the floor for question answer session.  At the end of the session Associate Prof. Laxman Gnawali, Kathmandu University, summarized the talk and appreciated Mr. Bal Krishna Sharma for his contribution to the M.Phil in ELE program of Kathmandu University.

Author:

Mr. Khati is a life member of NELTA and currently pursuing his MPhil in ELE from Kathmandu University, Nepal.

APPENDIX

Here is the pdf version of Mr. Sharma’s presentation slides and the article by Crookes (2009).

1. Critical at KU for Choutari

2. Crookes, critical pedagogy

Let’s Integrate Technology with Teaching

Teacher's Experience/anecdotes, Teaching Tips

Maheshwor Rijal

Technology has affected all the aspects of our life and pedagogy is not an exception. The use of technology in teaching English as second or foreign language (ESL/EFL) has an immense value. Before I conclude this blog entry with the importance of technology in ESL or EFL classroom suggesting the integration of technology into pedagogy, I will share my reflections on the online teacher training course offered by an American University (I have recently attended) and experience of integrating technology into pedagogy. I believe such sharing based on both the reflection and the experience of learning and using technology in the classroom through this blog entry will be worthwhile motivating the readers especially the teachers to introduce and integrate technology in the classroom for effective teaching learning activities.

Reflection on Online Teacher Training Course

A couple of months ago, I attended an online teacher training course titled Building Teaching Skills through the Interactive Web’ offered by the University of Oregon, USA.

I spent altogether 10 weeks for this course, which gave me lots of inputs to use technology into the classroom. The course was designed so systematic and practical in the sense that I had to do lots of assignments. Creating professional blog, nicenet and wiki classroom were the most useful tasks assigned to me. As a result, this web skill course enhanced me searching for innovative ideas.

First, I have bookmarked useful websites in my delicious bookmarking page. Like the name of the host page, this which encompasses the bookmarks of useful websites, offers really delicious tips for teaching and learning. Then, I created my blog on blogger, where I have shared my ideas, experience, reflections and learning. I found that using blog is an effective means for sharing ideas and professional development. Nik Peachey, freelance learning technology consultant, trainer and writer has developed learning technology blog (click here) which combines video tutorial with pedagogical suggestions to help teachers exploit free web based technologies. Likewise, Peachey (2011) says, this blog and also this are useful blogs for the teachers’ professional development.  I have used them and found very much useful for enhancing my professional career as Yadav (2011) argues that blogging is a helpful technique supporting the professional development of English language teachers largely through collaborative learning. He further adds that the blogging helps in building networks among English language teachers and promoting professional dialogues. Using technology in learning was a great opportunity for me to share experiences, knowledge, thoughts or plans with teachers of the same interest around the globe.

The use of nicenet is equally useful for organizing online English project which helps to run parallel to face to face tutorials.  This is all about virtual English classroom. This web tool is useful for organizing interactions among the participants around the globe, link sharing, uploading information, sending the personal message to tutors and others. Learning technology for teaching and experience of integrating technology into teaching has realised me the fact that I am in novice stage and I need to update myself with the changing need of technologies as per the demand of the time.

My experience of integrating technology with teaching

It was difficult for me to introduce technology in the classroom because there was no internet connection and lack of computer in the school. However, I used my own laptop without internet connection in the class for teaching and learning. I had already figured out how I could incorporate it into my lessons and it was—listening activities. First I connected speakers with my laptop and then played the audio materials related with lesson, which I had already downloaded at home. I found the students really enjoyed my lesson which was different from previous times. When asked them what they had learned, majority of them replied the correct pronunciation. They further added that they felt difficult to listen to the sound but later they easily understood. After I got back from the class, I downloaded more different listening activities, authentic speeches, and sometimes captured radio programs using internet at home. For example, I have used this website, as it consists of different communicative exercises and these were helpful for making the classroom more interactive and recreational.  Moreover, I have downloaded and used different games, riddles with the help of internet to make my teaching more interesting.

After I have used technology into the classroom, I found that students’ motivation and interest has increased in a greater amount, making a difference when compared to the classroom without technology. Now I realised that it is useful for revealing the great potentiality of the students and bringing a variety of changes.

Importance of technology in the classroom

Using technology in the classroom does not only associate with the PowerPoint presentation but also the use of different web tools for teaching and learning four language skills; listening, speaking, reading and writing. The use of technology shows the teaching and learning is not only limited within the periphery of the classroom but the teacher can do many more beyond the classroom using blog, nicenet, and wiki class. As a result, students can have access to learn beyond the class with the use of different web tools and the same set of tools can make the language classroom more interesting and lively. Such activities will certainly make the classroom activities fun and interaction oriented. My experience and learning show that these stuffs in the EFL classroom are also helpful for developing professionalism on the part of teacher. To conclude, the use of technology in the classroom opens the windows to access the free and open treasure of vast and worldwide knowledge.

Bill Gates says, “Technology is just a tool, in terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important”. This is age of networking and this is possible by connecting with virtual world. The teacher development is an ongoing process through networking. For this, the use of nicenet, blogging and creating wiki class will certainly have enormous effect for making classroom interactive and bringing synergic effects. By using this, you can post the course information, different assignments and hyperlinks. Moreover, such kinds of web tools are helpful in establishing stimulating environment.  This also provides access to authentic learning materials and considerable amount of exposure to a wide variety of native sounds.

The following sites will be helpful for the teacher to make teaching and learning more interactive:

We need to start doing something different, new and extra through the use of new web tools before it is too delay. Now, it is the time to believe in technology, which is today’s reality.

However, using web technology in the EFL classroom particularly, in remote public school in Nepal is not feasible due to lack of availability of technologies and facilities like electricity, internet access, computer, and other resources and infrastructure required. And, the places where there is such access and availability have challenges like illiterate teachers in terms of knowledge and skills to use technology and reluctance to adopt and adapt modern teaching techniques. Fullan (1991, as cited in Maggioli, 2004) opines that schools are facing problems and challenges because of the “fragmentation, overload and incoherence resulting from the uncritical acceptance of too many different innovations”.

Conclusion

The above sections of this blog entry suggest that there are both opportunities and challenges ahead while integrating technology with pedagogy. Maggioli (2004) adds that language teaching profession is faced with accountability issues that call for improved teacher development as means of improving student learning.  While integrating technology in the classroom, teachers ask themselves key five questions for professional development and this will be useful for implementing any new ideas in the classroom.

1. What am I doing?

2. Why am I doing it in this way?

3. What impact is it having on learners?

4. How might I do things differently?

5. If I did things differently, what impact might it have on learners? (Nolan and Hoover as cited in Maggioli, 2004)

The journey of thousand miles starts from a single foot. There is a need to change the traditional methods of teaching with integrating with technology. The curriculum developer, subject expert and others concerned need to introduce and integrate technology into the course of study for B. Ed. and M.Ed. degree. And such integration should be included in pre-service, in-service and refresher training modules too.

We can bring avenue of progressive change in Nepalese ELT and this is only possible when we have passion to update ourselves adopting and adapting modern global trends. We are not only the teachers but also change makers in ELT. Let’s integrate technology with teaching!

Author:

Mr. Rijal is pursuing his M. Ed. in ELT at Kathmandu University, Nepal.

REFERENCE:

Maggioli, G.D. (2004) Teacher centered professional development. ASCD: USA

Peachey (2011) A checklist of digital skills for teachers and trainers. The Teacher Trainer, Vol. 25, No. 1: A Pilgrims Publication ISSN:0951-7626

Yadav, P.K. (2011) Blogging as a Means of Professional development for ELT professionals. Journal of NELTA: Nepal English Language Teachers’ Association (NELTA) ISSN: 2091-0487

The Pragmatics ‘Became’

Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

Umes Shrestha

 

This happened in the first few months of my teaching career at a private boarding school in Lalitpur. It was one of the terminal exams in the school. I had finished handing out the answer sheets to the students, and was waiting for the bell to ring so that I could hand out the question papers. But, somehow there was no ring and one of the students from class 10 said, “Time became already”.

“What!!!” I exclaimed.

He said it again in a matter-of-fact-ly way, “Time became”.

It was the first time I’ve heard someone say that. At that time, I thought that it was his idiosyncrasy, this expression was his exclusive error. But I soon realized that the expression “time became” along with late became, right became, wrong became, homework became and countless of other became-expressions were quite common among the students and even the teachers in my school.

And once I was aware of this phenomenon, these became-expressions began to hit my ears from all directions. From the primary classrooms to the secondary ones. From the playground to the library. Became, I realized, was omnipresent in the school.

It was an epidemic. That’s what I initially labeled it as. I shouted out at the students. You can’t say ‘time became’. I corrected them. It’s not ‘late became’, it should be ‘I’m getting late’ or ‘It is getting late’. There was no respite, though. I started correcting their numerous other expressions as well. I made them write down the correct expressions. 20 times each. I made them speak aloud those expressions. 10 times each. I warned them. I threatened them. I preached them. But all in vain.

A week later, the students were back to their original English. Inside the classroom, they tried to be aware of my presence and my frown. Outside the classroom, they were back to their original self. Carefree. Spontaneous. Happy. It was like, they just didn’t give a hoot about the correctness of English language.

So, what’s unique with this “became-epidemic”?

The meaning of become/became usually translates to बन्नु [bannu] or हुनु (भयो) [hunu / bhayo] in Nepali. The first usage of ‘become’ as ‘बन्नु’ is very literal, as in:

Hari became a doctor.
हरी डाक्टर बन्यो।
[Hari doctor banyo]

However, the literal meaning बन्नु oftentimes gets morphed into हुनु (and the past form भयो) with the usages like:

Hari became first in the exam.

हरी जाँचमा फस्ट भयो।
[Hari jaanch ma first bhayo]

Or, here’s a context where भयो translates so smoothly into became. The bell has just gone off signaling the end of the class. The teacher is collecting papers from the students. One of the students has not finished writing it yet. And, the teacher asks, “Became?” (भयो ?) [bhayo?] The student says,

“Not became” (भएको छैन।) [bhayeko chhaina].

Hence because of this interference or influence of become’s Nepali meaning, students find it easier to make expressions like late became, wrong became, problem became and homework became. It’s short. It’s understandable. And, the best thing, it works among their context.

There are several other expressions as well, which have become regular among my students. One is ending a sentence with ‘and’, as in:

Student 1: (He wants to copy the answer.) Give your copy.

Student 2: Haven’t finished and.

This usage of ‘and’ to end a sentence is just as rampant as the usage of ‘became’. ‘Stop pushing and’ or ‘I am not coming and’ or ‘Not became and’.

The usual meaning of ‘and’ as a conjunction is (र) [ra] in Nepali, but students use it as a discourse marker to mean (अनी) [ani]. They translate the Nepali structure, for instance:

सकेकै छैन अनी [sakekai chhaina ani] into ‘Not finished and’.

This interesting phenomenon got me into thinking a lot. I turned the pages of Second Language Acquisition and Applied Linguistics books. I discussed about this with my teachers and friends. I googled around if this type of sentence structures were normal in other ESL communities as well. I came to realize that it was a normal phenomenon among the learners of a second or foreign language. It also got me thinking that my initial reaction and judgment was pretty immature and naïve. I was rude. And I was sarcastic to the students.

So this question – why do the students speak English in so Nepali way? – keeps prickling my brain. I have stopped correcting the students. I feel more curious and more confused, but I don’t get angry or frustrated anymore. These days, I just try to make my students aware of these ‘became-expressions’. But I don’t overtly correct them, hoping that one day they will pick up the appropriate expression on their own.

I am thankful to the became-expressions as they have helped me understand a part of second language learning. They have helped me gain insights and amend my teaching philosophy. My mission in my earlier days of teaching English was – not to speak Nepali at all in the classroom. Now, I don’t teach English without throwing in few Nepali expressions whenever I feel it aids the learning of my students.

Author:

Mr. Shrestha is a blogger who blogs at http://latebecame.wordpress.com and podcasts at http://latebecame.podomatic.com

 

Teachers’ Perception and Practices on Dealing with Homework to Young Learners

Teacher's Experience/anecdotes, Teaching Tips

Dipendra Kumar Khatri

Homework! Oh, homework!

I hate you! You stink!

I wish I could wash you away in the sink,

If only bomb would explode you to bits

 

–By Jack Prelutsky

In the above stanza, the poet Jack Prelutsky speaks of the feelings and attitudes of young learners towards homework. Many a time homework has become a cause of corporal punishment in many schools of Nepal. It has destroyed students’ fun, laughter, games, confidence, etc.  It embittered parents- children relationship, teacher- student relationship, etc. It has appeared as a villain for young learners and does not seem to disappear until a  foreseeable period of time. Teachers, on the other hand, like to assign homework with a hope that learners better learn the things they have taught.  In this connection, I like to share how teachers perceive and practice homework.

I, as the training co-coordinator NELTA Surkhet, facilitated a session on ‘Dealing with Homework in Primary Level’. The main objectives of the presentation was to find out the participants’ perceptions and practices on homework and share how teachers deal with different issues on homework.

In the sharing session, most of the teachers reported that they would always give homework to their students with a view to engaging them in learning at home so that they could consolidate what they had studied at school. They also shared that most of the teachers assign writing or reading or project work as homework. The teachers from the private schools said that they would give a lot of homework, and spend some twenty to thirty minutes to correct it.

The teachers from public schools shared that they were assigning homework ‘sometimes’; not every day; whereas the teachers from private schools shared that they were assigning homework ‘everyday’ and they would give a lot of homework if there is long vacation.

All the teachers shared their bitter experiences of  hearing that voice of students as the responses for not doing homework. Despite their expectations, often teachers have to listen to their students speak out the following utterances:

Sir, my brother tears my notebook.

Sir , yesterday I was absent’

Sir, I had gone to my mamaghar.

Sir, another teacher check it.

There was a lot of homework yesterday.

Sir, I asked father but father did not learn about it.

I only copy it, I do half only.

Sir, it was difficult.’ No idea.

I have lots of work in home.  ‘I have no time to do.’

‘I did not copy the homework.  You rubbed out the questions so fast.’

Sir, I forgot my copy.

‘Sir, I have new copy today.’

I forgot to keep in my bag.

I lost homework copy, sir

Sir, you no give me happy. So I have don’t write.’

Yesterday, I didn’t come to school.

Sir, my mother did not buy copy today.

‘I lost my English book.’

I have not a pen.

Sir, I am sick.

Sir, you check yesterday, I no do today.

‘Sir, you don’t find me very good.’

Some students just stand up still and remain silent; they do not speak but seem to have been terrified. Their face looks gloomy. They do not respond verbally. Those were the common verbal and non-verbal responses to the teachers who check homework. I believe that such responses certainly make both students and teachers feel bad and degrade their zeal for learning and teaching respectively.

Strategies to deal with homework

The teachers shared that they are using many types of strategies to deal with homework effectively.  Some of them are: asking the students for not doing homework, asking parents to come to school, asking learners to do the tasks while the teacher is checking other students’ homework, etc. Some of the teachers even reported that they would get angry when they do not find suitable reasons for not doing homework.

Harmer (2008) advises teachers to ask the students’ interest and try to set homework which are relevant to them; not only in terms of their interests but also in terms of what they are studying. The teachers tend to assign homework related to what the students are studying. They never consider their interests. Similarly, they are willing to contact guardians to conform the reason for not doing homework by their children.

The teachers do not visit the guardians to encourage their children who keep doing homework regularly. They do not telephone the guardians whose children do not have the problem of homework, but they telephone those guardians whose children have the problem of doing homework. Most of such parents also cannot support their children in doing homework. Therefore, not only students but also parents feel embarrassed for being called in the school just to listen to the same thing: Your child does not do homework.

All the teachers shared that they were giving the exercise or lesson of the book as the homework.  To write, read and memorize. They generally do not make it fun i.e. give varied types of work; not only the questions from the book but also some funny tasks. Students want to be involved not only in the routined tasks, but also some serious things or some slightly crazy tasks. The homework can be given in envelops or sent them in e-mails jut to make them feel like doing homework.

The private school teachers said that they would use homework diary to keep record of homework. But it was not used by public school teachers. The teachers in Surkhet valley did not give extra-activities as the homework. They gave homework from books only. They gave tasks orally or in written form face to face; not in envelops and e-mails. The teachers do not give the individual (solo) work, but only one type of task to the whole class.

The teachers form private schools shared that their first duty entering into the class is to check the homework. So they check the students’ homework very often. They do not use pair or student checking strategy. A teacher checked all the students’ homework. They spend as many as thirty minutes for correcting homework. How long do they actually teach!  They did not have sufficient time to check properly with constructive feedbacks. As a result sometimes guardians complain their strategies, sometimes the students themselves question to their teachers. The teachers from the public schools often face the problem while checking the homework because of the large no of students in a class.

Teachers do not forget assigning homework, because they believe that if students do homework, they have learned well. They are overwhelmed by the right responses of their students and keep correcting assignments, no matter how long they are.

The teachers only respect the right answers in the students’ homework, which is also not so good practice, because from the students’ mistakes or errors they can notice how much they have learned and how much they need to help them learn. They can make their further plans in such a way that they can significantly decrease the number of errors to be committed by their students.

Generally, the teachers do not think how they can make post-homework productive. They rarely manage the class where the students correct their mistakes and learn from one another. The teachers  have not  been successful to provide their learners with opportunities to get students to correct each other’s homework in supportive and cooperative way.

It was also shared that the teachers form public as well as private schools took many trainings that helped them to create home wok friendly environment i. e. if the students are not doing homework, the teachers will help them do at school during the class time. They were not using the punishment as the strategy to deal with homework. They also mention  that  they were in favor of finding out reasons why their students do not do homework and act accordingly.

Conclusion

In conclusion,  homework seems to be an integral part of teaching and learning activity from teachers’ perspective. The teachers who teach to young learners should particularly think of some ideas of making homework a fun activity and should not make learners feel any kind of burden, which can have a lot of repercussions on intellectual, emotional, social, etc. aspects of youngsters.

Author:

Mr. Khatri is a life member of NELTA and a Teaching Assistant at Surkhet Campus (Education) and he has been teaching English at the campus over the last four years.

REFERENCE

Harmer, J. (2008). How to teach English. London: Pearson Longman.

My journey from a Novice to Better Teacher

Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

Suman Laudari

Through this blog entry, I would like to share with the ELT community my narrative of professional development. I will first briefly review the notion of teacher development and then, I will share some of the things that I have gained over the past few years to improve my classroom practices followed by my personal attributes. Thus this entry will try to showcase my both personal as well as professional development as a teacher. 

Teacher development

Teacher development is a process of bringing changes in teacher’s behavior, attitude and beliefs in terms of teaching, construction of knowledge and classroom practice. These changes can be brought into two ways; teacher training and teacher development (Richards & Farrell, 2005). The former is related to the activities enhancing the teacher’s existing knowledge, skills and capacities in the subject matter they’re teaching  while the latter refers to general growth that serves a long term goal and is related to understanding the teaching and its different aspects, classroom practices, and themselves as teachers.

            Teacher development in ELT is aimed at understanding second language development process, teaching learning style, changing roles of teachers depending upon learners, classrooms, context and the society and how learners perceive what is taught in the classroom (Richards & Farrell, 2005). Such understanding transforms a novice teacher into an experienced one who then performs things differently as they can anticipate the classroom problems, think of solutions and solve them through different classroom techniques (Berliner, 1987).  This understanding can be gained through different practices such as reflection, action research, collaboration and communication with fellow teachers, training, reading and writing. The following section mentions the activities that I have done to translate the theoretical aspects as mentioned above into practice.

My efforts for teacher development 

The activities and strategies that I was involved in for teacher development can be classified into the following five categories:

1.      Training and workshops: Like as any other teachers, one of the things that I have been doing over the past few years, in fact since I started my teaching career, is attending different trainings and workshops organized by different publication houses, different schools, NELTA (Nepal English Language Teachers’ Association), British Council and later English Access Micro Scholarship Project implemented by NELTA in Nepal in collaboration with US State Department. Most of these trainings were free and the rest of them were paid. I am sure  that all the trainings were not equally useful but I have  certainly learnt  something. I hardly missed any training or workshop opportunities I was offered as I was very enthusiastic to attend them since they either reinforced me with things that I had already learnt at different points of time or taught me something completely new which was largely beneficial to my class.

 2.      Conference and Seminars:  Another source of my learning was conference and seminars basically organized by NELTA. I have not missed any international conference organized by NELTA annually in February since 2007. I have attended the conferences and seminars acting different roles as a volunteer, a rapporteur and a presenter. The different roles I have acted during such occasions enabled me become a matured teacher. Plus, these events provided me with opportunities to meet national and international personalities in ELT and exchange our ideas. Such a gathering encouraged me to be more dedicated to my teaching providing me impetus to keep working to improve my English language competence.

 3.      Reading:  Needless to say, reading holds a great significance to build on one’s professional career. To be honest, I did not know what reading is before I started it myself. The first book that I have read beyond my course book was ‘Robinson Crusoe’ by Daniel Defoe, after I became a teacher. The book made me realize that reading is a fun. I kept on reading a lot of novels both in English and Nepali and now it has not only become one of my hobbies but also a craze. Later, I took to reading ELT books and journals. Reflecting my past, now I can say that there was not a single day when I was not involved in reading a book or an article. It has helped me improve my reading speed and enhance my comprehensive skills. Most importantly, reading provided me with the chances to compare my classroom practices with the prescribed ones in different books and articles I read.

 4.      Sharing sessions with colleagues:  Sharing sessions with fellow teachers and colleagues was another activity that helped me become a better teacher today. . I have always shared my ideas with fellow teachers informally at my schools and formally with and the audience during different training sessions organized by NELTA and other institutions. These sessions comprised of sharing of my good practices from handy classroom tips to English songs. Most importantly, attending these training sessions was a good opportunity for me to reflect on my own practices of teaching and carry out self assessment with the ideas whether they work in different situations.

 5.      Online teacher trainings and webinars:  Attending online courses and webinars entitled ‘Teaching English to Teens (TET)’, ‘Critical Thinking in English Language Teaching’, and ‘Teaching English Webinar’ was the latest practices to add in my list. These courses were offered by Regional English Language Office (RELO) in Nepal in collaboration with some reputed universities in the United States. I found these courses and webinars useful for it provided the participants a global platform to discuss and share personal beliefs and philosophies regarding teaching. And these e-courses provided me with opportunities to reflect on my practices and engaged in professional discussion with teachers from global arena. In addition, such courses provided me some assignments like something to read, write and discuss with others as a teacher, which kept me thinking about my course, lesson plans, curriculum and teaching.

Easier said than done. I could go on writing more about these practices and suggest others they should replicate them than I would like to share some of my personal attributes that helped me become a better teacher in the following section.

Personal attributes from a novice to better teacher

One of the attributes that helped me bring this transformation was my passion to become a better teacher. Next, I was ready to embrace new challenges and never said ‘NO’ to any opportunities, no matter how trivial it was. Thirdly, my curiosity to explore the world of teaching was another X-factor in my career. Likewise, I was always positive about my learning despite all the odds. Like any other teacher, I went through hard times.  My earning was meager and the pressure was always escalating, however I was always positive and I lived with HOPE.

Another thing that I kept me alive in this profession was my hard work. I never let my passion drift away. Hard work probably was the result of positive disposition, passion and the enjoyment I that derived from my teaching. Next, I was generous as I did not confine myself in the things that I learnt. I always had my goals set. Most of these goals were not big. I trusted on little goals such as completing the novel by the weekend, writing a haiku a day and writing a blog entry the next week. They gave me something to look forward to. Lastly, I would like to focus on the efforts to self development, which will only be successful when you are ready for. The readiness brings commitment and commitment gives the encouragement and motivation to accomplish a task, and this attribute has brought all the changes in me.

Conclusion

I would like to conclude that any teacher can transform themselves when they wish to do so. It is obvious that teachers have hard time in Nepal but this does not mean that we ignore our professional growth. I have the opinions that positive changes are possible only when we take responsibility for our growth.

REFERENCE

Berliner, D.C. (1987). Ways of thinking about students and classrooms by more and less experienced teachers. In J. Calderhead (Ed.) Exploring teachers’ thinking (pp. 60-83). London: Cassell.

Richards, J.C. & Farrell, T.S.C. (2005). Professional development for language teachers: Strategies for teacher learning. Cambridge: CUP.

About the Author:

Mr. Laudari is a visiting faculty to Kathmandu University and Ace Institute of Management. He is currently in the UK pursuing his master’s degree at Lancaster University under Hornby Scholarship.

An Unforgettable Teaching Technique

Teacher's Experience/anecdotes, Teaching Tips

Dipendra Kanu

There are so many memorable moments of teaching English language, be it at English language institute or higher secondary school or college. I’d like to share with you what I find to be one of my most effective moments of teaching, which is teaching a story in grade twelve. 

As I was planning to teach students the story ‘The Tell Tale Heart’ by Edgar Allan Poe for grade XII, I was thinking of presenting a quite new idea in a different way from previous times. But I was quite confused and worried about how to teach the story effectively since I was unable to teach the same last time as effectively as I had expected.  I had not spent a great deal of time and I had prepared the lesson in a complete rush. As a result, I could not teach satisfactorily at the first attempt. However, there was a feeling of dissatisfaction in me as the students were not able to comprehend the texts properly as per my expectation.  

In the evening while I was sitting on computer with internet thinking of the next day’s lesson, an idea of searching some teaching materials struck my mind. When I tried it on Google, I found thousands of useful links there but they were of no help for me. Then I did it on YouTube where I came across a very satisfactory video clip uploaded by The Film and TV Channel on Sept. 21, 2009 and its duration was only 10 minutes. No sooner had I downloaded the clip than I watched it for three to four times to satisfy myself and then made a plan to show it to students on my laptop.

Then I took to Googling again till I found another useful file containing the story in pdf version. I printed the story on some pages albeit the course book already contained the story. The only difference was—the pictures in the story which the book does not have. Similarly, I also found some useful links for its audio clips this and also this in mp3 format. First I downloaded them on my computer and then on my mobile phone set.

The next day, I went to the class fully prepared with the audio clips on my mobile phone and video clip on my laptop and the printed papers of the story with attractive pictures. I had given the class a short notice about some video clips on my laptop the day before. The desire to watch the video motivated all the students present in the class that day with much enthusiasm and curiosity.

First I asked them to be attentive in the class and listen to what I was going to play on my mobile set. I played it for 13 minutes and 28 seconds but some of them hardly understood the sound properly since it was the native tongue. Next, it was the time to show the video on the laptop. The students were quiet to watch the short clip. They tried their level best to understand what was going on. After they listened to and watched the clips, I explained the story to them. It was much easier for them to understand it in a quite interesting way. Finally, I presented its summary with the help of printed sheets of papers containing the pictures accompanying to the story. And I asked them to get them photocopied if they wanted.

As luck would have it, it was the last period and I took advantage of this and engaged them for more time than usual. This time my students were able to comprehend the story as expected. It took me around an hour to finish it. This was the most successful, effective and satisfying lesson that I have ever taught in my teaching career. 

Let me conclude this short blog entry with the message—if we really try to explore the resources around us, they can be useful and powerful tool for our classroom activities and teaching something with audio-visual aids will have large effect on the learners. If you are going to teach the story ‘The Tell Tale Heart’ in grade XII in your class, you can use the hyperlinked resources I have mentioned above to make your teaching effective and feel the success.

About the Author:

Mr. Kanu has been teaching English for more than a decade. Currently he is involved in Popular English Language Institute, Thakur Ram Multiple Campus, Birguj Commerce Campus and Kadambari Academy in Birgunj. Besides, he is a journalist associated with Federation of Nepalese Journalists (FNJ) Parsa Chapter and the publisher/editor of The Young Guys, English Weekly Publishing from Birgunj.

An effective teaching through a student’s eyes

Teacher's Experience/anecdotes, Teaching Tips

*Jyoti Tiwari

Teaching and learning processes involve a lot of ingredients to make imparting knowledge and skills from one person to another effective. Teacher, teaching aids, methodology, planning and strategies are some of those ingredients. In their absence, teaching and learning processes are negatively affected.  Basically, teachers’ knowledge and skills are the main things for a successful teaching learning. No doubt, availability of resources and sufficient teaching aids and materials play a significant role for effective and successful learning. Lack of such resources inevitably creates a lot of problems derailing the learning process.

In Nepal, there are many schools which lack physical infrastructure, trained teachers, and other resources required,  But this does not mean that teaching learning activities do not take place effectively. Many schools have teachers who have taken teaching profession for their passion. They have been carrying out teaching learning activities more effectively and successfully even in the absence of such resources. They have proved the fact that it is the teachers who can be the world in the classroom to their learners.

I am writing to share a story about one of my teachers who taught very effectively in spite of lack of resources. After being in the teaching profession for more than four decades, essentially his entire professional life, he is now retired. But he remains a major source of inspiration for me.

I was unaware of how important the teacher’s knowledge and skills can be while I was  in school. BUT now when I myself am teaching after completing under-graduate studies, I realize and I could not help myself thinking of Ridhhi Kant Singh Thapa, my English teacher from Trijudhha secondary school in Birgunj.  I can still remember his teaching style as quiet different from others.

Mr. Thapa was really passionate about teaching and that was perhaps the most important reason for why he was such a successful teacher. Inspired by his teaching style and classroom procedures, I would like to share with the audience some of his key teaching tips and techniques that had overwhelming impact on the learners through this short blog post.

I can still recall when he entered into the classroom, the environment changed automatically and there was active participation of students. Every student was enthusiastic about reading the text again and again.  At the end of each lesson, we all were busy in making the questions ourselves and writing their answers accordingly on our own. My teacher usually wrote some examples of making questions to help the students who were weak and his individual attention to such students increased confidence and habitué of reading and writing.

While teaching passages and stories, the way the teacher adopted was very impressive and interesting to improve reading and writing skills. Here is a series of activities he used in the classroom and they have been presented in a process flow.

First, the teacher [T] selected some reading text ‘passage’ or ‘story’ or ‘dialogue’ from the textbook. He further informed the students [Ss] which text they were going through.

 Secondly, T made Ss read the text themselves and asked to make questions as many as possible while reading the same text.

After that, T asked Ss to note down the answer of the questions they had made while reading the text. 

In the meantime, T wrote some structure and examples on the board so that Ss would feel easy to do their task. He helped Ss with difficult word meanings in order to comprehend the text clearly and write the correct answer of the questions.

Then, T asked Ss to exchange their notebooks with their partner in a pair. After they had reviewed the answers written by their friends, they had a discussion and checked the answers of their friend’s notebook in pairs correcting their mistakes.

T asked Ss the number of the questions they had made and asked them to find the student who made more questions.

T was more interested in finding out which question Ss found hard to formulate and answer. Through this activity, he came to know where they were facing problems and where they required his support. It helped him come up with proper solutions helping Ss understand the text better.  

Then, T wrote all the questions on the board asking Ss one by one from the same list which they had prepared while reading. Similarly, he approved the answers they had prepared asking them in turns.

At the end, T knew how well Ss have understood and comprehended the text and if they are found missing something or clarity required, he was always forward looking to take possible steps to fulfill the gaps. This is how he was successful in making the lesson interesting and effective.

Benefits of using the above strategy

Following are the benefits I have experienced of using the above strategy;

  • It is a learner centered method.
  • It is easy to carry out without much planning and it requires no teaching aids and materials
  • It can be very useful where schools lack resources or cannot afford teaching materials
  • It increases confidence level of learners and enhances both of reading and writing skills.
  • It is suitable for large classroom especially to make all the students engaged and check their assignments
  • It helps enabling learners to comprehend the text themselves
  • The role of teacher in the activity is facilitators
  • Increased vocabulary power of the learners
  • No use of teaching materials and other resources but teacher can use flash cards, pocket chart and pictures in order to make classroom more live and motivated
  • Even untrained teachers can easily carry out this procedure and can get control over the large class-room.

As inspired by my English language teacher whom I have lots of respect for because of his uniqueness and successful teaching career, I have shared the above mentioned teaching procedure hoping it  could be beneficial and useful to those teachers who are compelled to teach due to lack of teaching materials and resources required. 

About the Author:

Miss Tiwari is an undergraduate in ELT from Tribhuvan University and preparing for her masters’ degree. Currently, she is working as Radio Jockey for Radio Bindas in Birgunj.

NNESTs and Professional Legitimacy: Fighting the Good Fight

Critical Outlook, Miscellaneous, Scholarly Article, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

 Davi S. Reis, Ph. D.*

Identifying and exploring the sources of one’s insecurities and fears is a daunting task for most of us. Yet, when it comes to Non-Native English-Speaking Teachers (NNESTs), taking the time to deliberately reflect on the sources of our professional insecurities is a helpful step in acknowledging, negotiating, and claiming professional legitimacy as English Language Teaching (ELT) professionals. As an example of this type of reflection and with the goal of helping others in their own journey, I share a bit of my own narrative as an NNEST in TESOL, including struggles and successes[i], and offer a few reminders, strategies, and resources for challenging the native speaker (NS) myth (that is, the notion that NSs of English are better language teachers)[ii].

A PERSONAL ANECDOTE

As an ELT professional, I worked hard to become a good language teacher. I pursued a bachelor’s degree in TESOL and a master’s degree in Education (both from an accredited American university), and taught ESL in the U.S. and EFL in Brazil for a few years. Yet, I was unpleasantly surprised when a private English institute in Belo Horizonte, Brazil (my hometown and country) offered my partner a job (virtually on the spot) but denied me the chance to even interview for the EFL teaching position they were seeking to fill. Although my partner is a highly qualified mental health counselor, he had no training or experience as a (language) teacher at that point. He was explicitly told that they only hired individuals who were NSs of English (the case with  my partner). Regardless of their possible motivations for enforcing such a questionable policy (that is, buying into the NS myth themselves or, as they claimed, feeling pressured by students’ supposed demand of and preference for NSs), I found myself doubting my own hard-earned professional expertise and experience. Especially when, though largely unconsciously, I had done my very best up to that point to sound and even act like a ‘native speaker of English’ (for me, this meant emulating and imitating some of the American English accents I had been exposed to while an international student in the U.S.).

A PERVASIVE FALLACY

 

My point in sharing this personal anecdote is that, as a ‘minoritized’ group (NNESTs actually make up the vast majority of ELT professionals in the world), we often suffer the damaging effects of an oppressive ideology. Unfortunately, the message heralded by the NS myth is clear and widespread: NSs do it better! They speak English better and, so goes the logic, will be better teachers and make for better learning and happier students (or should I say customers?). Despite its harmful effects, this clear message often works its way into NNESTs’ psyche through its pervasiveness in popular culture, teaching materials, and even published research in TESOL and Applied Linguistics. To make matters worse, the attribute of ‘native speakerness’ is conflated with phenotype (i.e., ‘real’ NSs of English are white, have blond hair, blue eyes, and, preferably, either an American or a British accent). NSs are also perceived as being largely monolingual (after all, according to the NS myth logic, if one already speaks English natively, there is little need to learn another, less influential language). My goal in grossly identifying some of the discourses around the NS myth is to expose it as a fallacy with harmful consequences to NNESTs and to the TESOL and ELT fields.

USEFUL REMINDERS

The so-called ‘NNEST movement’ has been growing exponentially since the late nineties thanks to various converging efforts: the creation of the NNEST Caucus/Interest Section in TESOL, TESOL Position Statements against the employment discrimination of NNESTs, and quite a bit of research[iii]. Yet, too easily we still buy into false dichotomies and blindly adopt disempowering discourses. But if our goal is to continue to improve the work conditions for NNESTs around the world, we must tirelessly, diligently, and unwaveringly challenge the status quo by working against the NS myth. In other words, I believe we can improve our own situation and that of our field by challenging unexamined assumptions and thinking and by encouraging and helping others do the same. Because, in my experience, this is much easier said than done, I offer ten points below as useful reminders regarding NNESTs’ quest for professional legitimacy:

1)      NNESTs make up the vast majority of English teachers worldwide, so our needs and strengths as professionals cannot be easily dismissed;

2)      NNESTs can relate to and support learners in unique ways that are often unavailable to NESTs, such as understanding first-hand the language learning difficulties and empathizing with students’ struggles.

3)      We all have (at least) one native language. So NSs of English are also NNSs of many other languages (this is an issue of positionality). Similarly, we can choose to think of ourselves as bi- or multilingual rather than simply NNSs of English;

4)      What counts as ‘native’ English is highly debatable. Language use is embedded in various but specific sociocultural, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic contexts, so holding an unattainable image of a mythical variety of English is likely to do more harm than good;

5)      The term ‘near-native’ may be an improvement over the term ‘non-native’, but still positions NNESTs as second best in relation to a ‘native’ target (an often ill-defined and unattainable expectation);

6)      All of us (NSs, NNSs, and all in between) make ‘mistakes’ when using language. But rather than viewing such occurrences as ‘errors’, we can think of them as natural and even helpful processes in most types of (intercultural) communicative encounters;

7)      Communication is a two-way street. Both interlocutors should make an effort to understand each other and to clearly communicate their ideas;

8)      Students learning English today are much more likely to be using their language skills with other NNSs, rather than with NSs of English;

9)      Accent (we all have one!) is not a predictor of language proficiency. It may reveal one’s pronunciation skills, but very little about their skills as a language user in real-life contexts and situations. In addition, because one’s accent is intricately connected with one’s identity, it should be honored and respected;

10)  Though language proficiency is a worthy goal we should aspire to achieve and maintain (regardless of native speaker status), it should not be conflated with one’s ability to teach language. In other words, being able to speak a language well does not automatically translate into being able to teach it well. Becoming a teacher takes training, time, and dedication.

TAKING ACTION!

In light of the points presented above, I also offer the following suggestions for taking action and becoming an active contributor to the NNEST Movement:

– Get involved! To the extent possible, become involved with or a member of a professional organization. These organizations help members create synergy about important issues to the profession (such as discrimination against NNESTs) and move the field forward by fostering collaboration and providing a sense of direction.

– Speak up! Silence is often perceived as an indicator of acquiescence. In many contexts, both social and professional, you may be the only individual who is aware of the dangers of operating under the NS myth. Speak up when you see a job listing or advertisement seeking only ‘NSs’. When NNESTs collectively make their voices heard, such discriminatory ads are sometimes removed or revised.

– Collaborate! Identify and take advantage of ‘allies’, including NESTs who are aware of the NS myth and work against it. NEST allies can help clear up many of the misconceptions we carry unknowingly about being a native English speaker (e.g., the U.S. is a very large country with many Englishes spoken throughout, rather than the land of a mythical, pure ‘American English’ as it is often portrayed).

REACHING OUT!

Though strong in numbers, NNESTs often feel isolated, powerless, and ‘minoritized’ in light of persistent native speakerism. But by reaching out to others and connecting to various resources, NNESTs can gain the knowledge, skills, and support they need to help collectively combat and overcome the NS myth. Here is a list of several groups, efforts, and resources you may want to check out, join, and contribute to:

NNEST Interest Section: Although you must be a member of TESOL International Association in order to become a member of one of its interest sections, doing so can open up a number of resources, such as the NNEST Newsletter and the NNEST-IS Listserv, where NNESTs from all over the globe can connect, learn, and challenge one another to improve our professional lives. Even if you are not a member of TESOL, you can find resources on the NNEST-IS website, such as a brief history of the NNEST movement and a list of resources and links.

 

NNEST Interest Section Blog: This forum was created in 2011 as a venue for focused discussions on issues relevant to NNESTs. Along with the NNEST Listserv, it provides a space where NNESTs and allies can connect, share, and ‘synergize’. But this synergy will not happen without the inclusion of various voices and experiences, including yours! So next time you have a question or comment related to NNESTs, consider sharing it with like-minded colleagues via this forum.

NNEST of the Month Blog: Featuring a vast collection of almost 100 interviews and tackling a range of NNEST-related issues, this blog welcomes contributions by practitioners, graduate students, researchers, scholars, and anyone who is interested in issues related to NNESTs and professional legitimacy. As one of the members of this blog’s editorial team, I can attest to the high professional development value of the voices and perspectives represented in the contributions from NNESTs around the world.

NNEST Facebook Group: Currently with over 400 members, the NNEST Facebook group is open to all NNESTs and friends of NNESTs. It provides yet another forum where NNESTs can share their concerns, struggles, successes, and resources. One of the main advantages of this group is the immediacy of posting and receiving responses or feedback. As with all things Facebook, it is always being updated.

Equity Advocates – Working toward Professional Equity in TESOL: With over 120 members, this Facebook group invites members to share “knowledge and strategies” for fighting “professional inequity in the field of TESOL”. So when you witness discriminatory practices or feel victimized yourself, try reaching out to this group. As a professional group, NNESTs can make a much bigger difference by joining forces and acting collectively, rather than in isolation.

TESOL Position Statements: Several position statements put forth by TESOL International Association are relevant to NNESTs, but a pivotal one is the Position Statement Against Discrimination of Nonnative  Speakers of English in the Field of TESOL (March 2006) . Although these position statements are not policies, they influence policy, so it is important that we be aware of such statements and spread the word.

Finally, five volumes focusing on the professional lives of NNESTs are especially helpful (see full references below; with the exception of Braine, 2010, all are edited collections): Braine (1999), Kamhi-Stein (2004), Llurda (2005), Mahboob (2010). In addition to helping coalesce the NNEST Movement, these titles cover a range of relevant issues for NNESTs and provide much food for thought.

In conclusion, there are ways to resist native speakerism and the discrimination we often experience. With every interaction, we can help erode the NS myth and strengthen the NNEST movement. It will not happen overnight, but the better NNESTs are able to articulate why they deserve to be treated as qualified ELT professionals in TESOL, the better chances we have of making a real difference. So next time someone implies that NSs make better language teachers, caringly give them some food for thought. They will be better for it, and so will we.

References:

Braine, G., Ed. (1999). Non-native educators in English language teaching. London, Lawrence Earlbum.

Braine, G. (2010). Nonnative speaker English teachers: Research, pedagogy, and professional growth. New York, Routledge.

Kamhi-Stein, L. D. (Ed.). (2004). Learning and teaching from experience: Perspectives on Nonnative English-speaking professionals. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Llurda, E. (Ed.). (2005). Non-native language teachers: Perceptions, challenges, and contributions to the profession. New York: Springer.

Mahboob, A., Ed. (2010). The NNEST Lens: Non Native English Speakers in TESOL. Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Moussu, L. and E. Llurda (2008). Non-native English-speaking English language teachers: History and research. Language Teaching 41(3), 315–348.

[i] If you’d like to know more about my own experiences and views as an NNEST, you can read about them here.

[ii] To be sure, I have many friends and colleagues who are native speakers of English and believe that they, too, can make fine ESOL teachers with proper education and training.

[iii] For a helpful state-of-the-art article on NNEST issues, see Moussu and Llurda (2008).

*Davi S. Reis is an assistant professor in the School of Education at Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh, PA. He teaches courses on cultural and linguistic diversity to pre- and in-service teachers and to graduate students in the master’s program in ESL. His scholarly interests include NNEST Studies and Teacher Education.

Action Research for EFL Teacher’s Professional Development

Miscellaneous, Teacher Training, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

Manita Karki

M.Phil. in ELE

Kathmandu University

School of Education

In recent years, action research has become increasingly popular as a form of professional development for teachers. The reason is, action research helps teachers to “look behind” what they did and  provides space for teachers to correct their past mistakes and analyze needs of the students. Such work significantly helps teachers to grow as professional teachers. So doing action research is one way to solve the faced problems while teaching and to develop teachers’ professional carrier too.

For me the category “Action Research” is not new but the meaning has  changed a little bit recently.  Action Research usually refers to “the researcher doing their research in the field” . Before taking the course “Action Research and Teacher Development,” I thought action research meant  going to the  field, observing the situation and finding out the real problem among the students regarding their study (learning) and then trying to solve those problems by applying different teaching-learning techniques, methods, and strategies. But now I have realized that after completing the process, the researchers should continually look for other difficulties among the same or different level of students. What I used to think was not completely wrong but that was  just the narrow sense of my understanding , which I noticed only after completing course on “Action Research and Teacher Development.”

Action research mainly consists of self reflection as its central tenet. McNiff (2002) opines that “Action Research is a term which refers to a practical way of looking at own work to check that it is as one would like it to be or not.” Because action research is done by self, the practitioner, it is often referred to as practitioner based research and because it involves thinking about owns work, it can also be called a form of self reflective practice. “In traditional forms of research/empirical research, researchers do research on other people but now they do research on themselves” (McNiff, 2002).

Here with the help of McNiff’s idea I can say that action research is mainly based on self-enquiry: conducting research by the self about the self. For example “YOU” as a practitioner can think about  your own life and work and this involves you asking yourself why the way you work is different?, why you are the way that you are? In this way you can translate your research into practice. However,  systematic investigation into your own behavior and the reasons for that behavior is quite essential. Achieving a  better understanding of yourself can further help you to grow personally and professionally.

Action research is an open ended  research and does not begin with some sort of fixed hypothesis because researchers generate knowledge while conducting research  and they keep on thinking and (re)designing what to do next. “The research process is the developmental process of following through the idea, seeing how it goes and continually checking whether it is in line with what you wish to happen” (Norton; 2009). What we can say then is that action research is a process of a form of self evaluation.

Therefore, importance of  applying it in teaching and learning field can be immense. If we  continuously involve  in  thinking about the tasks we do, in checking what went right and what went wrong and keep ourselves busy with reflection, we will be able to see  areas of weaknesses and areas of our strengths.  In the words of Smith and Gillespie (2007), in addition to “knowing what” and “knowing how” teachers must also be competent in “knowing why” and “knowing when”. The capacity to reflect and then develop a culture of questioning (ones practice) helps a teacher to be professionally competent and practically good at teaching because it furnishes positive impact on how and what students learn, and motivates to keep learning further.

So from my own experience now I can say that doing action research is very useful for the teachers to develop his/her teaching style because when the teachers involve in doing action research while teaching then they can look behind what, how, when and why they teach and what they are missing. With the help of the knowledge of weaknesses in their teaching and of the level of students, they can develop their own best pedagogies. In this way doing action research helps  teachers to be a professionals and enhance their teaching learning activities. Because of these reasons I can say that “Action Research plays vital role in teacher’s professional development”.

References

McNiff, J. (2002). Action research for professional development: Concise advice for new action researchers.

http://edavula.co.cc/web_documents/ar_jean_mcniff_-_per_studentet_e_ma.pdf

Norton S. L. (2009). Action Research in Teaching and Learning: A practical guide to conducting pedagogical research in universities. London: Routledge.

Smith, C. & Gillespie, M. (2007). Research on professional development and teacher change: Implications for adult basic education.

http://www.ed.gov/teachers/how/tools/initiative/factsheet.pdf.