Category Archives: Critical Outlook

Translanguaging to teach English in Nepal

Critical Outlook, Critical Pedagogy, English as a Global Language, Global thought, Miscellaneous, Scholarly Article, Teacher Training

Ofelia García*

 

Introduction

            English language teaching throughout the world has suffered from a monoglossic bias; that is, the view that English could only be taught in isolation and separated from the languages spoken by students. This was, of course, the pedagogical tradition that emerged from the West, and especially from North American and British scholars in particular, who saw the teaching of the English language as a monolingual imperialist enterprise. But in the 21st century, English teaching has gone global, no longer in the hands of colonial masters, but taught throughout the world by many who share language and culture with students. And yet, our pedagogies have remained as monolingual as ever, robbing students of opportunities to use their home languages to make sense of the complex use of English that is demanded in the world today.

            I argue here that we need to adopt a translanguaging lens, a lens which allows us to think about language, bilingualism and learning from the perspective of emergent bilingual students themselves. I start by considering the concept of translanguaging.  Using the translanguaging lens, I then provide counterarguments to some of the constructions about English language speakers, English language acquisition and learning, bilingualism, and language education that have been responsible for much failure in the teaching of English to students throughout the world.

Translanguaging

The term translanguaging was coined in Welsh (trawsieithu) by Cen Williams. In its original use, it referred to a pedagogical practice where students are asked to alternate languages for receptive or productive use; for example, students might be asked to read in English and write in Welsh and vice-versa. Since then, the term has been extended by many scholars (e.g. Blackledge & Creese 2010, Canagarajah 2011, García 2009; García & Sylvan 2011, Hornberger & Link 2012). I have used the term to refer to the flexible use of linguistic resources by bilinguals in order to make sense of their worlds, and I have applied it mostly to classrooms because of its potential in liberating the voices of language minoritized students.

I use translanguaging here to refer not to the use of two separate languages or even the shift of one language or code to the other (for simple Questions and Answers on translanguaging for educators see my introduction to Celic and Seltzer, 2012). Rather, translanguaging is rooted on the principle that emergent bilingual students select language features from a repertoire and “soft assemble” their language practices in ways that fit their communicative situations. Translanguaging in education can be defined as a process by which students and teachers engage in complex discursive practices that include ALL the language practices of students in order to develop new language practices and sustain old ones, communicate and appropriate knowledge, and give voice to new sociopolitical realities by interrogating linguistic inequality. In today’s globalized world what is needed is the ability to engage in fluid language practices and to soft-assemble features that can “travel” across geographic spaces so as to enable us to participate fully as global citizens.

Counter-narratives about English, its speakers, learning English, bilingualism, and teaching English

            The education of emergent bilinguals suffers from five major misconstructions about English, its speakers, the learning of English, bilingualism, and the teaching of English that can be counter-narrated through a translanguaging lens as follows:

  1. English is not a system of structures.
  2. “Native” English speakers are neither the norm nor objective fact.
  3. Learning English is not linear.
  4. Bilinguals are not simply speakers of a first and a second language.
  5. The teaching of English cannot be enacted in total separation from other language practices.

I will develop these counter-narratives to deconstruct some of the myths with which we have been operating in educating emergent bilinguals.

English is not a system of structures

English forms and meaning are not auto-sufficient, but arise in and through social practice, as linguistic practices get used repeatedly in local contexts for meaning-making. Language is a series of social practices and actions that are embedded in a web of social relations and that orient and manipulate social domains of interactions.  Pennycook (2010: 9) explains:

A focus on language practices moves the focus from language as an autonomous system that preexists its use, and competence as an internal capacity that accounts for language production, towards an understanding of language as a product of the embodied social practices that bring it about (my italics).

English is not a system of language structures; rather, languaging through what is called English is practicing a new way of being in the world.  This understanding of what English is and is not has enormous implications for our conceptualization of English speakers, the next counter-narrative that I propose.

“Native” English speakers are neither the norm nor objective fact

It is important to recognize that monolinguals are not the norm in the world. Although estimates are difficult to make, well over half of the world’s population is bilingual or monolingual. In the second language acquisition literature, the “native” speaker is always held as the ideal. But the notion of who is a “native” speaker has been questioned in the fluidity of today’s global world. Often “native” has become indexical of being white. The ideology of the existence of a monolithic “native” English creates an order of indexicality (Blommaert, 2010) that favors the language practices of white prestigious monolingual speakers. Thus, the other “native” practices are reduced to being “corrupted,” “stigmatized,” “deficient,” “needing remediation.” As many have argued, there is no “native English standard.” Being a “native English speaker” is not simply being monolingual or speaking a certain way. At the same time, learning English does not happen in a vacuum, and is not linear. This is the misconstruction addressed by the counter-narrative in the next section.

Learning English does not proceed from scratch, is not linear

The learning of English has often focused on an end point, the ultimate attainment of a “native English standard.”  When students haven’t achieved this, they are said to have a “fossilized interlanguage”; that is, their language system is said to be permanently deficient. Rarely has the learning of English paid attention to the resources students bring and to the dynamic process through which language practices emerge. But students are much more than just blank slates that are subsequently filled with English structures. They bring to classrooms knowledge, imagination, and sophisticated language practices. In addition, they do not forget what they know in order to take up English. These students are emergent bilinguals with full capacities. Their new language practices do not surface from scratch, but emerge in interrelationship with old language practices.

If the English language is not, as we have seen, simply a system of structures, then it follows that it is not possible just to add up structures in linear fashion in order to learn. Instead, English learning emerges as a flexible continuum, as students take up practices in interrelationship with others. The result is never an end point at which students “have” English. Rather, emergent bilinguals “do” language, languaging in ways that include practices identified as “English” in order to negotiate communicative situations and meet academic expectations. Emergent bilinguals are not simply in a stage of “incomplete acquisition.” The next section questions the misconstructions about bilingualism held by schools that have served to alienate the complex language practices of emergent bilingual students from English learning and provides an alternative narrative.

Bilinguals are not simply speakers of a first and a second language

Bilingualism in schools is often understood as being additive. Additive bilingualism refers to the idea that a “second language” can be added to a “first language,” resulting in a person who is a balanced bilingual. The views about languaging that I have been developing here lead us to reject the idea of “first” and “second” language, as well as balanced bilingualism.

Although most bilinguals may be able to identify which language they learned “first” and which language they learned “second,” the assignment of a “first” and “second” language to bilinguals is as much a theoretical impossibility as is the concept of being a balanced bilingual.  New language practices emerge in interrelationship with old ones, and these language practices are always dynamically enacted.

I have argued that bilingualism can be better seen as dynamic.  In contrasting dynamic bilingualism to an additive perspective, I go beyond simply the perspective of language systems and refer to the multiple and complex way in which the language practices of bilinguals interact and form a complex language repertoire. I have used the image of a banyan tree to suggest that language practices emerge and develop in intertwined ways.

As bilingualism emerges, the identification of language practices belonging to one or another “language” has to be questioned. Bilinguals translanguage, disrupting conventional ideas of what languages are or of the languages that bilinguals have. Bilinguals are clearly not two monolinguals in one. They use their complex language repertoire to fulfill the communicative needs that emerge from the different landscapes and speakers through which they shuttle back and forth. I have used the image of the All Terrain Vehicle to suggest that bilinguals use their complex language practices selectively as they adapt to the ridges and craters of communication in different languagescapes.

Traditionally, bilingual use has been understood as following a diglossic compartmentalization, with one language spoken at home, another one in school. But the translanguaging lens we have adopted makes clear that the language practices of bilinguals are transglossic, and that their full repertoire of practices is used in homes, and often “invisibly” in schools. The structures of language and education programs and their pedagogies have to respond to greater fluidity. This is the misconstruction addressed in the next counter-narrative.

The teaching of English cannot be enacted in total separation from other language practices

Traditionally, the teaching of English has taken place in English only. But as the complex translanguaging practices of bilinguals are made more evident, structures and pedagogies that separate languages artificially have to be abandoned. The language separation approach that is often used has to be abandoned.

All teachers must adopt translanguaging strategies in teaching.  It would be important for English teachers to leverage the children’s entire language repertoire in making meaning and to develop the children’s metacognition and sense of self-regulation as they translanguage.

Oral discussions that include all students’ language practices enable their class participation, deep and reflexive thinking, and rigorous cognitive engagement with texts. The reading of difficult text is facilitated when students can access background material about the content of the text in other languages. Engagement with writing English texts is also facilitated when students can discuss, read and write first drafts that may include other language practices besides those that are in English.  Translanguaging is an important tool.

A translanguaging lens enables us to understand the teaching of English to emergent bilinguals in new ways. Focusing on translanguaging practices enables us to shed notions of system structures that can be linearly taught, of the proper usage of natives, of the value of monolingualism, of bilingualism as simply double monolingualism, of the teaching of English without considering the entire language and semiotic repertoire of students.

References

Blackledge, A. and Creese, A. (2010) .Multilingualism. London: Continuum.

Blommaert, J. (2010). The Sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Canagarajah, A.S. (2011). Codemeshing in academic writing: Identifying teachable strategies of translanguaging. The Modern Language Journal 95(iii), 401-417.

Celic, C. and Seltzer, K. (2012). Translanguaging: A CUNY-NYSIEB Guide for Educators. New York: CUNY-NYSIEB. Online document: http://www.nysieb.ws.gc.cuny.edu/publicationsresources/

García, O. (2009). Bilingual education in the 21st Century: A Global perspective. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley/Blackwell.

García, O. and Sylvan, C. (2011). Pedagogies and practices in multilingual classrooms: Singularities in Pluralities. Modern Language Journal 95(iii), 385-400.

Hornberger, N. and H. Link. (2012). Translanguaging and transnational literacies in multilingual classrooms: A bilingual lens. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 15(3): 261-278.

Pennycook, A. (2010). Language as a local practice. London and New York: Routledge.

*Ofelia García is Professor in the Ph.D. program of Urban Education and of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.   She has published many book chapters, articles, and books. She is the Associate General Editor of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language.

What should one do in a language classroom?

Critical Outlook, Critical Pedagogy, Miscellaneous, Teacher Training, Teaching Tips

Rama Kant Agnihotri*

What students and teachers should do in a language classroom is best left to them. Language teaching is so complex and so contextually rooted that except for very general guidelines, nothing may really help in the actual task. What language professionals can at best do is to make available in as accessible a manner as possible content, form and format (oral, printed, digital etc.) material about the potential of the learner, aspects of nature, structure, acquisition and change of language, features of language variation, nature of learning processes, materials, methods and evaluation procedures. In this short article, I focus only on one issue that may be of some use to language teachers: How languages of learners in a given classroom is not an obstacle in the trajectory of language learning; it is in fact a resource not only in language teaching but also in enhancing cognitive growth and social tolerance.

Most teachers and several language professionals believe that languages of students are an obstacle in the process of learning another language. Many actually believe that they cause major interference and therefore students should not even be allowed to use their languages in the class and the school. The typical paradigm in which they work could be defined as ‘a class, a teacher, a text and a language’. Nothing if you reflect for a moment could be further from the truth. All classes are by default multilingual. Examine your own and examine your own language profile and that of your friends. Secondly, languages student bring with them are and can be used as a resource rather than dismissed as an obstacle. Languages always flourish in each other’s company; they suffocate in prisons of isolation and purity. English today is rich because it keeps its doors open; so were Sanskrit and Hindi till they started closing their doors. Thirdly, it is not at all difficult for all teachers and students to appreciate that all languages are equally rule governed and rich. This is something which is so effortlessly achieved if the strengths of a multilingual class are recognized. For example, all languages will have some technique to indicate the relationship between the subject and the verbal elements. That some languages may look more powerful than others is NOT a linguistic matter but one of history, sociology and politics and these aspects can also be easily demonstrated if the teachers are open to such a discourse. Languages like Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Persian etc. were once very powerful; the power of English is only a few decades old and there is no reason to believe that it would stay like that. If you leave out china, Russia, Africa, India etc., the English speaking world is actually very small.

In any case, we do need to think why theories of interference hold such power and what’s wrong with them. These theories hold power because they are the most convenient answers to what is going on and they stop any deeper inquiry into the issues involved. It is a cosy corner that looks very attractive to a teacher who breathes some relief in saying: They will never learn; their languages always come in the way. What teachers don’t realize is that errors are necessary stages in the process of learning and what is being dismissed as interference may actually be a part of the UG driven way of acquiring a language or a milestone in the process of learning. Let’s consider some typical examples.

Let’s start with syntax. The fact of the matter is that there is actually no major difference between the basic syntactic structure of say Indian English and British or American English. All children, including those from the so-called native English communities, will make such errors as ‘he go to school’; the structural pressure of English syntax dictates that it should be so. Imagine everybody including ‘I, we, you, you plural, they’ ‘go’, why should poor ‘he, she, it’ ‘goes’!!! But if we stop comparing the behaviour of school or undergraduate learners with fluent speakers of ‘standard’ English, we will realize that all speakers of English, whether they acquire it as L 1 or L 2, learn to say ‘goes’ in due course. Take another oft quoted example of the invariant tag-question. When many speakers of the Asian subcontinent use ‘isn’t it’ with all kinds of statements, it is often pointed out as a major interference from say Hindi ‘hai na’ etc. Nobody takes the trouble of finding out how many ‘native’ varieties of English do the same. Some varieties of Canadian English certainly do it with a different invariant tag. Two points may be noted here. It may be a part of the standard commonly used Indian English and there is nothing wrong with this fairly understandable overgeneralization. In fact, in the speech of the teachers and the community, there may be no exposure to the variable tag question. Secondly, in the case of fluent users of Indian English, there may be many who actually use the variable tag question. What you eventually accept as a standard ‘correct’ usage is a matter that is located in a spatial, temporal, historical and sociological space.

Consider morphology. It is well attested that all children irrespective of whether they learn English as L 1 or L 2, go through a stage of using first ‘go, went, gone’ (as unrelated items) and then ‘go, goed, goed’ (as morphologically demanded items) and finally acquiring the exception ‘go, went, gone’. Imagine that all learners go through this stage and the set of irregular English verbs is rather large including such commonly used verbs as ‘come, cut, dig, do, eat, get, give, make…’ etc. Word formation strategies have nothing to do with interference. Yes, languages frequently borrow from each other, particularly cultural items. There is nothing you can do about it. English simply adds an additional appendix to its dictionary every year; speakers of course always move ahead of the dictionary.

Take phonology. Do all the so-called native speakers of English speak the same way? Will any one of you, unless she belongs to north of England, claim to understand a word of Yorkshire English? Or do you all understand rural Texan English? I don’t. I don’t even understand my grand-daughter studying in Malone in New York State. She finds it equally difficult to understand my Indian accent. Phonology is a marker of group identity and if you are really interested it will not come into your way after a while. But if you are already beyond 15-16 years of age, you will notice that your jaw is set and you may not get the ‘English English’ inter-dental fricatives, or the aspirated alveolar stops or the distinction between /v/ and /w/, which is really nothing to write home about unless you want a job at the BBC etc. Every variety has a right to its distinct identity.

So if languages of learners are not in our way, why do we make such a miserable mess of language teaching? At most places I know of, most learners don’t even manage to master the basic skills of reading comprehension and writing coherently. We do need to examine the language profile of our class. Every child brings a different linguistic and cultural resource to the class and these can indeed be sensitively assimilated into the teaching-learning process. The first requirement is of course that the teacher needs to walk out of the position of being the fountainhead of all knowledge and have faith in the ability of children to use their resources creatively. In actual classroom transactions it implies that the time taken by individual learners and their interactions in peer group would be much more than normally consumed by the teacher.

We today know that multilinguality is a default human situation and is constitutive of being human. Every classroom by default is inherently multilingual. Further, in a variety of ways, recent research has established how this multilinguality can be used not only as a resource but also as a teaching strategy and a goal. It correlates positively with language proficiency, cognitive growth, scholastic achievement, divergent thinking and social tolerance. It is also now well-established that levels of language proficiency enhance significantly with metalinguistic awareness which would tend to grow if we allow children to reflect on their languages.

What kind of strategies would be most useful in such situations? In fact, there is no limit and also no defining ‘models’. Freedom from the bondage of script is the first step. With very small effort on the part of learners and teachers, it becomes evident that all languages can be written in the same script, with some modifications. What we do need to understand is that all children and all their languages need to  be involved and the teachers need to create situations in which children can work in groups collecting data from their languages, classifying it into different categories, examine the relationships among different parts and arrive at conclusions and hypotheses that would account for their data. Consider for example, the making of nouns from adjectives in English. Adjectives like ‘dark, lazy, rough, kind, small, rich, soft etc’ can be turned into nouns by adding ‘-ness’. However, this is not where teachers would start; they would instead start by talking informally about adjectives and nouns for a few minutes. Then leave it to groups of children who share some languages to make list of adjectives and related nouns in different languages available in the class. Hindi may not have any such strategy; but it may have some others. Or take the case of making plurals. With very limited guidance children will themselves work out the problems of saying that the plural in English is made not by adding ‘-s, -es or –ies’; once it is explained to them that they should focus on the sounds with which a plural ends, they work out that significance of ‘-s, -z and –iz’ in making plural, themselves pointing that the plural of say ‘dog and baby’ is made by adding the same sound. Another group will come up with a strategy for making plurals in Hindi which has not one but 3 plurals for each noun e.g. in the case of laRkaa ‘boy’, we have ‘laRke, laRkoN and laRko’, being the nominative, oblique and vocative plurals respectively. Consider the case of making ‘negatives’ in different languages. It is possible that children would themselves (and so would the teacher) discover that negatives in all languages are made by putting the negative element close to the verb of the main clause and if a rule is discovered in this way, it is rather unlikely that children would make mistakes in speaking or writing negative sentences. Take the case of translation. Nothing enhances language proficiency more than peer-group attempts at translation, not the traditional type of ‘literally and accurately translating from language X to language Y’. A small poem for example could be taken from any language. Notice that the power structures in the classroom at once start getting democratised; teacher is at the back of the classroom listening like others to a poem in an unknown language which is then written and explained by children in the script they are already using. The poem is then translated into several languages in small groups. Stories, plays, cultural events, social issues etc. could also be treated in a similar way. The kind of phonological, syntactic, semantic and semiotic issues such an exercise raises is overwhelming. The idea is to go through the process, not to arrive at a final, perfect translation.

*Rama Kant Agnihotri, D.Phil. (York), retired as Professor and Head, Department of Linguistics, University of Delhi. He is interested in and has taught and written extensively about Applied Linguistics, Morphology, Sociolinguistics and Research Methods for several years. He has lectured in Germany, UK, USA, Canada, Yemen, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan, among other countries. He has also been working with several NGOs across India in the area of elementary school education. He co-edits, with A. L. Khanna, the Sage series on Applied Linguistics. He was Chair of the NCERT Focus Group on The Teaching of Indian Languages during NCF 2005.

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.

Hindu educational ethos and practices as a possible source for local pedagogy

Critical Outlook, Global thought, Miscellaneous

Bal Krishna Sharma*

The term ‘local’ is problematic for several reasons since there is no clear boundary between local and non-local (or global) knowledge and pedagogies. We need to be careful when making a distinction between local and global knowledge and practices because what we say is local is not untouched by another form of culture or knowledge. Nor is it waiting to be discovered. In addition, what we say is global is often another, albeit more dominant, form of some local culture. Keep in mind that the so called global knowledge is somebody’s local knowledge. In the context of Nepal, we have several local traditions although they have undergone changes according to time and space. We have religious traditions as well as oral literacy traditions in Nepal. Taking the case of Hindiuism as a philosophy and practice of education, I want to make two points in this essay with regard to local pedagogies (1) Hinduism urges us to understand the meaning of education and pedagogy in a different way compared to many educational practices, (2) Review of Hindu educational ethos shows that some of what have been regarded as the standard practices and innovations in language pedagogy in the Western world today, especially in Anglo-American educational contexts, were in existence in the traditional Hindu educational ethos found in the Vedic and Upanishadic periods in the South Asian sub-continent.

When we make a historical overview of Hindu educational ideals and practices in the Indian subcontinent, we take account of educational thoughts manifested in different scriptures and variety of ways in learning and teaching them. Ancient Hindu literature is divided into two elements: shruti and smriti. Shruti, meaning ‘listening’ or ‘hearing’, consists of sacred texts and scripts like the Vedas and the Upanishads that are traditionally understood as divine revelation. They are principally oral texts and can best be transmitted as such. Smritis, which means ‘that are remembered’, are sacred writings that originated from human authors and comprise codes of conduct for human life. Examples include the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the Manusmriti, etc.

Hinduism conceives the entire course of human life as consisting of four Ashramas or successive stages of life though only a small number of males would pass through all the phases. The stage of studentship is called Brahmacharya Ashrama and it was spent in the Vedic schools. The second stage as Grihasthas or householders began when people entered family life. The third state of Vanaprasthan started when they left homes for the forest to become hermits. And in the final stage of Sanyasashram, they become homeless wanderers with all earthly ties broken. The chief aim of education was to achieve emancipation or liberation by detaching oneself from worldly matters and activities. Emancipation was achieved through sravana, manana and nididhyasana. Sarvana means listening to the words or texts from the teacher or Guru; manana means deliberation or reflection on the topic and nididhyasana means meditation through which truth is to be realized. The ultimate goal of education in Hindu philosophy is to achieve revelation or Brahman.

Learning in Hinduism

Hinduism argues that true empowerment emerges through an understanding of the sources of knowledge, not just its components, which in turn leads to unity with the universe. Thus, Hindu view of learning does not limit itself in learning of facts and figures, but emphasizes in developing wisdom by forming a connection between mind, body and spirit. This is different from dominant Western view of learning which seeks cause-and-effect relationships with the worldly phenomena and believes in learning components as part of a whole.

When we survey learning from more formal and pedagogical perspective, it requires us to uncover methods of learning about the outer world by studying scriptures under the supervision of gurus.  Memorization constituted one of the major techniques of learning. This has recently received scholarly attention. This form of learning by memorization seemingly has parallels with behaviorist principles of repetition, practice, memorization and habit formation. However, I argue that we need to go beyond such accounts at least for two reasons. First, this practice has to be interpreted within the socio-historical context of the region. Given the oral tradition of literacy and knowledge-making, memorization and rote learning could enhance the archiving of knowledge in the form of songs, chants or poems which would be available for the future generations. No wonder these elements were partly reflected in the educational practices of that time. Second, it is to be noted that learning by heart without understanding the meaning of Vedic hymns, and without reflection was condemned. This kind of learning is not based on rote learning, but much deeper comprehension involving reflection, questioning and exercising judgments. Under the modern system, the three processes of teaching, learning and evaluation seem to be treated as working almost independently in the context of South Asia, and hardly any integration or synchronization exists among them. In ancient times, all three processes were integrated well.

Methods of Teaching

The Gurukul system of education in ancient Indian sub-continent provides us insights on methods of teaching during that time and helps us make comparisons with popular pedagogical models today. The Upanayana ceremony, meaning taking charge of a student, was considered as the foundational state in starting the Gurukul or the Vedic education. Students would live with their guru as members of a single family. The system of teaching was communal though there were ample occasions when the teacher explained something to the individual pupils. In addition to teacher-fronted, product-oriented guru-shisya system, teaching was substantially based on practice-based apprenticeship system. Students engaged in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor. As the pupils interacted regularly, more experienced members helped the new members acquire the community norms and the Vedic educational ethos through their mutual engagement in learning activities. The learning system was notably non-formal, blurring the differences between philosophical and technical knowledge, facts and skills, and knowledge and life. This process was more inductive and process-oriented, and teaching methods were diverse depending on learner, context and subject matter.

Teachers exercised total autonomy in curriculum and organization in Gurukuls. Pupils also enjoyed some degree of autonomy in choosing institutions or teachers; they, for example, could move from one Gurukul to another for better knowledge. Sometimes even the teacher could advise the students to go to another teacher to satisfy their queries. Also the Gurukul system did not rule out the possibility of self-study and learning.

Methods of debate, discussion, speculation and argument were salient features of education in the Gurukul system of education.  Discussions and debates would take the form of intellectual challenges between the guru and the students or among the students themselves. Typical of present day symposiums, many learned persons from far off places used to assemble and participate in the debates and discussions that regularly took place at the Vedic education centers. Such use of discussion as a method of teaching later led to the development of logic called Vakovakyam or Tarkashastra or the science of disputation. Such a tradition of arguments can be substantially exemplified from dialogues between Krishna and Arjuna in the Bhagavat Gita – a small section of the epic the Mahabharata. This method of argument shares some similarities to the art of Socratic dialogs in ancient Greek tradition. Based on the idea of promoting democratic values and fostering student-centered learning, such a discussion-based teaching is a major pedagogic technique today, supposedly originated from the Western philosophical traditions.

 Student-teacher Relationships

In ancient Hindu system of education, education was highly individualized. There would be only few selected students enrolled, and teachers knew individual students very closely. Teachers and students were vegetarian and lived a simple life close to nature. Teachers loved students as if they were their own children, and were fully aware what had been learned by each student including areas of weakness. In fact, the Vedic students are regarded as twice-born: first birth from their mother and second from their guru at the start of the Vedic education. A teacher was to possess the highest moral and spiritual qualifications and to be well versed in the sacred lore and dwelling in the Brahman or the Brahmanishtha. Similar was true in higher educational institutions.

This may seem to suggest a stereotypical ‘traditional’ ‘hierarchical’ teacher-student relationship and a supposedly ‘authoritarian’ role of the teacher in Vedic education practices. Of course, at any period, educational practitioners in South Asia as in any other location may misuse a teacher’s power for non-pedagogical purposes. However, the topic of student-teacher relationships has to be understood and interpreted with reference to the socio-historical context of pedagogical practices of that time, in contrast to their use in pedagogies of modern times. Traditional Hindu education system has given more responsibility to teachers beyond classroom teaching. Reverence has been given to the teachers for their position in social and moral hierarchy. Teachers while clearly occupying such a higher social status were expected to mutually participate with students in the classroom, on the playgrounds, and in activities related to the management of the school. Of course, it cannot be said that the teacher and the students enjoyed an equal relationship. However, it should be noted that the teaching and relationship was not solely controlled by the teacher and the students could initiate questions and topics for discussion and debate.

Good teachers were considered to be role models in their virtues and morality, live exemplary lives and change human society toward wellbeing. The literal translation of the Sanskrit word ‘guru’ as ‘teacher’ carries with it deep reverence for the teacher. Reverence is different from respect: ‘Reverence calls for respect only when respect is really the right attitude’.  In contexts where problems of classroom management and student discipline frequently cause ‘professional vulnerability’ of the teachers, requiring sometimes to protect themselves from personal dangers in professional lives, reverence can be a strong tool for creating conducive teaching environment. If students lack certain level of obedience to the authority in classroom, there is a risk that teaching and learning become counterproductive.

Ancient Hindu educational practices did not ignore agency and voice of the students. As mentioned in the Dharmasutra, teacher should not restrain the students for his own advantage in such a way that hinders their studies. Teachers were not given power to refuse instruction to students unless they found a defect in them. In addition, teachers did not appear to have encouraged blind obedience from the pupils. Dharmasutra clearly mentions that students can confidentially draw the attention of the teacher to any transgression of religious injunctions that he may commit deliberately or inadvertently. Students can forcibly restrain the teacher from wrong-doing either by themselves or with the help of their parents. The teacher not imparting knowledge did not indeed deserve the designation of teacher. Although teachers enjoyed certain degree of authority and reverence, they did not compromise learning potential and agency of the students.

Final Words

Presenting the survey in three themes – teaching, learning, and student-teacher relationships – I have presented arguments and historical evidence to show that some supposedly Western educational standards and practices occupied important space in ancient Hindu educational traditions. This observation resembles made by some researchers who argue that that Western knowledge and educational practices are relatively recent phenomena first spread to other parts of the world through colonization and through globalization of culture, education, and economy. Within the seemingly dominant practices of teacher-frontedness, learning by heart, transmission model of education in Hindu ethos of learning and teaching, there indeed were agendas and practices of more student-centered, practice-based, approaches and methods that fostered learning, teaching and autonomy. Revisiting our own educational histories and ancient ethos, we can compare and recontextualize dominant pedagogies in local contexts.

Suggested Readings

Canagarajah, A. 2005. Reconstructing local knowledge, reconfiguring language studies. Reclaiming the local in language policy and practice, ed. by A. S. Canagarajah, 3-24. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Crookes, G. 2009. Values, philosophies, and beliefs in TESOL: Making a statement. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Dharampal, 1983. The beautiful tree: Indigenous Indian education in the eighteenth century. New Delhi: Biblia Impex Private Limited.

Jonston, B. and Varghese, M. 2007. Evangelical Christians and English language teaching. TESOL Quarterly 41. 5-31.

Kumaravadivelu, B. 2003. Problematizing cultural stereotypes in TESOL. TESOL Quarterly 37. 709-719.

Merriam, S. B. and Kim, Y. S. 2008. Non-Western perspectives on learning and knowing. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 119. 71-81.

Mishra, S. K. 1998. Educational ideas and institutions in ancient idea (From the earliest times to 1206 AD with special reference to Mithila). New Delhi, India: Ramanand Vidya Bhawan.

Narain, S. 1993. Examinations in ancient India. New Delhi, India: Arya Book Depot.

Purple, D. 2002. Social justice, curriculum, and spirituality. Educational yearning: the journey of the spirit and democratic education, ed. by T. Oldenski  and D. Carlson, 86-102. New York: Peter Lang.

Sheshagiri, K. M. 2011. A cultural view of education in Hindu civilization. Handbook of Asian education: A cultural perspective, ed. by Y. Zhao et al., 529-547. New York: Routledge.

Thaker, S. N. 2007. Hinduism and learning. Non-Western perspectives on learning and knowing, ed. by S. B. Marriam and Associates, 57-53. Florida: Krieger Publishing Company.

Upadhyaya, P. 2010. Hinduism and peace education. Spirituality, religion, and peace education, ed. by E.J. Brantmeier, J. Lin and J. P. Miller, 99-113. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Pub Inc.

Whelpton, J. 2005. A history of Nepal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wong, M. S., and Canagarajah, A. S. 2009. Christian and critical English language educators in dialogue: Pedagogical and ethical dilemmas. New York: Routledge

 

Note: This blog entry is an abridged and simplified version paraphrased from my article published in Language and Linguistics Compass (2013).

————————————————————–

*Bal Krishna Sharma is a doctoral candidate in Second Language Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His interests include sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and critical pedagogy.

SLC, ELT, and Our Place in the Big Picture

Critical Outlook, Native Perspective, Scholarly Article

Shyam Sharma*

When School Leaving Certificate (SLC) results were published earlier this month, quite a few of my friends and family members posted happy messages such as the following on Facebook: “Congratulations to our nephew ___ for securing 8* percent!!!” But whenever I come across such messages, I am reminded how privileged these friends and families are (including my own family). I am reminded of one person in particular whose SLC-related story I can never forget.

I have told Ramlal Sunar’s story on this blog before (please see comment section) so I won’t repeat it, but to recap what it is about, this young man was one of the “jhamte” candidates for the SLC who sought my help because he and the other young men and women in a village in Gulmi had been failing in English, some of them for many years. I had only completed my IA at the time but for them my private school background made me look like a savior. But tragically, Ramlal and most of the other students failed again even after my three or so months of tutoring. I probably helped them improve their English a little, but that was not what they wanted.

Until that experience, I had always believed that everyone who “studies hard” (like I did) would be academically successful. But now I began to think what happens when a whole education system lacks grounding in the local reality of students’ life and society. I could see that the young people were not failing because they were stupid. They were failing because the SLC did NOT test the intelligence, skills, knowledge-bases, and value systems that constituted and had value in the students’ LOCAL social, economic, cultural, and occupational lives. And the students would fail SLC if they failed any course.

Nepalese educators, especially those in fields related to English studies or English language, are often good at talking about postcolonialism, hegemony, and so on. But few of them seem to realize the irony of how they are perhaps most actively (though it may not be consciously/deliberately) involved in the gradual destruction of what used to be at least a slightly more organic system of public education, one that was delivered in the local language, one that encouraged a more locally based curriculum and pedagogy. That is, when Nepalese intellectuals leave Ramlals behind in their villages, they also seem to leave their responsibility to think in terms of the nation as a whole, a nation where Ramals are much more representative of the broader reality than those whose names we see on Facebook.

When I met Ramlal many years later, he didn’t even want to talk to me very much, because by this time I was already in my master’s degree, teaching at a big private school, with all kinds of gaps ever widening between him and me.

But this year’s SLC results reminded me of Ramlal again because I thought again how  those of us who have the voice and venues for raising public awareness about the numbers are also not very interested in talking about the national challenge in the first place. Just give it a try even as the furies about SLC results are still flying high, and someone is likely to ask you, “So, what are you going to do about it?”

The pendulum of failed percentage wildly swung back into the 60s again this year, after a small relief since 2004. As the media highlighted the numbers for a short period of time, among the regulars 58.43% students failed; among the exempted, a shocking 93.24% failed. That was a total of 343230 (yes, 3.4 lakh!) regular students and 98911 (yes, one lakh!) reappearing students whose friends and family didn’t get to post happy Facebook updates—or whatever equivalent social networking they use. That was a total of almost four and a half lakh students’ careers being sacrificed in an absurd national drama that we call education.

For a few days, people talked, and then they forgot. In fact, even when the discussions were visible on the interwebs, few educators seemed to share any ideas, assessments, soul searching, and solutions to this national crisis. The community of educators that I am closest to, English teachers, seemed less bothered by the situation than others within and without the education sector.

I try to think about why many people aren’t even surprised. It’s possible that they are being more optimistic, looking at the full half of the glass while I focus on the empty half. However, a glass that is almost 60% and more than 93% empty is a little too empty. And because we are talking about people rather than water or wine, it is too painful to even talk about it. It is also painful because this involves a society—its teachers, its policy-makers, its city-dwellers who don’t have to send their children to where the majority of parents do—that seems to have inured itself to the tragedy of closing the doors to the majority of children, a society where those whose voices have most impact are mostly quiet and smug because it doesn’t affect them directly. There are exceptions, but those people are hard to find.

Where does it all go so wrong with our education? News reports post-SLC indicated that “government spending on education increased from 27 billion rupees in 2006-07 to 63.91 billion rupees in 2012-13.” There was actually a silver lining—if you call this a silver lining (I call it a sign of disaster for the nation at large)—that the pass percentage at private schools has been above 80 in the past decade. But students in public schools, from which between two thirds and four fifths of students take the SLC, the pass percentage has been in the 30s, often below that. According to Teach for Nepal,

[I]f 100 students enroll for grade one, by the end of grade ten only 15% will have remained in the school system. The future prospects for these children are severely diminished. . . . of the students who fail their SLC, 90% fail in the core subjects such as Mathematics, English and Science.

Hard data is difficult to find (I would appreciate if someone could please add in the comments section below), but the subject taught by most of us on this blog, English, is evidently the lock on the “iron gate” of academic and professional careers in Nepal.

It is not easy at all to assess the situation with public versus private education. As serious researchers have often pointed out, because families tend to focus just on their children, the public tends to overlook the very definition of education–that it is most importantly a matter of social good. Most people do know that the current educational situation is creating a new “caste” system where those who attend the more expensive private schools have an unfair advantage over those who did not from the get go. But in the rush toward giving own children better chances than their neighbors they don’t pause to think that even in the most economically advanced nations, public schooling is guaranteed and even the richest people send their children to public schools. Added to that are the dynamics of power and resources, which in matter of about two decades have turned education in Nepal largely into a commodity in the market. Needless to say, English has increased opportunities for a few already privileged communities to participate in the global march of personal progress, but “English education” has also played a much more significant role in having a functional education (albeit one that needed much improvement) replaced with a myth about both language learning and about education at large.

But public education did not weaken just due to the lack of social responsibility that it needs. Social forces are dangerously aligned in one direction. For instance, there are forces such as these: the self-fulfilling myth that cost equals quality, English equals the promise of successful careers, and  private schooling equals prestige in society. Consequently, more educated, more motivated, better paid, better travelled and experienced people mostly gravitate to the private side; even those who theoretically oppose the destruction of education as a social good send their own children to private schools, and parents who have to send their children to public schools are literally ashamed. In fact, even among the most informed and educated people in our society, there is the myth of “English” education. Most people don’t even pause to think that in reality, there is just good education, which can be provided by any school, including the likes of Samata School–where students who pay only a hundred rupees a month were more successful in SLC this year than those in most of the lakh-rupees-a-year schools (Samata’s quality education had nothing to do with the medium but everything to do with a reality-based vision for the learner, the community, and the society at large). For a more critical/careful comparison of private and public schools, see the section starting at page 30 in the dissertation by Amrit Thapa, a Nepali researcher at Columbia University.

As Amrit Thapa shows by citing Tooley and Dixon’s findings, “private schooling as a solution to failing public schools in developing countries is not as straightforward” (p. 83). It is not just that it is ludicrous to not think about the overwhelming majority of parents who cannot afford the cost of private schooling; the very foundation and culture of private schools as they are today makes it unlikely that this sector will rise above the business model and become an organic part of the social structure that serves the need of the ordinary families. Whether we like this reality or not, private schools are usually run by individuals or groups who do not involve parents and community in governance, who treat teachers and students autocratically (See Thapa, linked above, p. 31), and who have little or no interest in long term visions of education for social good. This is not to say that we should dislike private schools altogether. In fact, we should expect private schools to be focused on profit motives and to contribute to education as a social good while trying to make profit, not as a primary objective. But that is why we can’t expect this mechanism to address the overall need of the nation given the economic status of the majority. The society and its serious educators and policy makers must think about how to make the private sector better align with the broader goals of education for social good.

So, where does a better understanding of the complexities leave us as English teachers most of whom have made our careers, or are making it, in the private sector? What do “we” have to do with the public schools when most of us teach in private schools where 80% pass the SLC, which looks fine? (No, actually, even the failure of 20% is not fine, but let’s leave that aside for the moment). As colleagues in this forum have also tried to articulate (e.g., here’s a discussion on a post that I wrote back in 2009 when we had just started Choutari; other editors have written in this tenor since the beginning), we can be more than just English teachers; we can be citizens, scholars, human beings who think about the nation and world at large. We as members of a professional organization, and as scholars who have spread around the world but try to contribute to research, scholarship, and professional development at home, are not doing fine. Because the big picture is our picture as well, it is time that we start confronting the deplorable overall state of education in our country–at least in our discussions. Why?—-because we have greater opportunities to write, to conduct and publish research, to start public conversations. 

Shocking majorities of Ramlals are still failing across the country, and talking and writing is essentially what we do, right? Talk is how we start getting ourselves and other to think and act. Next time, when someone asks us what we are going to do about it by just “talking” about the tragedy, let us say, “Talk. Do you want to join?” 

—————-

* Dr. Shyam Sharma is an assistant professor of rhetoric and writing at Stony Brook University, State University of New York. A former lecturer of the Central Department of English, Tribhuvan University, he teaches and studies writing in the disciplines, the intersection of culture with literacy and technology, multilingualism, and academic transition of students from different backgrounds.

Creative Writing for Students and Teachers

Creative Writing, Creativity, Critical Outlook, Critical Pedagogy, ELT Resource, English as a Global Language, Global thought, Miscellaneous, Scholarly Article, Writing

Alan Maley

U.K.

Why is it that most institutional systems of education develop such narrow and unadventurous teaching procedures?  How is it that joyful learning somehow gets overwhelmed by institutional rituals: the worship of the syllabus, the obsession with ‘covering’ the textbook, the manic preoccupation with the exam, the compulsion to conform?  It seems that only in rare cases, through the determination of individual teachers, is joyful learning achieved.  In most other cases, the language is reduced to drumming in material as if it were a set of mathematical formulae in preparation for the exam, after which it can safely be discarded.  Small wonder that many students simply switch off  and develop a lifelong aversion to the language in question.  What they learn is neither enjoyable nor perceived as useful in the ‘real’ world outside the classroom.

This applies to much English language teaching too: all too often, it lacks a creative spark.  John McRae goes so far as to say,

“In future years, the absence of imaginative content in language teaching will be considered to have marked a primitive stage of the discipline: the use of purely referential materials limits the learner’s imaginative involvement with the target language, and leads to a one-dimensional learning achievement.  Representational materials make an appeal to the learner’s imagination…”  (McRae 1991:vii)

In this article I shall be arguing for the need to develop more creative approaches to writing as a way of enriching the learning experiences of both teachers and learners.

 

What is Creative Writing?

Creative writing is often contrasted with Expository writing.  I have summarized the principle differences between them in the following table:

   Expository Writing   Creative Writing

 

     Instrumental

 

     Facts

 

     External control

 

     Conventions

 

     Logical

 

     Analytical

 

     Impersonal

 

     Thinking mode

 

    Appeal to the intellect

 

    Avoidance of ambiguity

 

    Aesthetic

 

    Imagination

 

    Internal discipline

 

    Stretching rules

 

    Intuitive

 

    Associative

 

    Personal

 

    Feeling mode (plus thinking!)

 

    Appeal to the senses

 

    Creation of multiple meanings

When writing an expository text we are essentially instrumentally motivated. We have a quantum of facts, ideas and opinions to put across.  Expository writing rests on a framework of externally imposed rules and conventions.  These range from grammatical and lexical accuracy and appropriacy to specific genre constraints.  The aim of expository writing is to be logical, consistent and impersonal and to convey the content as unambiguously as possible to the reader.

Creative writing, by contrast, is aesthetically motivated.  It deals less in facts than in the imaginative representation of emotions, events, characters and experience.  Contrary to what many believe, creative writing is not about license.  It is a highly disciplined activity.  But the discipline is self-imposed: ‘the fascination of what’s difficult’ (Yeats).  In this it stands in contrast to expository writing, which imposes constraints from without.  It often proceeds by stretching the rules of the language to breaking point, testing how far it can go before the language breaks down under the strain of innovation.  Creative writing is a personal activity, involving feeling. This is not to say that thought is absent – far from it.  The ingenuity of a plot, or the intricate structure of a poem are not the products of an unthinking mind: they require a unique combination of thought and feeling – part of what Donald Davie (1994) calls ‘articulate energy.’  An important quality of creative writing however is the way it can evoke sensations.  And, unlike expository writing, it can be read on many different levels and is open to multiple interpretations.

The Case for Creative Writing.

 

It is reasonable to ask however, how we can justify the inclusion of creative writing, in addition to aesthetic reading, in our language teaching practices.  A recent small-scale survey (unpublished data) I conducted among some 50 leading ELT professionals, especially teachers of writing, yielded the following reasons:

1.  Creative writing aids language development at all levels: grammar, vocabulary, phonology and discourse. As learners manipulate the language in interesting and demanding ways, attempting to express uniquely personal meanings (as they do in creative writing), they necessarily engage with the language at a deeper level of processing than with expository texts (Craik and Lockhart 1972).  The gains in grammatical accuracy,  appropriacy and originality of lexical choice, and sensitivity to rhythm, rhyme, stress and intonation are significant.

2. Creative writing also fosters ‘playfulness’.  In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the role of play in language acquisition. (Cook 2000, Crystal 1998)  In some ways the ‘communicative movement’ has done a disservice to language teaching by its insistence on the exclusively communicative role played by language.  The proponents of play point out, rightly, that in L1 acquisition, much of the language used by children is almost exclusively concerned with play: rhythmical chants and rhymes, word games, jokes and the like.  Furthermore, such playfulness survives into adulthood, so that many social encounters are characterized by language play (puns, jokes, ‘funny voices’, metathesis, and so on) rather than by the direct communication of messages. In creative writing, learners are encouraged to do precisely this: to play creatively with the language in a guilt-free environment.  As Crystal states, ‘Reading and writing do not have to be a prison house.  Release is possible.  And maybe language play can provide the key.’ (Crystal 1998:217)

3. This playful element encourages learners to take risks with the language, to explore it without fear of reproof.  By manipulating the language in this way, they also begin to discover things not only about the language but about themselves.  They effectively begin to develop a ‘second language personality’.

4.  Much of the teaching we do draws and focuses on the left side of the brain, where our logical faculties are said to reside.  Creative writing puts the emphasis on the right side of the brain, with a focus on feelings, physical sensations, intuition, and the like.  This is a healthy restoration of balance between the logical and the intuitive faculties.  It also allows scope for learners whose hemisphere preference or dominance may not be left-brain, and who, in the usual course of teaching, are therefore at a disadvantage.

5.  The dramatic increase in self-confidence and self-esteem which creative writing tends to develop among learners leads to a corresponding increase in motivation.  Dornyei (2001), among others, has pointed to evidence that suggests that among the key  conditions for promoting motivation are:

‘5. Create a pleasant and supportive atmosphere in the classroom

6.  Promote the development of group cohesiveness.

13. Increase the students’ expectancy of success in particular tasks and in learning in

general.

17. Make learning more stimulating and enjoyable by breaking the monotony of

classroom events.

18. Make learning stimulating and enjoyable for the learner by increasing the

attractiveness of tasks.

19. Make learning stimulating and enjoyable for the learners by enlisting them as active

task participants.

20. Present and administer tasks in a motivating way.

23. Provide students with regular experiences of success.

24. Build your learners’ confidence by providing regular encouragement.

28. Increase student motivation by promoting cooperation among the learners.

29. Increase student motivation by actively promoting learner autonomy.

33. Increase learner satisfaction.

34. Offer rewards in a motivational manner.’(Dornyei 2001: 138-144)

All these conditions are met in a well-run creative writing class.  This increase in motivation is certainly supported by my own experience in teaching creative writing.  Learners suddenly realize that they can write something in the foreign language which no one else has ever written before.  And they experience not only a pride in their own products but a joy in the process.

6. Creative writing also feeds into more creative reading.  It is as if, by getting inside the process of creating the text, learners come to intuitively understand how such texts work, and this makes them easier to read.  Likewise, the development of aesthetic reading skills provides the learner with a better understanding of textual construction, and this feeds into their writing.  There is only one thing better than reading a lot for developing writing ~ and that is writing a lot too!

7. Finally, the respondents to the questionnaire survey were almost unanimous in agreeing that creative writing helps to improve expository writing too. In fact, by helping learners to develop an individual voice, it makes their factual writing more genuinely expressive.

All of the above factors were mentioned by the respondents to the questionnaire.  Respondents noted that students who become engaged in CW tasks demonstrate a robust sense of self-esteem and are consequently better motivated (Dornyei 2001).  They also become more aware both of the language and of themselves as learners. The virtuous cycle of success breeding more success is evident with such students.  As they become more self-confident, so they are prepared to invest more of themselves in these creative writing tasks.  Above all, students derive not just ‘fun’ but a deeper sense of enjoyment from their writing.

References

Arnold, Jane.  (1999).  Affect in Language Learning.  Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Boden, Margaret.  (1998)  The Creative Mind.  London: Abacus.

Carter, Ronald.  (2004)  Language and Creativity: the art of common talk.  London: Routledge.

Cook, Guy.  (2000)  Language Play: Language Learning.  Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Craik, F.I.M. and R.S. Lockhart (1972)  ‘Levels of processing: a framework for memory research.’  Journal for verbal learning and Verbal Behaviour II: 617-84.

Crystal, David. (1998)  Language Play.  London: Penguin.

Davie, Donald (1994)  Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy.  London: Carcanet.

Day, Richard and Julian Bamford.  (1998)  Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom.  Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press

Dornyei ,Zoltan  (2001) Motivational Strategies in the Language Classroom.  Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Gardner,  Howard. (1985)  Frames of Mind.  London: Paladin Books

Gleick, James. (1988)  Chaos.  London: Sphere Books

Koch, Kenneth. (1990) Rose, where did you get that red?  New York: Vintage Books.

Krashen, Stephen  (2004 second edition) The Power of Reading.  PortsmouthNH: Heinemann

Maley, Alan (ed) (2007 a)) Asian Short Stories for Young Readers.  Vol. 4.  Petaling Jaya: Pearson/Longman Malaysia

Maley, Alan (ed)  (2007 b))  Asian Poems for Young Readers. Vol.5. Petaling Jaya:Pearson/Longman Malaysia.

Maley, Alan and Jayakaran Mukundan.  (eds) (2005 a))  Asian Stories for Young Readers, Vol 1   Petaling Jaya: Pearson/Longman Malaysia.

Maley, Alan and Jayakaran Mukundan  (eds)  (2005 b))  Asian Stories for Young Learners. Vol. 2  Petaling Jaya: Pearson Malaysia

Maley, Alan and Jayakaran Mukundan (eds) (2005 c) Asian Poems for Young Readers.Vol. 3.   Petaling Jaya: Pearson/Longman.

Maley, Alan and Jayakaran Mukundan (eds) (2011a)) Asian Short Stories for Young Readers.  Petaling Jaya: Pearson Malaysia

Maley, Alan and Jayakaran Mukundan (eds)  (2011 b)) Asian Poems for Young Readers. Petaling Jaya: Pearson Malaysia.

Maley, Alan and Jayakaran Mukundan (2011 c))  Writing Poems: a resource book for teachers of English.  Petaling Jaya: Pearson Malaysia

Maley, Alan and Jayakaran Mukundan (2011 d))  Writing Stories; a resource book for teachers of English.  Petaling Jaya: Pearson Mal.aysia

McRae, John  (1991) Literature with a Small ‘l’.  Oxford.: Macmillan.

Matthews, Paul. 1994. Sing Me the Creation.  Stroud:Hawthorn Press.

Mukundan, Jayakaran.  (ed)  (2006) Creative Writing in EFL/ESL Classrooms II.  Petaling Jaya: Pearson Longman Malaysia

Rubdy, Rani and Mario Saraceni (eds) (2006) English in the World: Global Rules, Global Roles.  London/New York: Continuum.

Schmidt, Richard (1990).  ‘The role of  consciousness in second language learning’.  Applied Linguistics. Vol. 11, No. 2 129-158.  Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Schumacher, E.F.  (1974).  Small is Beautiful.  London: Abacus/Sphere Books

Spiro, Jane  (2004)  Creative Poetry Writing.  Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Spiro, Jane.  (2006)  Creative Story-building.  Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Tan, Bee Tin (ed) (2004). Creative Writing in EFL/ESL Classrooms I  Serdang: UPM Press.

Tomlinson, Brian  (1998). ‘Seeing what they mean: helping L2 learners to visualise.’  In B.Tomlinson (ed). Materials Development in Language Teaching.  Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.  265-78

Tomlinson, Brian (2001) ‘The inner voice: a critical factor in language learning’  Journal of the Imagination in L2 learning.  VI, 123-154.

Wright, Andrew and David Hill. (2008)  Writing Stories.  Innsbruck: Helbling Languages.

Monolingual Policies in Multilingual States: Implications for Language Teaching

Critical Outlook, Critical Pedagogy, English as a Global Language, Global thought, Miscellaneous

Madhav Kafle

Penn State University, USA

In this brief post, I share my rumination over the concept of ‘a language’ and concept of correctness in language teaching and learning. Historically, neither did human beings claim a language by the virtue of belonging to a place nor did they police communicative endeavors of the learners as we do in many academic and non-academic spaces today. So when did we begin to have the concept of a language from that of the Language? By the Language, I mean the semiotic affordances our predecessors exploited to communicate with each other. We might first be shocked to realize that languages such as English, Nepali, Hindi, Chinese and so forth as we conceptualize them today as bounded entities belonging to a certain group of people were invented at some point in the past. Today, as we know, in most parts of the world, languages are taught as if they always existed as self-contained systems with discrete borders. If we mix words or chunks of so-called language “X” to that of a language “Y” in academic discourse, then we are often seen as a language learner who has yet to master the language fully rather than a member of an elite family. Despite being pervasively prevalent in everyday interactions, mixing is seen as one of the seven sins, if you will, in the academia.

And you might be saying, well you can do that in speaking but not in writing; writing is formal and is set in stone whereas speaking is ephemeral and assisted by multiple channels of meaning including gestures and facial expressions. To speak only of English (as ‘a language’) in Nepalese context, we expect our students at all levels to be able to show the mastery of certain national goals and objectives stipulated by the policy makers. Needless to say, the objectives of the language education are monolingual; therefore, teaching materials and resources all are only in English and the medium of instruction is also assumed to be English only (Let’s not get distracted right now by caring to talk about the reality). The pedagogy in most cases is test-driven. Therefore, instead of assessing the effectiveness of the utterance to the local context, we dwell up on the global binary of right and wrong.

Let’s talk about issue of normativity for a while. Modern society judges all human experiences by putting them through the parameters of ‘normalcy’ whereas this very concept has been shown as a matter of social and historical construction rather than a condition of human nature. According to Lennard J. Davis, as he recounts in his essay “Constructing Normalcy” in The Disability Studies Reader, the word ‘normal’ as ‘constituting, conforming to, not deviating or different from the common type or standard, regular, usual’ only enters the English language around 1840. The boundaries and strictures of normalcy, which we think of as ‘natural’ givens now, were constructed just one and a half century ago, at least in the western intellectual history. Likewise, according to Davis,

the word ‘norm’ in the modern sense, has only been in use since around 1855, and ‘normality’ and ‘normalcy’ appeared in 1849 and 1857, respectively. If the lexicographical information is relevant, it is possible to date the coming into consciousness in English of an idea of ‘the norm’ over the period 1840-1860. (10)

Further, Davis  goes onto say that before the construction of the concept of the norm, there was the concept of ‘ideal’, which also dates only from the seventeenth century. However, since the ideal was linked to the world of the divine, it was simply impossible to be achieved by mortals. Within such a schema of the ‘ideal’ there could be no room for the notion of deviance. Disability, for example, did not mean deviance but a part of the ideal. After the construction of ‘norms’ around the mid-nineteenth century, rules and regulations were created in each and every domains of human experience. This historic account of norms might sound a little simplistic; however, the purpose should be clear: norms are social constructions as are languages. As an aside, let me say this to you, I had to resort to western literature to elucidate this point, I wish I was able to find some relevant sources from our local multilingual archives .

Now, once constructed, do the norms last forever? An example from The New York Times example might be insightful. According to the article, the current association of baby clothes, which are often sorted by gender and color lines, pink for girls and blue for boys, were once just the other way around. Before the World War I, boys were pink and the girls were blue. This indicates that the norms can change according to the needs of the new times (or even for some mysterious reason).

If you permit me to continue this philosophical rambling, to have a historical understanding of the language standards, how about we travel a little back to the pre-colonial times? Would not it be interesting to explore what kinds of language norms were exercised during gurukul education system?  Maybe,  our tendency of seeing ourselves as authorities and our language  policing in  language and literacy teaching, has some kind of legacy to gurukul system as well. Again, unfortunately, the literature covering that time is relatively sparse and we are raised in a culture of looking to the West.

Consciously or unconsciously, we seem to be unable to conceive of other ways besides following the mono-normative pedagogy by default. We take for granted that skills such as reading and writing once learnt are going to be useful for ages while that is in fact not the case. If we talk about professional development, rarely is the case where teacher training programs do capitalize on local (multilingual) pedagogy. Similarly, well-meaning literacy sponsors such as British Council and US Embassy and other funding agencies would not probably commend our proposal of mixing different languages for academic purposes. This is not to say we do not have local conventions, but we often tend to discredit them as incorrect or substandard. We do not often look for hidden legacies we might have. To put it a little differently, we have yet to create the knowledge base that validates our centuries long practices.

On a more positive note, there are some signs that we are going to regain the multilingual history at some point in near future, if not soon. European Union today is a case in point. However, I am aware of the fact that while economic prospect of multilingualism is now visible in developed countries, English is still getting an unjustly superior position in many developing countries like ours. Therefore, to envision a future where we can follow the middle path by striking the balance between the indigenous and dominant languages, whether they be English or Nepali, we need to start acting today. We can’t outright negate the ‘a language’ discourse as it is rather deep, but we can at least start destabilizing the concept. The recent discussion on speaking English (only) in and out of the classrooms in NELTA yahoo group can be taken as one of the examples of possible steps forward.  Through such intellectually engaging discussions, we will be able to reinvigorate and build on our past pedagogies.  Yes, we won’t reach to conclusions easily, but the fire of criticality will keep us guiding to a better future. I hope we soon realize that erasing tribal languages in the name of validating economically advantageous languages in academia is neither fair nor foresighted. So, what kind of pedagogy would be more socially sensitive and culturally appropriate? Let’s keep the discussion going on!

Teach English, Speak English, Why? The Importance of Conversations on Choutari

Critical Outlook, Critical Pedagogy, English as a Global Language, Native Perspective, Nelta Networking, Scholarly Article

Dr. Shyam Sharma
Stony Brook University, New York

Choutari is now in the hands of a brilliant new group of NELTA scholars, and I am excited about that. The old and new teams who were working together for a while in order to make this conversation under the shade of this forum even better had to go through a somewhat difficult time during the month of January—it’s a story that may be worth telling someday, perhaps years from now, and it’s a good one—but we also had a wonderful opportunity to further realize the tremendous value of promoting professional conversation in this great community. With the talent and enthusiasm of the new team, I am sure that we are going to see in the years to come great strides in the work of welcoming, encouraging, urging, prodding us to give back in the form of ideas and inspiration to our society. This work of building our scholarship from the ground up is extremely important to us as educators in a struggling nation right now and it will be, for different reasons, for generations to come.

Among the reasons we started this blog, one was to make our professional conversations serve as useful resource by making them open and accessible. And that’s what I want to write about in this reflection today.

Since I promised the editor of this month, my friend Bal Ram Adhikari, that I would contribute an entry for the issue, I’ve been trying to write about something that has kept me professionally “awake,” so to say, since I started teaching in a primary school in Butwal almost 20 years ago, something that I continued to ask for the next 12 years in grade schools and eventually at TU and then when I decided to switch from English to Writing Studies. And that something is a whole range of questions, which used to often discourage me while I taught at home: Why am I teaching what I am teaching? Does teaching grammar help students learn language? Why are we asking students to speak in English only? The teaching of literature seems to contribute to students’ personal development quite a bit, but how far does it contribute to their social and professional lives and the society at large? Why do we do little more than giving lecture in the name of “covering” the content of the course and helping students prepare for the exam—and what if there are better ways to achieve these same goals and also make education more worthwhile? What do we mean by “English education”?

When we started Choutari, I was happy because this platform allowed us to ask questions like the above as part of a broader professional conversation among hundreds of other scholars and teachers who may have similar questions, different perspectives, better answers. In this post, I want to build on a recent conversation that took place (and at the time of this writing is still ongoing) inside NELTA’s Yahoo mailing list that many of us are subscribed to. I responded briefly there, as it fit that medium, and I want to explore the issue further here, from broader educational, professional, and social perspectives. I request you, dear colleagues, to share your thoughts in the comments section below.

A fellow NELTA member, Umesh Shrestha, asked in the mailing list recently whether we, as English teachers, should communicate in English beyond the classroom and school (because, the writer seemed to imply, we don’t practice what we preach). This was a very thought-provoking question (and among other colleagues, Suman Laudari has responded with some great ideas on the list). Let me get into the relaxing mood of choutari and share some thoughts—for the beauty and fresh air of early spring is returning to the hillsides and I am truly excited by the arrival of a whole group of gaunles under the shady tree.

The question of whether we, even teachers of English, should speak English everywhere, as well as require our students to do so in school and encourage to do so outside is not new. And I happen to have strong views not only about whether even our students (forget about us) must be required to speak English at all times in school (if not beyond it!) but also about whether we should use English as a medium of instruction and for what purposes, if at all.

Let me take a step back and ask a more basic question: “Why” is it that English is the increasingly dominant, increasingly popular, increasingly unquestioned medium of instruction in Nepal? Is there a straightforward “ELT” answer to this question? Does the use of English as “the” medium of instruction raise the standard of our education overall? Does it make classroom teaching and classroom learning more effective?

First, if the answer to questions like the above is more of a “no” than “yes,” then should we make it our professional lives’ priority to make the answer “yes”? Or, should we instead pause and think why the answer is “no”? That is, if using English rather than Nepali and/or other languages of instruction—at least in certain subjects, grade levels, regions, etc—does not have an “ELT” answer (which I presume it doesn’t), then why are we insisting that “English Only” must be the medium of instruction? If imposing English as the only medium of instruction does not raise the standard of our students’ education, then how have we come to embrace the delusion (sorry, but that’s what I think it largely is) that English “is” education (as in the phrase “English education”)? Is there, in the world of reality, such a thing as “English” education (one that is of a different order of intellectual significance than education acquired “in”? another language?)– or have we just created a feel good phrase to describe “English language education/learning” by dropping the key word in the middle?

To stay on the yes/no questions above, I would readily say NO, there is absolutely no doubt that IF requiring only English as the medium of instruction, communication, and jus being in school had ZERO SIDE EFFECTS, then the benefits are so many, so significant, so long term, so attractive… that we wouldn’t need to have this conversation. I would whole-heartedly support the use of English as the “only” medium in/throughout school. I’m not joking about this, but IF our students were to come out of high school speaking fluent English while ALSO writing effectively (whether that’s in English or not, please note), demonstrating critical thinking skills at par with their peers in other nations, being able to pursue and generate new ideas on their own, excelling in math and science and technology, etc, and IF the “medium” of English was a significant reason for our students’ elevated standards in all the above areas, then NO we would not have this conversation either. We would just call the adoption of English as the “only” medium of instruction as a straightforward, non-political, purely pedagogical decision. But that’s not the case. We know for fact—and we have been in denial for a few decades now—that the English medium that we have imposed in the name of improving the “quality” of education has VISIBLY affected the effectiveness of just too many teachers’ teaching, thereby their students’ learning, the teaching and learning of math and science and social studies and economics and environmental studies and agriculture and you name it. The English medium is certainly justified for teaching the English language—although even in this case, I have a hard time understanding why we teach it for 12-16 years and our students’ English is not as good as the Nepali proficiency of my Christian missionary friend who has been in Nepal for less than a year. Yes, our students’ English proficiency—and indeed our own as English teachers—may be too low. And it is for us as teachers (plus scholars) to develop solutions by having serious curricular, pedagogical, and educational discussions. But our good intentions to solve a problem don’t justify just “any” means. For instance, it would be terribly absurd for us as English teachers to tell our colleagues teaching social studies and math and physics and chemistry and their students who are solving algebra problems or playing khopi or eating samosa in the canteen that they must use English because— oh, wait, I forgot what I was about to say! English, you know, English, and like English education. Like globalized world. Opportunities. The internet. Facebook…. Okay, I can’t think anymore. Let me do something different. Let me tell you a story.

I have a nonnative English speaking (Chinese) student named Bao in my “intermediate college writing” class (here at the State University of New York). During the first class meeting in a one month long intensive writing workshop, while I was describing one of the assignments, a “rhetorical analysis” of a text that students would choose, Bao raised his hand, with his face looking like he was terrified of something, and said: “Professor, I don’t have the ‘professionalism’ to criticize the author’s writing style….” Bao’s English language “speaking” proficiency was so low that I couldn’t help thinking how many of the international students (15 out of 20, from 6 different countries, with different extents of exposure to “native” English speaking communities) were going to pass. Bao’s case was particularly striking: he not only struggled to express himself in English, as a student who had just come from a sociocultural background that doesn’t value “challenging” or even “analyzing” the ideas and expressions of established writers and scholars, he was saying that he neither could nor would like to “criticize” how a scholarly article was written. I gave a short answer and invited Bao to my office for further discussion. During the first discussion I realized that Bao was “confusing” his low proficiency in English with his lack of “knowledge” about what “rhetorical analysis” means; so I gave him a text (an excerpt from Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech), a sample rhetorical analysis that he and I found online, and a long list of questions with which I broke down the assignment (as supplement to the assignment description). Long story short, the rhetorical analysis that Bao wrote within the first week of class (before the class moved to another project) was in many ways better than the writing of most other students in class, including the native English speaking students (some of whom, by the way, implemented what they had already learned in high school and turned in their papers, and their papers showed little new learning). One of the things that Bao had done was to copy, adapt, and echo the rhetorical analysis “moves” made by other writers in the many samples that he had gone on to find: he deliberately avoided looking at rhetorical analyses of the text he was analyzing so he was not plagiarizing. When he submitted the finalized analysis, I had to start by asking whether and to what extent someone else had helped him write the paper and/or he had copied from another writer’s analysis of the same text. He had not, as I found out that he had done what I just described.

So, it was not because Bao mastered the “medium” (indeed, it was “in spite of” the medium that still lagged significantly) but because he was engaged with ideas (a highly thought-provoking text), because he had an unyielding commitment, because he learned how to learn, because of his commitment and motivation that Bao was able to do what seemed so impossible. Even as he imitated and echoed and adapted and ventriloquized sentence structures and phrases and worlds from the samples that he gathered from all kinds of sources, Bao learned a whole new “discourse,” indeed a new language, in his incredible one-week long learning journey, thereby tremendously improving his overall English language skills (including skills for critical thinking, analytical reading, and composition). When I read Bao’s final draft, I questioned some of the conventional teaching wisdom that only rare situations like this make me ask, only situations like this can so beautifully blow up in the air.

Reading the question about how great it might be if we too were speaking English all the time, I was almost depressed to think about the state of our education—I mean about the learning part, the part where the nature and content of education matters, the part where our students are being prepared (or not) to become intellectually and professional capable of navigating (and indeed competing in) the complex, connected, global world that they live in and need to be even better prepared for.

Let us (of course) develop practical solutions for practical problems. But let us do so without being so naive as to think that we can be more effective at doing so by eschewing the larger context of education–motivation, rationale, fairness, etc–in the name of being practical. Let us not allow the politics of denial (or the claim that one is not being political in order to stay above the discussion when the issue is politically significant) to justify an active forgetting and overlooking of the larger purpose of teaching English, or social studies or science for that matter. It is only within the larger social context that our problem-solving of any ELT issues—the questions we ask, the answers we seek—will make sense.

And to connect that to what I was saying about the importance of joining and promoting such conversations like this in choutaris like this, I have the same old, humble request for you. Dear colleague, after you read a post, or two, maybe all, please do not forget to add a line, or two, or many lines, sharing your idea, experience, feedback… as encouragement to the writers and good example for other readers.

Critical Thinking in Language Classroom

Critical Outlook, Scholarly Article

                                                                                                            Prem Prasad Poudel

Mahendra Ratna Campus, Tribhuvan University

Learning is the continuous process of obtaining knowledge and skills. Language is the medium for learning and thinking. As Vygotsky said that learning proceeds from pre-intellectual speech that includes crying, cooing, babbling, bodily movements to the complete production of the linguistic utterances. Children learn better through sharing and playing. This is also true for language learning. There are various methods that focus on learners’ participation in the learning process. Children as well as adults learn through cooperation. In the countries like ours have inappropriate classroom management, which do not support learning through communication and cooperation. If the classroom situations and teachers help in learners thinking, they may develop decision and judgment skills.

Webster’s New World Dictionary (1988) defines the word ‘think’ as the general word which means to exercise the mental faculties so as to form ideas, arrive at conclusion, etc. If teachers foster thinking environment in the classroom, the learners will be the top class beneficiary. The most successful classrooms are those that encourage students to think for themselves and engage in critical thinking (Halpern, 1996, Kurland, 1995, Unrau, 1997). We understand critical thinking to be purposeful, self-regulatory judgment that results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation and inference as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations upon which that judgment is based. Critical thinking is essential as a tool of inquiry. As such, critical thinking is a liberating force in education and a powerful resource in one’s personal and civic life (Facione, 1990). Critical thinking has become a hot topic of discussion in the field of education today.

Critical thinking allows learners to think about their own thoughts and the reasons behind their points of view. It means that they reflect on their own ways of making decisions or solving problems. Thinking like this means that their thoughts are consciously directed to some goals. Their  thoughts and ideas are not only based on their biases or prejudices but also on logical or information they might gather and filter from many sources. As they think critically, they are always mindful of what and how they are thinking. When they detect an error or a different way to think about a problem, they explore it eagerly. Students who think critically are typically excited about their learning. They see challenges and opportunities for learning in even the most difficult intellectual tasks. Critical thinking methodology is useful in all the subject areas and it has been very much influential in the area of language teaching as well.

Language teaching classroom must foster critical thinking on the part of the learners. Some think that critical thinking is useful for only the adult learners, but there are a number of chances that we may engage children in wide range of thinking activities. Thinking activities depend on the objectives of teaching. The type of objectives and type of questions create active learning and thinking in the students. They may ask questions ranging from very lowest level to the highest level. The following list includes categories of question and objectives that range from the lowest level (simply remembering) to the highest level (creating).

Lower level activities:  drawing and coloring,  copying, reading aloud, silent reading and watching, memorizing, revising, simple comprehension, looking things up, etc.

Higher level activities: imaginative writing tasks, collecting evidence, problem solving, deducing, reasoning tasks, application tasks, analysis tasks, synthesis tasks, evaluation, creation, summarizing, etc.

In my reflection of my own teaching experience and observation of other language teachers’ (novice and experts) classroom presentations, I found the following problems-

  1. Teachers  don’t encourage students to think
  2. Their students do not want to spend time for thinking, if their teachers ask them to think for one or two minutes, they take it as a waste of time or an opportunity to make fuss.
  3. Teachers are not worried about students learning.
  4. Classrooms are not resourceful. The available resources are even not properly used.
  5. Most of the classroom situations do not favor group work or pair work activities.
  6. Teachers find difficulties in forming groups appropriately.
  7. The teaching is focused on some students only, teaching doesn’t cover whole class.
  8. Some students (especially shy and slow learners) get frustrated, humiliated and develop inferiority complex because of the class domination by some quick learners.
  9. Teachers teach the content more than the language. They do not realize ‘language focus’ in language classes.
  10. Students and teachers most often spend more time in single activity.
  11. Some teachers conduct group or pair work activities but they are ill-managed, not organized, etc.

To minimize most of the above mentioned problems, the critical thinking based activities will be more supportive.

Activities for generating critical thinking in the language classroom

  1. 1.      Jigsaw technique: Jigsaw is one of the highly influential techniques for generating students’ cooperative learning in the language classroom. This technique requires students to help each other learn some grammar topics or vocabulary items. It is equally useful in teaching listening, speaking, reading and writing. That means it can be used when students are reading a text, listening to presentations and even while carrying out a group investigation. This strategy of teaching learning employs both home groups and expert groups. This helps all the students to study and learn all of the materials. The learners may become experts as they teach each other parts of the material. Each student thus has an active role in teaching and learning and experience deep understanding and higher order thinking.

 

Procedures

–          Teachers prepare beforehand. They review the learning materials, write questions to guide students’ learning.

–          Teachers assign students to groups. The students count the number one-two-three-four-five- six and students counting from one to the other number (the number may depend on the number of the students kept in a group)stay in one group. Other groups are formed in the same way. Each group includes the reasonable number of students. Groups are formed based on the nature of learning material and availability of the resources. The groups comprise of the boys and girls, more capable and less capable students.

–          The tasks are assigned, the tasks may be ‘reading stories, writing paragraphs, summarizing paragraphs, solving problems or project works’, etc. Each group is given a different task of the same teaching lesson.

–          Student work in their groups, they select their leader. Teachers need to control during the nomination of the group leader. In every next learning session, there will be a different leader so that all the student may be participating and working as a leader.

–          The teacher invites expert group and instructs the group about the activity. The  experts go to their respective group and help others do the task accordingly.

–          Students complete the task, come with an outcome within a stipulated timeframe. They become expert in the task provided to them.

–          Teacher monitors, assists and makes sure that they are engaged in the task assigned.

–          The students remix to form another type of group. The students counting number one stay in one group, two in another group and this continues until the last group is formed. Here, all the groups include the students having knowledge on the different task assigned to different groups before. There is information gap. They discuss each other and make complete information of the whole learning material.

–          Group leaders make presentations of the tasks one by one, other members of groups  comment on the presentation and finally they consolidate the learning outcome.

Let me discuss about a lesson I presented using this technique at grade eleven. The presentation was on reading a story that included five paragraphs, the number of students in the class was 32.

I prepared one day before I taught. I prepared separate reading texts breaking down the story into five paragraphs. I divided the student into five groups. Three groups consisted of six students and two groups consisted of seven students. In the class I asked the student speak out the numbers from one to five and asked students with the number one to five in one group and another one to five into another group and so on so the five groups were formed. After formation of the group, I asked each group to select one student to be an expert. I invited five experts in an expert group, instructed them about the learning task (the task that each had to do- it was reading a paragraph). The experts went back to their home group and instructed others about the task. They read the paragraph assigned to them. Again I asked each member of the group to form group of the similar numbers. For example, group A was formed of the students who had the number ‘one’. In the similar way, other groups were formed. Each group included students who were experts of all the paragraphs of the story. There was information gap among them. The student from the first group shared the information of the first paragraph; the student of second group shared the information of the second paragraph and so on. Finally the new groups made understanding of the whole story. If any of the members was confused, they discussed again in the group and finally came to the teacher with the summary of the story. There was a quick write exercise to check if they understood the story. Some comprehension questions were designed and they were further suggested to answer working in the pairs. Their queries were answered. They were also asked to make critical judgment of the story.

 

From this activity, I found that students experienced being teachers and also had developed a sense of being responsible for learning and sharing. They were more empowered and had to speak at least something. While sharing, they had good confidence and all of them were very much attentive and active in the learning process. From this activity, I found jigsaw to be useful for teaching language skills and vocabulary too.

  1. 2.      Pair reading-pair summarizing technique:  This technique is mostly used to practice reading and speaking. It can be used in the very beginning classes and the advanced levels also. The nature of the reading text will be different accordingly. This technique also allows students to take more initiative in their own and each other’s learning. It may take times more than simply reading aloud but there is more chance of making comprehension of the text more closely. It could be used in the large classes also.

Procedures

–          Teachers choose more informative text with short paragraphs. If paragraphs are not available, they may indicate the limitation of the text for each pair to read.

–          Students pair up.

–          One student of the pair reads one paragraph or marked section of the text and provides summary of it.

–          Teachers ask some cross questions to other students in order to check understanding, some of them may report the summary they heard from their peer.

–          Other students are asked to make questions related to the paragraph if they have confusion.

–          The same procedure continues till all the paragraphs are finished and all pairs do the activity. If the text is short, some pairs may read and summarize and other pairs may re-summarize, ask questions and give opinion on what was mentioned in the text.

My own experience of using this:

I used the same procedure in class eight (it was a class presented as a model class during teacher training). At first students were hesitant doing this. They thought that they will be unable to do the task. I encouraged them and finally they did it. There were 46 students. I made 23 pairs. The pairs were heterogeneous. There was a reading passage of 35 lines. I instructed each pair read three to four lines. Once a student of the pair read the text, s/he immediately summarized. Other student of other pair summarized the text again, and another student of another pair asked questions related to the text. I asked other interested students to deliver their own opinion on the text information mentioned on the text too. It was very much interesting because students were acting and reacting, making judgment and giving their own logic. In the similar way, reading all the paragraphs of the text was finished successfully. Finally I asked all the students to summarize the whole story working in groups of five for five minutes. I requested two groups make presentations of the summary of the text. They shared and other added more information that were missing. At the end of the session, they said that it was really good way to practice.  

 

  1. 3.      Read- summarize-question technique: This technique of teaching and learning is useful for practicing reading, listening and speaking skill simultaneously. It also develops their thinking too. People find it more difficult to use at the very beginning level. It is certainly fruitful in the upper grades.

Procedures

–          Teacher selects the reading passage or paragraphs.

–          S/he clarifies the way it takes place in the classroom.

–          One student reads the text, s/he points another student to summarize what    he read, the student summarizes it after making close listening to the       paragraph read by the first student and that student again asks another             student sitting little further in the class ask questions about the text    read     and summarized  before. The answer of the question may be given by          somebody other than those who participated.

–          This process continues until the whole task is finished. The teacher monitors            and guides in order to make sure that all students took part in the learning   process.

My experience of using this technique

When I used this technique in the classroom, my students were very much attentive on what was going on. They were so because they thought that they might need to say about it at any time. This worked well in the classes like ours where the benches are fixed in such a way that sometimes there is no space for the teacher to move around. Once I clarified the process, students themselves conducted it well. Finally I summarized the text following some questions asked to check their comprehension. To develop their higher order thinking skills, we may modify the questions and activities and relate them to synthesizing, evaluating and creating.

 

Conclusion 

Thinking activities develop learner’s motivation. There are many other activities that generate critical thinking on the part of the learners. If the teachers are well-known and prepared, they may design their own activities that help the learners  develop lower level to higher level thinking skills. The three techniques I mentioned above develop integrated learning of language skills of aspects. All of these activities enhance learners’ readiness, feeling of responsibility and sharing. Finally they will be the critical thinkers. Many of the present classroom related problems could be solved and some of them could be minimized.

We can … without corporal punishment

Critical Outlook, Native Perspective, Scholarly Article

Atmaram Bhattarai & Praveen Kumar Yadav
Plan Nepal Sindhuli/Rautahat

Abstract

Cruel and humiliating forms of psychological punishment, gender-based violence and bullying remain a daily reality for millions of children in schools. Such different sorts of violence adversely affect quality education and create fearful learning environment violating the rights of children to learn in a safe school environment. The short article attempts to look back to the history of corporal punishment, moves further with the consequences and reasons for such punishments and finally concludes with alternative ways to create learn without fear environment. Overall, it appeals all the stakeholders to join hands to contribute Learn without Fear campaign launched globally with an aim to end violence against children in all schools.

Scenario of Corporal Punishment in Nepal

Corporal punishment in school has become a preferred measurable tool for making children disciplined. 57.77% of school going children in the world is potentially risk of receiving school corporal punishment. A study done by Plan Nepal in different 7 districts in 2011 shows that 39.34% of children realized punished corporally by the teachers. They also mentioned that 5.34% of total school droppers are because of the corporal punishment.

The above data makes some of us cringe while it is common for some.  No doubt, we were compelled to grow up in fearful learning environment in Nepalese context. The Learn with Fear concept or method has become a culture in teaching learning activities. We need to remove the culture with our collective efforts. The present article starts with some historical background of punishment given to the learners, goes ahead with the causes behind punishing the students followed by its effects and concludes with some alternative ways of teaching.

A look at the history

Our education system from traditional age is largely influenced by our religious books such as Vedas, Purans, Manusmriti, etc. According to Tulsikrit Ramayan, Ayodhyakand, one of Hindu religious books “भय बिनु प्रिति नहोई” (which means that there can be no love or motivation that leads to success without punishment/fear). But gone are the days when there was Gurukul Education and the teacher who was known as guru used to be powerful. Today, the traditional education has shifted to new generation and the power is misused by so called gurus. As a result, children are victimized due to excessive power exercised by the teachers.

In the Western world, such punishment was used for minor judicial and educational misconducts in the past. It was the most popular form of punishment until English philosopher John Locke stirred up some controversy with his paper, Some Thoughts Concerning Education around the late 1700s. In this paper, Locke explicitly criticised the manner in which corporal punishment was central to education. But it was as early as the 18th century that European countries banned corporal punishment; for example, Poland banned all forms of CP in 1783. Gradually, the practice of corporal punishment declined through 20th century globally to some extent. However, it is sad to note that corporal punishment is still prevalent in our schools of Nepal.

Why teachers beat the students in Nepal

Corporal punishment is given to the students in the following conditions or for the causes mentioned here:

  • When the students fail to submit their homework
  • When they make a noise in class room
  • Debate with the teacher in class room
  • When learners are found fighting with each other
  • If they come to school with no uniform
  • Lose / forget to bring copy, books and other stationeries
  • Cheat and hide others’ copy, book, pencil, etc
  • When they sleep in the classroom or show misconduct
  • When they are unable to answer correctly
  • If they receive poor marks in exam
  • When they leave some classes and run away
  • If a student is absent or does not attend the school regularly
  • If students speak unpleasant words
  • When they come to school late
  • They fail to pay school fee in time

What types of Corporal punishment is given in Nepalese Schools

  • Scolding, verbal abuse
  • Making the students sit in a discomfort position
  • Locking them in toilet/other room
  • Slapping a child by his/her own classmate
  • Making them stand for long time at side of the door, corner of room, on bench and ground
  • Pulling hairs and cheek
  • Twisting the ears
  • Hitting with the objects on any part of the body (like duster over the head)
  • Throwing some objects at child
  • Discrimination of equal participation because of caste group or gender
  • Hitting with stick on palm, back, head, legs, etc.
  • Preventing students from entering the classroom for a while
  • Squeezing a pen/pencil between the fingers
  • Pinching, Hanging, kicking
  • Making them lean against a tree and tying up with the rope
  • Threatening
  • Making the students run around the school premises or playground many times

What results when the teachers beat students (Consequences of Corporal Punishment)

  • Intellectual loss
  • Increased delinquency
  • School drop outs of children
  • Mentally / physically disabled
  • Nurture violence behavior
  • Lower self esteem / lose confidence/humiliation
  • Training for children to use physical violence
  • Liable to instill hostility
  • Rage without reducing undesired behavior
  • Associate with negative outcome
  • It does not only hamper the individual development but also disturbs/ruins the social harmony
  • Suicide /Death

Why corporal punishment is not the solution

Extensive research shows that corporal punishment does not achieve the desired end – a culture of learning and discipline in the classroom. Instead, violence begets violence. Children exposed to violence in their homes and at school tend to use violence to solve problems, both as children and adults. Key research findings show that corporal punishment:

  • Some learners blow their own horn about being beaten as something to be proud of, as a badge of bravery or success.
  • Undermines a caring relationship between learner and educator, which is critical for the development of all learners, particularly those with behavioural difficulties.
  • Undermines the self-esteem and confidence of children who have learning or behavioural problems and/or difficult home circumstances and contributes to negative feelings about school.
  • Does not build a culture of human rights, tolerance and respect.
  • Does not stop bad behaviour of difficult children. Instead, these children are punished over and over again for the same offenses.
  • Does not nurture self-discipline in children. Instead, it provokes aggression and feelings of revenge and leads to anti-social behaviour.
  • Does not make children feel responsible for their own actions. They worry about being caught, not about their personal responsibilities. This undermines the growth of self-discipline in children.
  • Takes children s focus away from the wrongdoing committed to the act of beating itself.

Why ban corporal punishment

Nepal is a one of the signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which compels it to pass laws and take social, educational and administrative measures to protect the child from all forms of physical and mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse.

By the result, banning corporal punishment is responded in School Sector Reform Program (SSRP-2009-14). The SSRP states that no child shall be subjected to physical punishment in any form in the school. Teacher and school found guilty of practicing corporal punishment shall both be subject to disciplinary actions that may include suspension of teacher’s grade and an official warning to the School Management Committee (SMC).

Similarly, Education Rule (sixth addendum), 2059 has added ‘no students should be physically and mentally violated’ under the teacher’s code of conduct. At the mean time, the ministry of education has approved a policy named ‘Policy Provision for Banning Corporal Punishment in Schools- 2011’.

Ministry of Education in the collaboration with the Department of Education, National Centre of Educational Development, Plan Nepal, Save the children and UNICEF launched Learn without Fear (LWF) Campaign in Nepal on 21st November 2008.  It is a campaign for preventing all forms of violence against children in schools. This includes corporal punishment, sexual abuse, neglect, verbal abuse, emotional abuse, and bullying in schools.

So What?

CP crates fear among children. Where there is fear, there is no effective learning and the children can not construct their knowledge. The teacher should adopt alternative ways of CP. If teachers are to have a positive culture of learning and teaching in their schools, the learning environment must be safe, orderly and conducive to learning. There should be close relationship among teacher and children. The children should be loved and affected.

There are also those teachers who believe that corporal punishment is wrong, but they don’t always know what to use instead of physical force or the threat of it to maintain discipline and a culture of learning in the classroom. Discipline is a part of the daily life of students and teachers, but it is not a simple issue; it demands a great deal of time, creativity, commitment and resources.

A classroom climate based on mutual respect within which learners feel safe and affirmed will decrease the need for disciplinary action. By implementing a proactive approach, teachers can put things in place, which will safeguard the culture of learning, and teaching in their classrooms. Simple things like preparing for lessons; exercising self-discipline; having extension work available; ensuring that teaching and learning happen consistently; ensuring that learners are stimulated; establishing class rules with the students; making a space for time out or a conflict resolution corner; affirming students; building positive relationships with children; preparing and implementing job chart are all strategies which will set the stage for a positive learning environment and can significantly reduce problems with discipline in the classroom.

Similarly, the other alternatives ways of CP for a positive culture of learning and teaching are:

  • Providing disciplinary actions for misconduct inside the classroom: Carried out by class teacher; Verbal warnings; Community service; Additional work which is constructive and which possibly relates to the misconduct; Small menial tasks like tidying up the classroom; Detention in which learners use their time constructively but within the confines of the classroom i.e. they cannot participate in extra-mural activities or go home.
  • Adopting a whole school approach and making sure that the classroom discipline reflects the school’s policies.
  • Establishing class rules by the learners in the participatory way; be serious and consistent for implementing class rules.
  • Building a relationship of trust in which learners feel respected, understood and recognized for who they are.
  • Managing the learning process and the learning environment enthusiastically and professionally.
  • Being inclusive by using materials, pictures, language, music, posters, magazines and so on that reflect the diversity of the class so that no children feels left out or that his or her identity is not valued.
  • Giving students the opportunity to succeed.
  • Allowing children to take responsibility.
  • Giving attention seekers what they want.
  • Adopting strategies for behavioural modification like setting expectations, positive reinforcement, consistent consequences, presenting role model, etc.
  • Preparing and implementing code of conduct in school

Conclusion 

We observe that ‘pounding an animal is cruel; pounding an adult is crime and against human behaviour whereas pounding a child is a corrective measure for their proper adjustment into the social and cultural norms that the children need to respect’. Sometimes, punishing a child is considered the ‘right’ of parents or teachers. Teachers who are unmotivated and poorly trained are more likely to resort to punitive and physically violent methods of control, but this is not always the case for all teachers. But, globally, the practice of corporal punishment in school is being rejected and promoted alternative non violent discipline method to facilitate children’s behaviour and learning activities. A total of 106 states of the world have already legally banned the practice of CP in schools and care institutions. Similarly, 24 countries of the globe have legally banned corporal punishment at home either. In a society like ours with a long history of violence and abuse of child rights, it is not easy to make the transition to peace, tolerance and respect for human rights at a pace. Schools have a vital role to play in this process of transformation by nurturing these fundamental values in children.

 Our Appeal to NELTA

Most of the English teachers of school level in Nepal are known and blamed as cruel teachers as they mostly punish children in the purpose of making them success. Most of them (mostly of lower grades) are not aware that English is not learnt with corporal punishment. English can be taught using love and affection to the children in the communicative way using the above alternatives. Therefore, it is our humble request to NELTA to adopt Learn without Campaign within the network to wash the blame of cruelty pasted on the forehead of English Teachers in Nepal.

What we can do is to prepare some posters for promoting ‘learn without fear campaign’ in collaboration with ministry of Education, Department of Education, Save The Children, Plan Nepal and UNICEF and disseminate among the teachers all over the country through our branches existed in more than 35 districts. This will prove a milestone to make the campaign a grand success.

References

Education Rule (sixth addendum), 2059

Learn Without Fear Campaign Plan (October 2008-2011), a core document

Policy Provision for Banning Corporal Punishment in Schools, 2011

School Sector Reform Program (SSRP), 2009-2015

Teaching without punishment, a training manual to teachers, NCED, 2063

http://www.endcorporalpunishment.org/pages/pdfs/SchoolsBriefing.pdf

Writing English in Nepali Way

Critical Outlook

– Hem Raj Kafle

Young English writers in Nepal are often confused. Their confusion comes from their seniors’ general advocacy of universality and standard in writings, both in language use and aesthetic productions. The advocacy, in other words, may be of writing English in the English way so that the ‘native’ reader finds it worth reading and appreciation. The confusion would mean there always is a tendency to dismiss the belief that Nepalis can claim some ownership of English by giving it a degree of Nepaliness through local themes and figures.

And this is something to ponder over. Some young writers may begin to wonder the logic of universality against their faith on originality and textual autonomy. They may try to locate their writings within the theoretical trends they are trained (or rather brainwashed) with. Their works may not appear unfit in the Romantic tradition for their touch of spontaneity; nor would they fail the New Critical, formalist, structuralist or poststructuralist/postmodernist ‘standards’ for their autonomy as texts. They would only come low in the strict (neo)classical norms of didacticism, decorum, sophistication and sublimity which the English using elders of Nepal passionately adhere to.

But would that matter much? To many new generation writers, writing in English has all the way been a search for identity and space among the existing Nepali English writers. The ‘established’ writers appear to belong to one or other of the following groups. First, there are literary writers — inspired professors and aspiring young thinkers. The second group comprises the academic and professional circle of researchers and textbook writers/ compilers.  The third includes the commercial group — the ‘writers’ of guides and guess papers, probably the most ‘academically’ sought-after people regardless of the quality of things they launch in the market. The fourth consists of independent contributors of newspapers and magazines, ‘widely’ read and usually forgotten. Many young writers, however, find themselves in the margin of any one the above groups though they may have the aspiration to belong to at least one or all.

The literary writers in English form a smaller group, probably for the same old reason that everybody does not become a poet or a writer of fiction. This group may occasionally meet and make reflections on the types of standard and gravity its individual members (should) maintain in their creations. In such cases, the inspired elders may have all the norms and standards to inculcate on the aspiring young people. One typical characteristic of such reflections, most of the times, is the adherence to either British or American way of thinking, writing and critiquing though from the margin the theoretically inspired young lot may be murmuring the upsurge of postmodernist thoughts and implications.

To put it other way, the (neo)classical ways often confuse the connoisseurs of contemporary English. To study and think in English today almost means to study and think anything irrespective of standards. At an age when postmodernism instructs the blurring of boundaries and standards and shows possibilities of alternative locations, new writers and critics are found at war with the discourse of decorum and didacticism. Our academia has already led the new generation towards study of margins and alternatives with such disciplines as non-Western studies, postcolonial studies and minority studies among others. The English Departments of Kathmandu are already full of ‘discourses’ on alternative literature including Nepali literature(s) in English. So, when the talk of western standards becomes vociferous at times, the attempts to study alternatives appear ironical and therefore problematic.

The old sense of originality is ambiguous. Whose originality? Is it the originality springing from writers’ consciences and contexts, or the one supposedly instilled by old norms and paradigms? Or is it the tendency to westernize thoughts at all costs?  When the writers of non-western locations (say postcolonial thinkers) have already used English as a tool to retort western discourses through realism and indigenousness, what are we doing by advocating western ways most of the times? Theory readers would call it a neocolonial tendency, a misfit for a time when English is no longer the language of a particular nation.

Authenticity is an equally problematic notion. Can there not be a specific way of using English in Nepal? We judge our English either in American or British standards, sometimes disregarding the adaptability of our native images and allusions into this ‘medium’. English, by history, is one of the most acquisitive languages and its power lies in being able to belong to wherever it travels. Nepali English writers need not all the time write for the native readers unless required by a context. Our main intention to write in English is probably not to look like English, but to tell the international readers how much we represent ourselves in this medium. It is also to popularize Nepaliness through a common connecting language. Emphasizing authenticity in western paradigms is therefore pedantic. If not, it is the resistance to originality.

There have always been talks of some kind of Nepali English from some energetic and inspired people, but Nepali English users are yet to see how it looks and sounds. The fact is the most strident advocates of Nepali English are usually the most unappreciative sticklers to classicism. Alternatively, a palatable course for Nepali English writers would be to respect the eclecticism and diversity in the content and readership of English. Can we do away with the changes, when English itself is more a concept, a theory and an encompassing discipline than a mere lingua franca, a confined category? Perhaps we are in need of more thoughts and interactions between the old and new generations. The time is to release oneself from the tendency of waving English and American flags from the location of our native academia. The time is rather to survey the stock of Nepali writings in English — to see whither we are moving, and which course is more appropriate for us in the day ahead.

[Updated from, “Nepali English: Confusions and Directions,” The Kathmandu  Post 23 Sept. 2007]

Gaps in the Expectations of Course Designers, Teachers and Students

Critical Outlook

 

Bal Ram Adhikari

Mahendra Ratna Campus, Tahachal

 

 

Knowledge gap and expectation gap

A gap in our knowledge is natural. It is the gap that makes the process of learning inevitable, our communication meaningful, and living purposeful. In teaching, it is the knowledge gap that brings the teacher and students together in a specific world of sharing and caring. It makes cooperation and interdependence mandatory between them when both the parties strive for narrowing it down. However, before making concerted efforts in bridging the knowledge gap via teaching , we should be aware of another type of gap lying at the deeper level— the gap in the interpretation of the intension, purpose and expectation of the parties involved.  The gap of the second type results from our attempts to communicate knowledge without establishing a common ground for understanding. Successful communication of knowledge cannot take place unless the involved parties have understood the purpose of communicating that knowledge and the expectations that bring them together.  Against this backdrop, I would like to touch upon my own experience of teaching English grammar course entitled “English Grammar for Teachers” prescribed by Tribhuvan University for the master’s level students. Here I would like to shed light on the nature of the gap in expectations of the different parties who are directly involved in the production, communication and consumption of the course.

The major parties involved in the communication of grammar knowledge are course designers, teachers, students and examiners.  At the deeper level, the threads of communication among these parties are intricately interwoven. However, at the surface level we can specify who communicates what to whom where and how. In our context, this communication is almost one-way. In this monologic communication one party communicates to the other without establishing a sufficient ground for understanding each other’s purpose and aspirations.   Regarding this, I would like to refer to a fundamental question: Who wants what? raised by Chalker (1994) in designing and implementing an appropriate pedagogical grammar. The effectiveness of a course depends largely on how we answer this question.

Course designers and teachers

What do course designers want?   What do teachers want?

Course designers are the major architect of the course. They decide not only what to teach, but also how to teach and how to assess what has been taught and learned.  In our context, they are the people who assume the role of experts and communicate vertically with the teachers who they think are the people to translate their expertise and expectations into practice in the classroom.  Whenever any problem arises during the implementation of the course, the common practice is to come up with the conclusion that the teachers lack adequate knowledge in the subject matter and teaching methodology. On other hand, the teachers criticize the course designers for not taking into account of their views, and situational and institutional constraints. Students criticize both course designers and teachers for demanding too much from them. Such a culture of blame has become commonplace in the Nepalese context, and it is mainly because there is lack of communication among the stakeholders during decision-making process, before launching, during and after the implementation of the course.  The expectations of different parties are often taken for granted.

What is missing?

Knowledge of subject matter and classroom pedagogy are necessary, but not sufficient for the successful implementation of a new course.  The questions are: Have the course designers taken into account of classroom reality by involving the teachers in the decision making process?  Have both the parties shared what they expect from the course? Did both the parties have enough understanding of what they were going to achieve from the course and how? In fact, “these are the questions of negotiation”, and “typically, not enough time is spent on these kinds of questions” (Dragger, Clintok and Moffit, p. 8, 2000).  The lack of negotiation has caused a rift between what course designers want and what teachers want.

Based on the cursory observation of the course content and methodology (Adhikari, 2012), what the syllabus designers seem to communicate to the teachers is that the course is:

  1. detailed, comprehensive and exhaustive ( for it deals with four broad areas of grammar teaching: Basic Concepts of Grammar, Grammar in Practice, Grammar and the Language Teacher, Pedagogical Grammar),
  2. contemporary and in line with the recent research finding and practice of  grammar teaching (i.e. the course deals with task-based language teaching, lexical approach, discourse-based approach, processing-instruction, etc. ),
  3. pedagogical and practical.

In terms of classroom pedagogy, the designers expect the teachers to adopt the following procedures:

  1. Have students read the lesson before they come to the class or have them read in groups.
  2. Give reasons not rules.
  3. Engage students in problem-solving activities.
  4. Have them prepare and present lesson plans (maybe as mini-project work).

What have we teachers made of the course?

What follows is based on my own experience as teacher, and personal communication with the grammar teachers  like me who I came across during my visit to some of the TU campuses in an out of  the Kathmandu Valley:

  1. The course is lengthy. I do agree with the complaint that the course is lengthy. At the end of every session I have the feeling that I am unable to go into the depth of the course. Every year I manage to scrape through it with my epilogue “Yeah, I somehow completed the course.”
  2. The course is difficult to teach. Obliviously, a course becomes difficult to handle for want of sufficient orientation, group discussion, workshop, and training. Except of the one-day course dissemination program that took place once during the formal launching of the course, the concerned authority has not organized any formal/informal programs for teachers and course designers so far.
  3. The course is not well-contextualized. By whom and where the course materials were produced? It is a crucial question.  The course is universalist in its approach. The foreign books are adopted as course materials without taking into account of what Kumaravadivelu (2001) has to say about the parameters of an appropriate pedagogy: the parameter of particularity, practicality and possibility. There is no single academic work prescribed as a reading material that deals with our local/national context. Take for example, the problems that ESL/EFL students face while learning English grammar. All the evidence discussed in the textbook “The Teacher’s Grammar of English” (2009) are from Chinese, Korean, Japanese, German, Farsi and French speakers learning English. These decontextualied examples are very difficult to understand for teachers, let alone their students. Even if understood, what could be their relevance to our context?    The course designers have not justified why we need to discuss with our students the firstlanguage-specific problems faced by the speakers of the languages other than those spoken in our context. Nor are the teachers provided with practical guidelines for contextualising the universalist  materials to fit the local Nepalese contexts.

What do teachers want? What do students want?

There is another layer of gap that I have experienced in my grammar class. To align myself to what the course expects me to do in the classroom while communicating grammar knowledge to my students, I have tried to follow the procedures mentioned in the course— the procedure of  discovery-oriented and collaborative. But what I often feel is the resistance from my students by remaining absent or showing their low involvement in the classroom activity. I often have the feeling that I have failed to communicate my agenda to my students and I have failed to understand their agenda.

At the end of the class, I tell them what the coming topic will be and how it will be discussed. If the topic is theory-based, the next class will see the increase in the number of students. Most of them turn up with the prospect of listening to lecture and getting notes and summary.  If the topic is practice-oriented and the mode of learning is interactive, the number of students thins out. During the class, some students show  ‘open opposition’ to use Holliday’s (2010) term, by murmuring or not working out the solution or not showing keen interest in collaboration and sharing.  As I read the face of my students, some of them seem to have the feeling of not learning anything new as they find their notebooks without any notes or summary.

My teaching agenda:

  1. How to make their learning discovery-oriented and collaborative   so that they can work out the rules for themselves from the available linguistic evidence. As it is widely believed that such learning is meaningful and memorable. If so, it will certainly help them secure better marks in the examination.
  2. How to help them read the theoretical portions from the prescribed reading materials under my guidance and supervision. I want them to read extensively for general understanding of the text.
  3. How to help them envisage the wider application of their knowledge of English grammar to other fields such as copy editing, translation and creative/free and academic writing.
  4. How to take them out from the confinement of examination.

Let me present my students’ agenda that they have expressed in and out of the classroom verbally or through their behavior:

  1. How to pass examination.
  2. The most frequently asked questions are: Sir, what types of question are asked from this unit?

Sir, is this topic important? No questions were asked from it in the previous exams.

  1. How to get notes for the theory portion from the teacher.
  2. How to get ready-made answers and grammar rules for the problems given in the textbook.

Who should read the text for whom?

I want my students to read the assigned chapter before they come to the class. They get the following handout before I make formal entry into the course “The Teacher’s Grammar of English”:

Classroom procedures

  1. To succeed in class and examination both, you should have a good command of the material presented in the first section.
  2. Read the first section before you come to class.
  3. Your teacher begins each class going over the exercises. You are expected to answer the questions given in each chapter. The methodology will be “Give Reasons, not Rules”.
  4. From the second section of the chapter, your teacher picks out some typical errors made by the learners with different L1s. He will briefly discuss the possible causes of these errors and engage you in a short discussion of whether these errors should be addressed through pedagogical intervention.
  5. Your teacher will summarize the first section relating it to the second and third sections, which will be the reading assignment for the next class.
  6. The next class begins with problems and teaching suggestions. While reading the problem section at home, examine the types of errors and explore their causes as proposed by the writer. So far as the suggestion for teaching is concerned, examine and evaluate the activities proposed and discuss your ideas with your friends in groups.

Very few (sometimes not more than two or three out of forty or so) students do home reading. This makes the discussion of salient points from the chapter challenging and sometimes waste of time, for  my communication with the students turns out to be monologic, not dialogic. Contrary to my expectation, my students want me to read the text and summarize it for them. On the other hand, they may find what I want from them being contrary to their expectations.

The challenge that I have been facing is how to wean my students from dependency on me and how I can become progressively unnecessary for them. Despite my attempt to act as a guide to walk on their side (as the syllabus designers want me to do), my students’ expectations push me back to take up the traditional role of the teacher as a sage preaching from the stage.

The expectation gap has widened the gap in the communication of knowledge. So it is imperative that the concerned parties negotiate with each other about their expectations from the course. The course designers should sit with the teachers to find out how they have taken the course.  Also, the teachers should think of possible ways of bridging the gap between their teaching agenda and students’ learning agenda.

References

Adhikari, B.R. (2012).  English grammar: Views of student teachers

and  communication of grammar knowledge to their students. An unpublished mini-research. UGC.

Chalker, S. (1994). Pedagogic grammar: Principles and problems. In Bygate, M., Tonkyn, A. and Williams, E. (Eds.) Grammar and the language teacher (pp. 31-44). UK: Prentice Hall.

Cowan, R. (2009). The teacher’s grammar of English. Cambridge: CUP.

Curriculum Development Center (CDC). (2009). English grammar for teachers. Kirtipur: Tribhuvan University.

 Dragger, N.,  McClintok, E. & Moffit, M. ( 2000). Negotiating health development: A guide for practitioners. Conflict Management Group & World Health Organization.

Holliday, A. (2010). Appropriate methodology and social context. Cambride: CUP.

Kumaravadivelu, B. (2001). Towards post-method pedagogy. TESOL Quarterly, vol. 35, No. 4. 537-560.

Mapping “Bottom up” Pedagogy in the Age of Digitally Globalized World

Critical Outlook, English as a Global Language, Global thought

Marohang Limbu

Choutari is a great platform with many outstanding essays in “Nelta Chautari,” but one piece by my friends Prem Phyak and Shyam Sharma, “Teachers’ narrative: Building theory from the bottom up” particularly draws my attention. Prem and Shyam envision the need of scholarship, research, and pedagogy to construct knowledge at the local level. They also observe the “need to start developing new approaches, theories, and methods based on local social-cultural contexts and dynamics” so that “practical challenges of the classroom can be better tackled … theoretically, methodologically, and pragmatically.” In this essay, I am discussing pedagogical theories and practices of teaching English in the glocal (global + local) context in the age of digitally globalized world. My discussion focuses on mapping new “bottom up” pedagogy, significance of “bottom up” pedagogy, and the importance of “bottom up” and cloud computing pedagogy and its future direction.

I, like these colleagues, believe in the philosophical theory and pedagogical practices of “… Building theory from the bottom up,” for I suppose that teaching is to map/remap new knowledge, to disseminate, and cultivate it. Teaching is a powerful force that can construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct realities, and the results we achieve depend upon how we apply theories into classroom practices. Hence, in my “bottom up” pedagogy, I, as an educator, create strategic pedagogical inquiry questions, such as how my teaching/research matters to a student’s individual, academic, and professional life; how I can effectively connect pedagogical theories into classroom practices; why and how I should embrace globalization and new social media technologies (Web 2.0 tools) in my day-to-day pedagogical practices; how I can create “safer spaces” (non-threatening environment) for diverse student populations so that students can bring their cultural narratives and prior academic literacies; and how my pedagogical practices prepare cross-culturally and digitally potential human power for the 21st century digitally globalized world.

As a 21st century educator, I foresee an urgent need of pedagogical practice that Prem and Shyam indicate that we need to develop, as well as new teaching approaches, theories, and methods based on “local and social contexts.” But what does it mean in the context of digitally globalized world? And what prevents us to translate it into classroom practices? And how are we creating our “local” linguistic values and cultural identities in the context of the 21st century global/world Englishes? In our “bottom up” pedagogical approach, rather than mimicking so called the Standard English, our teaching approaches should seek ways of creating spaces of non-native English speaking students inside and outside the classrooms. Our pedagogical strategies should help, not hinder, students create their cultural and linguistic identities from the local perspective and connect them to the global level. We, as non-western educators, should also advocate for the inclusion of multicultural materials, students’ prior academic literacies, cultural narratives, and web 2.0 tools in our curricula, syllabi, and in our pedagogical practices. Our “bottom up” pedagogy should engage students in dialogical environment in both virtual and physical spaces in order to make them critical and analytical thinkers and communicators.

Furthermore, we advocate for the development of “new approaches, theories, and methods based on local social-cultural contexts and dynamics” (Phyak and Sharma). We may be claiming/reclaiming our local linguistic identities and agencies. We may be creating our identity as global citizens, but what kind of impact our pedagogy has at the local and global level. More importantly, we are living in the digitized global village where our knowledge is constantly shifting; that means disciplinary discourse is also shifting, such as analog literacy is shifting to digital literacy, paper to screen literacy, industrial economy to information economy, local culture to global culture, and national perspective to global perspective.  So, as pedagogues of the 21st century global village how our pedagogical approaches address the disciplinary/knowledge shifts when we meet with our students in the classrooms (without modern technologies).

Now is the time, not only do we have to create pedagogical environments that offer students their voices and identities, but we also have to create cross-cultural communication/intercultural communication settings where students learn to contest, question, and negotiate their spaces. As I understand, the notion of “bottom up” pedagogy tends to advocate for “local social-cultural contexts and dynamics” (Phyak and Sharma). That means it also tends to validate students’ (especially non-western and language minority) voices, but we should critically contemplate how we are conforming their voices and identities; how we are supporting world/global Englishes from our local pedagogical practices; and we also should critically evaluate how our students’ voices will be recognized in other discourse communities from the 21st century globalized context.

Furthermore, when our pedagogical strategies come into discussion, we invariably claim that our teaching approaches are “student-centered” ones, but what does “student-centered pedagogy” mean to our day-to-day teaching practices and how we practice it? In terms of my pedagogical practice/s, I teach at Michigan State University, East Lansing where I am, more often than not, likely to meet with students from almost all around the world. In my writing classes, I use Web 2.0 tools (Facebook, blogs, websites, YouTube, videoblogs, and podcasting, etc.); these cloud-computing pedagogical tools tend to be more democratic, inclusive, and representational. I, via these cloud-computing tools, encourage my students to bring their cultural narratives and individual voices. I allow my students to bring/present their cultural literacies and prior experiences in the classroom discussions and in their writing assignments. I highly encourage students to share, collaborate, communicate, create, and publish both in digital (and physical) spaces so that students can share their ideas in a single click. Additionally, my pedagogical practice also does not tend to linguistically and culturally favor one group of students over the others. As a result, students seem to question, contest, and create their spaces in the center.  In this pedagogical setting, not only students learn to collaborate, communicate, and create together, but they also learn to validate other students’ cultural narratives and prior academic experiences.

Although I claim that my pedagogy is “student-centered,” I still may be ignoring a significant number of students in my writing classes because I still handle the classes based on my interest, department’s interest, and university’s interest. Despite my democratic cloud computing pedagogy, I still feel that I fail to observe how my students are constrained by my teaching approaches and pedagogical practices within that small discourse community due to their age, interest, class, gender, sexual orientation, and prior experience. So, as educators, how are you practicing your “student-centered” pedagogy? How are you creating your students’ glocal identities and connecting their local literacies to the global level? How are you validating their voices? And how are you preparing your students for this digitally globalized world? Overall, are we just preaching or are really practicing our “student-centered” pedagogies?

What is the significance of “bottom up” pedagogical theory? What constitutes “bottom up” pedagogy? I know every teaching is different teaching; every pedagogical practice is a different practice. However, we tend to practice more or less similar type of “bottom up” pedagogical approaches, but how we literally practice it when we teach English in Nepalese rural and urban contexts. How do we practice this theory when we teach diverse multilingual, multicultural, multi-ethnic students (in different geopolitical situations)? Additionally, why do we create our syllabi before we actually meet our actual student populations?  Why do we create curricula, syllabi, and so on that do not address the diverse student populations and their interests? If we do not have power to change the curricula and syllabi, how we, including our students, are resisting the conservative ideology and hegemony. Prem and Shyam implicitly observe some “practical challenges” and they believe that those challenges “can be better tackled if we try to theoretically, methodologically, and pragmatically address those issues.” As I mentioned earlier how we are translating these theories into practices; how we are resisting the traditional ideology and hegemony in order to address the interests of multicultural and multilingual students in the context of the 21st century globalized world.

The purpose of English language teaching is not only to make students able to use basic English for basic communication, but it is also to empower them with their voices. Teaching for me is also to support students to globalize their local narratives to the global level. I remember my school level English courses where we were forced to memorize lessons and answers. We also learned grammar, speech, intonation, and some facts and figures. Similarly, when I went to college/university, I learned Western English literature, which literally had nothing to do with my Limbu culture, Limbu literature, and Limbu identity. When I became a teacher/lecturer, I practiced the same teaching approach. In this type of pedagogy, students will not be able to connect local narratives and academic literacies to the global level because cross-cultural communication is ignored; the concept of audience is also too narrow, limited, and localized. The conservative and traditional teacher centered pedagogy implicitly colonizes students. Based on this discussion, my query is how we are applying Prem and Shyam’s “social-cultural … dynamics” and how you are challenging/resisting the conservative, hegemonic, and ideological practices.

My theoretical and philosophical thoughts on “bottom up” pedagogy are we should address glocal (local + global) issues. We have to globalize our local narratives to global level and our new pedagogy should lie in the fast changing global village saturated by cloud computing technology because glocally/cross-culturally and digitally literate students can create their identities better; they can produce more effective, accurate, and high quality texts; they can effectively communicate with students/people from different cultures. Moreover, if we apply “bottom up” pedagogy from the 21st century context, it not only seems to illuminate the geopolitical blindspots, but also reduces cultural and linguistic gaps, which are better pedagogical elements of the 21st century digital global village. We have to create new “bottom up” pedagogy saturated by technology to engage students in different digital, multimodal, and cross-cultural writing projects that will provide them valuable future career preparation. Many of the traditional pedagogies we still practice do not necessarily address needs and expectations of the 21st century digitally globalized world and audience; there is a need of retheorizing and remapping our pedagogical theories and practices. Therefore, “bottom up” pedagogy is a pursuit of pedagogical transformation in the context of the 21st century global village.

Finally, in terms of theoretical, methodological, and pragmatic issues and future directions, teachers (as activists of the global society) should map/remap pedagogy from glocal perspective. This pedagogy will introduce horizontal spaces, languages, subjectivities, speeches, and writings, and these situations lead the “bottom up” concept of free playing field from the “local social-cultural contexts.”  In this process, we, along with our “now students” and our “future colleagues,” will continue to enact an epistemology of representation that will guide present pedagogical practice and will shape future pedagogical approaches. In this journey, we do not perpetuate the traditional hegemonic and ideological pedagogy as they have always been practiced, but we will map/remap democratic pedagogical theories and approaches as they will have been practiced in the future.

——

Dr. Limbu is assistant professor of English in Michigan State University, Michigan USA. You can find more information about the author here.

Why Can’t Women Do It?

Critical Outlook, Scholarly Article

A book review and reflection on Julie Des Jardines’s The Madam Curie Complex 

Sewa Bhattarai

If women really are talented and can do anything that men can, why are there few famous women philosophers, scientists, writers, musicians, and politicians? Why have women been unable to achieve anything notable in history? Are women really oppressed or are they making much ado about nothing? Underlying these questions continuously thrown at women is the assumption that opportunities are available equally to men and women, but women are just not capable enough to utilize them. This issue of women’s inability to break the glass ceiling seems striking to education in general and ELT in particular, because growing up I have heard these limitations resonate in the experience of every female teacher in Nepal (my mother and several aunts being among them).  Though teaching is a popular occupation with women, very few women are found in positions of leadership. The widely adopted explanation for this phenomenon is that women can only do women’s work: housekeeping, cooking and raising babies. In this post, I first share a review of the book “The Madam Curie Complex” by Julie Jardines, who completely overturns this traditional view. I then ask readers to consider how the situation compares to the field of Nepalese academia.

Jardines has researched and listed a number of limitations faced by women in science. Interestingly, those limitations sound eerily familiar to any woman in higher education, and even more so in societies like Nepal. Jardines begins the book by tracing the image of science right from the foundations of Western thought. The earliest philosophers like Aristotle and Plato declared that men are objective and analytical, while women are feelers and sentimental beings. Other rational thinkers also Descartes followed in the tradition and perfected this image. The field of science, as a result, has come to be seen as very virile and physical. In the post- World War II era, following the success of atom bomb, scientific victories were treated like military or sports victories. Male scientists, including Albert Einstein, became a prominent part of art and culture, featuring in superhero movies. Already, the well was poisoned against women who wanted to become scientists. How did the definition of science as male affect women scientist?

Madame Curie is probably the most famous woman scientist of all. After radium was discovered, the French academia lobbied to have the prize given only to her husband, just because Marie curie was a woman. Even though she had started the work on radium before her husband Pierre joined the team, and she was the team leader even after her husband joined. Her husband insisted to the Committee that his wife was the driving force in the research before the committee relented and awarded the prize to the couple. Even so, at the award ceremony the prize giver quoted the biblical story of Adam and Eve “God saw that man was alone and sent him a helpmeet.”

Such condescending attitudes awaited all women who wanted to pursue a career in science. Jardines lists the case of a woman whose examiner did not come to take her oral exam and said he had been sleeping, though it was 2 pm. Women who graduated in the traditionally male fields did not find employment. Like many other women, Ellen Swallow Richards took on menial job as a janitor and sweepers just to be a fly on the wall and learn about her subject anyhow. A talented woman like Rosalyn Yalow who later went on to win the Nobel prize in physiology had to take stenography courses because no one would employ her.Due to anti nepotism policies active in those days, only one of the spouses was employed by an organization. Unsurprisingly, it was mostly the male half of the couple who was employed, even if he was less qualified than his wife. Marie Curie’s husband was appointed a professor at university while she was not. And after the death of Pierre, she was allowed to take over his post, but not as a full professor that he was, only as an assistant professor. Laura Fermi, the wife of Enrico Fermi was herself a fully qualified scientist before she gave up her career to pave the way for her illustrious husband.

Besides the sneering attitudes of the top people in the field, women also faced many practical day to day problems. There were no often no women’s bathrooms in the buildings. Women were often barred from attending public lectures because there were no female seats. Men bonded over nights out at bars and made work related decisions while socializing, which women were not allowed to attend.

And what was happening to these women’s home lives as they struggled inthe professional arena? Today, Madame Curie is remembered as a motherly figure who had nothing on her mind but to discover a cure for cancer through radium. But the reality was far from it, Madam Curie had no interest in curing cancer, but instead was a very passionate scientist. This image of a motherly, caring woman was created for the sake of publicity so that more women could identify with her and fund her to get more radium. The slightest departure from this image could be disastrous: when Marie Curie won her second Nobel Prize, it did not make much news because the newspapers were busy writing about her alleged affairs. These allegations destroyed her reputation; in contrast, the affairs of Albert Einstein were treated indulgently by the press.

Other women scientists also struggled to maintain such an image, without which they were shunned by the larger society.  Even though they were scientists, they were expected to fulfill all the duties of a mother. Rosaline Gilbraith was said to sew buttons, make lunch, and attend all the school plays for her children, while Rosalyn Yalow lived only one mile away from her laboratory so that she could walk there after she had put her children to sleep. Even Marie Curie’s otherwise supportive husband left the childcare to Marie and his father. Jardines quotes Charlotte Whitton who famously said that “a woman has to work twice as hard to be thought half as good as a man.”

And if any woman, despite these hardships, managed to climb the ladders of her professional career, she would face the biggest roadblock of all: the Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize is awarded to at most three people at a time. Rosalind Franklin unluckily happened to be the fourth partner in the team that won the prize for discovering the double helix structure of DNA . Naturally, she was the one axed from the team, even though it was her photograph that provided conclusive evidence of the structure.

For a woman, it was not enough to be talented to be recognized. They also had to be patronized by the men in the field. Exceptionally talented women like Lisa Meitner, whose work contributed to building the atom bomb, ended up losing out on the prize. Meitner’s partner of thirty years Otto Hahn received the prize alone. As a consequence, Jardines calls the life of Maria Mayer charmed, even though she had taught without pay for most of her life as no one would give her work. Mayer won the Nobel prize for her work. Her husband was a physicist and she socialized with other respected physicists like Enrico Fermi. In contrast, talented women like Eleanor Lamson, Florence Sabin and Williamina Fleming, who had no defending husbands like Pierre Curie, were employed in subordinate positions while the credit for their work was taken by their male superiors. Jardines acknowledges that Nobel Prize discrimination sometimes happens to men too. However, the ratio of discrimination towards deserving women is much higher than the same for their male counterparts.

Many of these problems do not exist any longer. We have laws in place that bar discrimination, and many people have begun to concede that women can be successful in scientific careers. Many (not all, but many) men are willing to help out in the house and coordinate double careers. Thankfully, women can usually find bathrooms at workplace. And yet, the ratio of women in science remains low. A typical engineering class contains about 10% of girls. Girls are even rarer to find in pure science subjects like pure math or physics.

Many of the social glitches that dogged these earlier women still continue to pester today’s women in all fields of career. Jardines writes that once at a conference, a humorous picture of a bikini clad woman was displayed, and the men present burst out in raunchy jokes. How is a woman to handle a misogynist joke? Should she laugh along and hurt her feelings? Or should she express her feelings and jeopardize her career?Most of the socializing takes place in the evenings over drinks. In Nepal, most women still do not stay out late and drink. Work ideas are shared and camaraderie is built over the socialization, out of which most women are shut off.

In conclusion, this book gives an insight into the systematic exclusion of women from science. Jardines explains why it was so hard for them to make inroads into science and proves that the absence of women in science is not a factor of their genetic makeup. In fact, these insights are helpful for women in any field to realize the limitations facing them, and to gradually face these challenges. Hopefully, as time passes and more and more women enter all kinds of subjects, the path will be easier for future women.

As stated above, teaching is a popular career for women, maybe because it falls in the traditionally feminine fields of caring and nurturing children. Today there may even be more female teachers than male teachers in Nepal. But it would be laughable to say that a Nepalese woman can move ahead in her career as well as her male counterparts just by the dint of her talent and hard work. First, the gender hierarchy that prevails in the Nepalese culture as a whole largely shapes the roles that men and women play within the academia: men are expected to, want to, and quite often have the privileges to take relatively superior roles like that of administrators and supervisors compared to women. Second, the burden of work that women have at home doesn’t allow them to invest nearly as much time, to gain as much academic/professional expertise, and to aspire as much as men at work. Third, women who do desire and get into leadership positions are not given the same respect by men simply because they are not men. Fourth, when women are elected or invited to take on roles with authority and leadership, men tend to see their very entry into the position as representation. It would be rare for men to see the entry of a woman into the scene as a privilege for the men to have a female colleague who can add new perspectives and strengths to the institution/organization and its mission. I could go on, but I will leave it there and ask you to add your own perspectives on the issue. I hope you will join the discussion and point out issues that you have observed or experienced in Nepal.

Which of the situations described in the review above have you seen happen in Nepal? Does a particular example resonate with your or one of your colleague’s professional experience in the academia? How far have we come from, say, 30 years ago in terms of women leading or shaping the field of education? I would be delighted to read comments from the NELTA community about this subject.

Critical Thinking in EFL Classrooms

Critical Outlook


Lal Bahadur Rana

This article discusses what critical thinking is, why it is important for second or foreign language learners and analyses whether or not it can be applicable to teaching English as a foreign language in the contexts of Nepal. If it is applied, what kinds of challenge are likely to occur and how the teachers who practice critical thinking can overcome them.

On defining critical thinking

Critical thinking refers to a type of lateral thinking that enables individuals to analyze and evaluate information about a situation or phenomenon or a problem and to make appropriate decisions that befit in their contexts. As a matter of fact, it is the thinking process through which people tend to gather knowledge, deconstruct the gathered knowledge and create new knowledge. The people who think critically do not take anything for granted, no matter who says.  Instead, they raise vital questions and problems, formulate them clearly, gather and assess relevant information, use abstract ideas, think open-mindedly and communicate effectively with others.

Critical thinking, like many other phenomena, has been defined variously by many scholars. So it is worth discussing some of those definitions. Ennis (1989  defines critical thinking as a “reasonable, reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do”. This definition implies that critical thinking enhances our judgmental ability” (as cited in Fisher 2011, p. 4). Similarly, Beyer (1995) is of the same opinion and maintains that critical thinking means reasoned judgments. Kelley and Browne (1994) maintain that critical thinking consists of an awareness of a set of interrelated critical questions, plus the ability and willingness to ask and answer them at appropriate times. For Paul (2003), critical thinking is that mode of thinking about any subject, content or program in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully taking charges of the structures inherent in thinking or imposing intellectual standard upon them. Likewise, Lohani et al. (1998) also define critical focusing on standards to be maintained. According to them, critical thinking is consciously observing, analyzing, reasoning, and evaluating, according to proven standards. To conclude, critical thinking is that mode of thinking which stimulates higher level of thinking in individuals, and enables them to take rationale decisions analyzing different contexts skillfully and wisely.

Why critical thinking

To my knowledge, the teachers of English in Nepal carry out their teaching activities focusing on contents or information only, because their main focus is to facilitate learners become proficient in English, rather than developing higher order of thinking in them. In other words, our teaching learning activities are confined to knowledge and comprehension level only. Consequently, we are not able to help our students develop higher order thinking skills such as of application, analysis, evaluation and creating. However, it does not mean that the adherents of critical thinking deny the importance of information; rather they maintain that learners should go beyond the information level, because in real life situations learners need to possess higher order of thinking skills in order to face their challenges. If we believe that the education that we impart to our learners should cater to their needs, we should conduct our teaching and learning activities following the framework and strategies that adhere to critical thinking. It is because critical thinking encourages learners to think independently, share their ideas, respect others’ opinions-be they against or in favor of them etc. To put it other way, learners are likely to foster human rights, democratic norms and values just by carrying out small tasks in classrooms, because they sub-consciously build up the knowledge that there is power and pleasure in accepting the existence of others.

In the post conflict scenario of Nepal, the importance of  teaching and learning of critical thinking can hardly be exaggerated, because the students who have been studying at schools and colleges have got the hangover of the conflict in the past. They have lost the abilities to raise questions against any issues or problems, no matter how bad they feel. The ability to think critically is especially important for students living in a country with political and socioeconomic problems, for it will help them to look at issues from different viewpoints and become independent thinkers and responsible citizens (Shaila and Trudell, 2010). The students who have been studying at schools and colleges have bittersweet experiences of insurgency, which seem to be deeply rooted in their minds. If we follow the ideology of critical thinking in our classrooms, learners will be able to analyze those experiences through different perspectives and make sure that they will respect and make others respect human rights, democratic norms and values, laws of the land, individual freedom etc.

Although Tribhuvan University has prescribed the courses such as ‘Reading, Writing and Critical Thinking’ in B. Ed. and ‘Critical and Creative Thinking’ in B.A., these courses are also taught and learned focusing on contents. Lecture is the only classroom activity for teaching of those courses. Because of this system, students heavily depend on teachers and begin to memorize the information with the faint hope of reproducing in the examination so that they can pass the examination to be administered once a year. They think that teacher is the bank of knowledge and therefore they take whatever teachers provide them for granted. Thus, we are not preparing learners to be independent thinkers, but blind supporters of certain -isms or persons, which has resulted deadlocks in every sector of our country.

In order for a good learning to take place, three perspectives- materials, methodology and pedagogy play pivotal roles, therefore, all these three aspects should simultaneously be changed. Of these three perspectives, bringing about the changes in the pedagogical perspectives is the most challenging task. Therefore, we tend to change learning materials only, retaining the same teaching and testing systems. Therefore, despite the implementation of good syllabuses, the result remains the same.  Nowadays, I am fully convinced that without bringing about changes in classroom activities, we cannot obtain the desired outcomes. As far as I know, strategies to be followed while conducting classes following the principles of critical thinking can be very instrumental to help learners develop their proficiency or competence in second language and foster higher order of thinking skills at the same time.

Application of critical thinking in EFL classrooms

The application of critical thinking in EFL or ESL classrooms is quite possible, because the strategies such as Think Pair Share (TPS), quick write, know- want to know- learned (KWL), pen in the middle, jigsaw, predictions by terms ,debate etc.  prescribed by critical thinking are almost familiar to the teachers of English. Similarly, the ABC (Anticipation, Building knowledge, and Consolidation) framework followed in teaching following critical thinking is very much similar to the PWP (Pre-, While and Post) or BWA (Before, While and After) framework used in teaching reading and listening.

In the anticipation stage, teachers set contexts for carrying out the main tasks using learners’ experience or previous knowledge so that learners can easily understand the main texts. Similarly, in building knowledge stage, learners receive new information, or ideas, and consolidation stage learners consolidate what they have learnt in a lesson going beyond the texts so that their learning can be permanent or automatic, because the learners are provided with the opportunities to assimilate the new knowledge with their real life experiences.  Thus, it seems that ABC and PWP or BWA frameworks are different terminologically only. However, it is not true. There are certain differences between these frameworks. The PWP or BWA framework is generally used for teaching receptive skills- listening and reading, whereas the ABC framework is applicable to any kind of teaching items or subjects. The striking difference between them is that, in the former, the teachers are much concerned on how they can include the activities as per the six levels of cognitive domain given by Bloom (1956), but   in the latter teachers focus on only how they could help learners develop their language proficiency.

While we are teaching English, we teach different kinds of texts such as essays, poems, stories, memoirs, biographies, dramas, novels, etc. In order to teach these discourses, we can very wisely utilize critical thinking strategies, which can help us shift our activities from teacher centered to student centered. These strategies can help us dissect texts into various pieces and analyze each piece with some criteria or standards.   If we apply ABC framework with suitable strategies, we are sure to ‘improve today and create a better tomorrow’ Chapman (2007). It is because teachers will not only help students develop their abilities to communicate effectively, but also the abilities to make appropriate decisions taking wider perspectives of their social and cultural lives into their account.

The above discussion implies the fact that we can apply critical thinking strategies in EFL or ESL classes successfully. The objectives of English curricula should not be circumscribed to linguistic factors alone. They should include the art of critical thinking. It is because, in order to be proficient in a language, learners need to use creative and critical thinking through the target language.

 Challenges

 In course of implementation, few challenges can easily be envisioned, which need to be faced by all teachers of English collaboratively. Most of the students focus on linguistic factors; rather than higher level of thinking. Thus, the development of critical thinking in language classroom seems to be a by-product of teaching English. To some extent, it seems to be true as well, because relatively a large number of students struggle for the improvement of linguistic abilities in English. Thus, for those students whose English proficiency is not fairly good, developing critical thinking in them seems to be a far-reaching goal. My own experience in ESL classrooms shows that students are engaged in higher level of thinking if they are provided with opportunities to use their native language in the discussions of different kinds of texts selected for them. In other words, many students have good ideas, but due to the lack of good command over English, they lag far behind.

Another challenge is that most of our teaching learning activities are guided by testing. To be specific, teachers in Nepal tend to teach what are likely to be asked in the examinations; rather than what are important for learners to learn. Most of the examinations at schools, colleges and universities contain test papers that are limited to knowledge and comprehension levels. If an examiner happens to construct papers including the questions which require students to use their higher level of thinking, the examinees tend to claim that the questions are out of syllabi, which results into re-administration of the examination.

Courses to be taught and learnt, on the other hand, are highly challenging both in terms of length and contents. Teachers hardly ever finish the courses just by doing building knowledge stage only, let alone anticipation and consolidation. Moreover, some teachers are likely to show their reluctance to change their stereotypical teaching techniques. Critical thinking emphasizes that learners should learn to analyze the same texts or situations through different perspectives. Thus, the teachers who follow critical thinking strategy are sure to go beyond the texts spending much time on the same lesson. So the implementation of critical thinking strategies will require comparatively more time than in the ways the teachers tend to teach. In some cases, large number of students in the classroom will also pose some challenges. The government of Nepal has specified that in a standard classroom there should be fifty students. In colleges or universities one hundred and the above students study in a classroom. Most of the strategies prescribed by critical thinking methodology seem to be appropriate for the classes which consist of some twenty to thirty students.

All new things in Nepal are introduced following top down modality of implementation. Teachers in the classrooms can adopt the innovative ideas and strategies in the classrooms, but they may not be supported by the personnel in high ranks or positions. The examiners are also not very much well-informed in the use of critical thinking in  setting question papers that can check the different levels of critical thinking. If there are incompatibilities in teaching and testing, it can exacerbate the result of our academic institutions.

Possible Solutions

Both the teachers and students should be crystal clear about the fact that language is not used in vacuum; neither is it used without contents. In order to develop language proficiency, we need subject matters to be discussed or studied or taught by using a target language. So both knowledge and language get developed simultaneously. Surely, the critical thinking strategies if applied properly will stimulate learners to develop higher levels of thinking and make them feel like expressing, sharing, doubting, debating, discussing, etc. At the same time, when they feel the need of expressing their ideas, they automatically acquire their target language i.e. English in the context of Nepal. Undoubtedly, in the initial days, learners can be confused and will even think that they are not learning, nor will they think that their teacher is teaching, but their perseverance to try a new way of learning will certainly count in the long run. It is because almost all the strategies to be used in critical thinking enhance learner-centeredness.

Syllabus designers, textbook writers, examiners certainly play significant roles in deciding what instructional techniques and evaluation schemes should be followed in a particular program. They should know the fact that critical thinking is an important way of imparting education to the students. These three key stakeholders should collaborate and take initiatives to make textbooks, exam papers and teaching learning activities critical thinking friendly.

Conclusion

In conclusion, critical thinking is one of the most thought provoking methods of teaching, which can be implemented in any discipline. From the above discussion, it can be discerned that this methodology can be applied in teaching English as a foreign language, disregarding to whether the learners are in elementary level or advanced level. The implementation of critical thinking can help learners bring about positive changes in the ways they think and expand the horizons of their knowledge. Therefore, if it is implanted in ESL classrooms, the learners will not only build up communicative competence in English, but also intellectual traits.

References

Atkinson D. 1997. A critical approach to critical thinking in TESOL. TESOL Quarterly, 31 (1), 71-94.

Barbara, L. and Wendy, W. 2006. Critical Thinking Framework for any Discipline. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 17: 160-166.

Chapman, D. E. 2007. The Curricular Compass: Navigating the Space between Theory and Practice. Thinking Classroom. 5: 29-34.

Craford, A. et al. 2005. Teaching and Learning Strategies for the Thinking Classroom. Kathmandu: Goreto Nepal

Fisher A. 2011. Critical Thinking: An Introduction. New Delhi: Cambridge University.  Press.

Gardner P.S. 2009. New Directions. Reading, Writing and Critical Thinking. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press.

Lohani, S. et al.(eds). 1998. Critical and Creative Thinking. Kathmandu: Modern Printing Press.

Mahmuda Y. S. and Trudell. B. 2010. From Passive Learners to Critical Thinkers: Preparing EFL Students for University Success. English Teaching Forum. 3: 2- 9.

Shea, G. I. 2009. Public Speaking Tasks in English Language Teaching. English Teaching Forum. 47: 18- 23. Underwood, M. 1989. Teaching Listening. London: Longman

So Many Textbooks, So Little Time

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

So Many Textbooks, So Little Time:
Selection of English Curricula in the Public Nepali School System

Kent Grosh,  Fulbright Teaching Assistant *


Though we are discussing English education, let us imagine for a moment we are with a primary school teacher teaching math at Grade 4.  The students are presented with this problem:

figure of a math problem

The basic approach to solving this problem, the one we would assume that the class 4 teacher would present, might be similar to this:

But perhaps some of the students are still having trouble understanding this problem.  They might not understand the formula, or perhaps they never learned their multiplication tables well and can’t remember what 6 times 8 is.  We would expect that the teacher goes through each step until every student understands how to get the answer.

But imagine that the school, in response to poor student performance in math, decided that teaching advanced math would help the students learn more.  The fourth grade math teacher is provided with an advanced math textbook, perhaps a calculus textbook, and asked to teach it to their students in order to help them improve faster.  In that case, the the solution to Problem 0.1 that the primary level teacher would present might end up looking like this:

Someone with a background in math would recognize that this approach is just as correct, mathematically, as the first solution, but it is not nearly as appropriate to the audience.  What good would teaching calculus to students in class four do, even if the math is right and we get the right answer?  Would the teacher expect this to improve the students performance, or would this perhaps confuse them even further, and distract them from the fundamentals that prevented them from understanding the question to begin with?  If the students have trouble with this simple problem, teaching them to solve it with calculus would likely result in hopelessly confused students who do not understand how to find the answer at all.

This scenario may sound absurd, but it is unfortunately more or less the approach that many public schools have taken to improving student’s English.  Most public schools, whether English medium or not, teach two English periods per day.  One period often uses the government text, but the other uses a supplemental text, examples of which are Headway English, New Nepali Reader, Lotus English, or Harmony.  Private schools, whose students are generally ahead of their public school peers in English, use similar texts, and the understanding among those who choose and write the textbooks seem to be that using similar curricula and materials to that of the private schools will create similar results.  Thus, the texts at use at least half the time in public schools are frequently much more advanced than the corresponding government text.  There seems to be a general consensus among public schools that the more advanced the material presented, the more students will learn.

Unfortunately, creating unrealistic expectations for students does not improve the quality of their education. There are a variety of reasons that factor into the gap between the performance of students in private schools and those in public schools, but attempting to correct poor English by increasing the difficulty of the textbook is analogous to correcting poor math performance in class four  by teaching them calculus. Frequently, these textbooks are so advanced that the majority of the material are too far above the level of the students’ understanding for anything useful to be learned.  Rather than improving their English, the students gain nothing from the material presented, wasting the time that should be spent on creating a good, foundational understanding of English basics and fundamentals.

This is a writing sample I received from one of my class six students.  I present this not for criticism but simply for the purpose of comparison:

Ones upon a time there live in tiger and deer.  one day tiger was very hungry tigers look his lift side deer is going to drink and tiger eat that Deer.

In my experience, this sample is representative of a standard class six ability in English, and while it isn’t bad it is also clear there are still errors in basic grammar and spelling that need to be addressed; it seems that the simple past tense is not understood by the students, nor is punctuation.  By comparison, here is a sample from the textbook being taught in this class, this unit featuring a poem:

I saw a boy with eager eyes,/  Open a book upon a stall,/ And read, as he’d devour it all;
Which when the stall man did espy,/    Soon to the boy I heard him call,
“You, Sir, you never buy a book,/ Therefore in one you shall not look.”
The boy pass slowly on, and with a sigh,/ He wished he had never been taught to read,
That of the old churl’s books he should/ have no need.

            ~Mary Lamb, in Foning and Panlook, Headway English Book 6, pg. 123

Imagine the student who wrote the first writing sample reading this poem.  Look at some of the words used, such as stall, devour, espy, churl.  Not only are these words advanced and infrequently used in conversational English, but in the case of espy and churl the student might never encounter these words again until a Ph.D. program.  So what is being taught here, aside from obscure vocabulary?  There is no basic grammar construction being focused on, in fact much of the grammar is incorrect due to the flexible grammatical rules of poetry.  As a teacher, there is no lesson to teach here, little to be practiced or taught that students will find useful, and nothing to engage them.  There is little option for the teacher but to simply translate the poem into Nepali and have the students memorize the required vocabulary for the exam, all of which they are will likely to forget afterward; it is unlikely they will encounter, or they will have opportunity to use, any of these words again anytime soon.

Unfortunately, this example is representative of many, if not most, of the supplemental texts at use in public school classrooms.  Not only does this approach to learning actually result in students learning much less than they would with a simpler textbook, but there are a number of other more subtle, but equally damaging consequences.  As most Nepali teachers will be able to tell you, Nepali students frequently find speaking English extremely difficult.  It is not unusual to come across class ten students who, having studied English for six or seven years and who can read and even write proficiently, find it difficult to have a simple conversation in English.  In part, this is a result of the student never having learned fundamentals properly.  While their vocabulary is impressive, students are often never properly taught the basic grammar necessary for simple speech.  Speaking in another language is difficult, even terrifying, for a language learner, and without confidence in simple structures and grammar students will never have confidence in speaking.  When will class six students ever use espy or churl in a sentence when they need to communicate something?  And why should they, when simple past tense and correct punctuation are still a struggle for them?

But perhaps the most unfortunate result of these texts is that it removes the potential for fun from the classroom.  Students do not and cannot enjoy learning material that they cannot understand, and when the text being taught is incomprehensible to them, how will they be able to take any interest in it, even if the story or passage has good content?  Overly difficult material eliminates the possibility of games, activities, or creativity that engages the students, resulting in boring, dry lessons and a rote-learning approach in order to do well on the examinations.  A good teacher will always be able to engage students with material that they already understand, but even a good teacher will struggle to make the incredibly advanced textbooks presented in the public school classroom interesting or fun.  A good teacher can always make simple material challenging to the students by incorporating creative activities, more difficult vocabulary, or language production like writing and speaking, which are things teachers should be doing anyway.  But it is much, much harder for a good teacher to make anything useful of the difficult and irrelevant content provided as textbooks in the public school classroom.

It is true that public school students are often behind their private school peers, but there are many positive aspects to public school English education, not the least of which are fantastic government textbooks for class six, seven, and eight.  If public school are serious about increasing the quality of education that their students receive, work needs to be put into making sure that students have a solid foundation in the fundamentals, especially at the lower secondary level.  Only then will they be ready for more advanced materials.  Without that, attempting to increase student’s English with the use of textbooks above their level is like teaching calculus to class four students who have trouble finding the area of a rectangle.

————-

* From the Author: My name is Kent Grosh, and I have been teaching here in Nepal in a public school for about nine months.  It has been a wonderful experience; the students are enthusiastic and hard working, the teaching staff is dedicated and friendly, and there are many positive and encouraging things happening in the Nepali public school system that are often overlooked while lamenting the challenges at hand.  However, in this article I’ve chosen to highlight one common approach in public school English educational curricula that I believe is in need of change, with the hope this article might inspire some teachers and school administrators to assess their schools textbooks and ask whether they are appropriate to the abilities of their students.      

Speaking a Foreign Language Makes You Less Intelligent

Critical Outlook, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

 Luke Lindemann*

Speaking a foreign language makes you less intelligent. This is a fundamental truth about speaking a foreign language, but it is often forgotten. And forgetting this truth can have profoundly negative consequences for the classroom.

I do not mean that the practice of learning a language is harmful to intelligence. What I mean is that when we express ourselves in a language that is not our mother tongue, we must simplify our thoughts. To give a personal example, I have been conversationally fluent in Nepali for almost two years, but even today when I speak Nepali I feel less intelligent. I know fewer vocabulary  and the words I do know are simpler than those of my Nepali friends. It takes me longer to parse sentences and longer to respond. I forget words and mix others up and am often laughed at for some amusing mistake (my students were quite confused when I told them that their homework assignment was due ‘pharsi’ – I had meant ‘parsi’). For me, thinking in Nepali is just harder to do. It takes longer and it is exhausting.

When our students speak or write to us in the English language, they are the same students as when they speak Nepali to us outside of class, but the outward manifestation of their personalities can be very different. They may be bolder or they may be more shy, depending upon how they face the challenge and potential humiliation of being forced to express themselves in a less intelligent (and oftentimes laughably simplistic) way. This is the discomfort and terror of learning a language, and also its exhilarating challenge.

As teachers who have long since mastered the English language, we sometimes forget this. We teach language as if it were a simple skill like long division, and not a fundamental means of expressing ourselves. We scold our students for not speaking out in class, for being timid and quiet when their names are called and they must stand up and speak out in front of their friends. But when we do this, we are forgetting the terror and frustration that we experienced when we were students. We are inhibiting their learning.

By teaching only in this way, we make speaking English a terrifying ordeal for the less confident students. And it is almost impossible to develop communicative competence, in which students are able to hold a spontaneous conversation. Without communicative competence, the students may be able to pass the SLC but they will never be able to speak English fluently.

We must also take language into account when considering the medium of instruction for other classroom subjects like science and social studies. Most of the students where I worked spoke Tamang as a first language, Nepali as a second language, and English as a third language. The decision for medium of instruction is a very important decision in a country like Nepal that has such vibrant language diversity. In choosing to include instruction in the medium of English, Nepali, or a regional language, a school must respond to the desires of the community, the pressures of competition with other schools private and public, the resources available, and the strengths and limitations of the government curricula and examinations.

Ideally, students should be given the opportunity to learn in the language with which they are most comfortable. Speaking a foreign language makes you less intelligent. When students learn history or science in a language that is not their own, their grasp of the subject matter is unavoidably simpler. The depth of their questions and their creative capacity are diminished. They do not learn as well.

Unfortunately, in many places throughout Nepal today this is something of a necessary evil. A good command of the English language is considered one of the most useful skills, and English medium instruction is held to be one of the best ways to develop that skill. Schools must compete with each other by offering quality instruction in the areas that foster high SLC scores and attract students. Schools in poorer areas can also be hampered by a lack of materials and staff.

But regardless of resources or medium of instruction, in every single classroom in Nepal there needs to be the realization that language study is less about memorizing words and more about learning to communicate. Language study is difficult, often scary, and (when mastered) extremely satisfying and valuable. Speaking a foreign language will make you feel less intelligent, especially at first, but mastering a foreign language will make you brilliant.

————– 

* Luke Lindemann was a 2010-2011 Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Shree Udaya Kharka Secondary School in Chapagaon VDC, Lalitpur. Before receiving this grant, he worked as an English teacher for Bhutanese refugees in the United States. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics from Pomona College, and his primary interests are language issues and education. 

Examination as an Agent of Educational Reform: Re-iterating some issues of debate

Critical Outlook, Scholarly Article


         Ram Ashish Giri, PhD

EIL, Monash University, Melbourne

Introduction

As the Nepalese politics remains entangled in developing a process of political reform, the academia has embarked upon reforming the education sector in order to meet the changing socio-political and educational aspirations of the people. They are looking into the ways of reforming the curricula, existing teaching force, infrastructure and recourses. However, one area of education which does not receive as much attention is examination, in particular the national examination. Examination as a measure of achieved competencies, developed abilities and acquired educational proficiency plays a crucial role in shaping up the very educational system.  In developing contexts like Nepal, reforming examination may be the cheapest, most viable and most effective way of reforming education. In this article, I take English language education (ELE) as a case study and present an argument for examination as an agent of educational reform. My purpose in this article is to open an argument for discussion to all ELE practitioners, including NELTA Choutari readers.

The debate of reforming education, in particular ELE in Nepal is not new. Several attempts have been made in this respect in the past (for a detailed discussion of this, see Giri 2005) to improve the educational system in order to meet the changing requirements of the school graduates in the globalised world. However, the outcomes of these attempts have been severely scanty and limited. One reason for this could be the fact that no serious attempts have been made to reform the examination system. No significant debate about ameliorating the current examination practices seems to occur in the Nepalese academia.  Despite repeated recommendations from researchers on the SLC examination, for example (see Khaniya 1990, C. Giri 1995 and R. Giri 2005), no resolute initiatives have  been made in order to reform the examination. The constitution of a Study Team in 2005 to study student performances in the SLC may be regarded as an important government initiative in this direction (Mathema and Bista 2005).   There were, however, a number of inconsistencies in the formation as well in the findings/recommendations of the Study Team. Firstly, the study was anything but about student performances. The study report did put in the report a few tables of statistics from the Office of the Controllers of Examinations (OCE). However, it failed to report why certain students performed well while others did not, what were the attributes of their performances and what factors contributed to it.  Secondly, most of the members of the study team had neither the right qualifications nor right training to study student performances. Thirdly, as a result of the first two, some of the findings and recommendations are contradictory and do not fit well for the very context for which the Study Team was created. To cite just a few of the numerous examples of these, the team does recognise the role of examination in educational reform:

The SLC provides both a yardstick for measuring student performance and an instrument for holding schools and teachers accountable for higher performance. It encourages schools to do better, forces teachers to cover course contents, ensures alignment between instruction and curriculum, motivates students to learn more, creates competitive environment between and/or among schools, helps to ensure that all schools maintain the same standards, provides a means for measuring the impact of school reform initiatives, selects students for further education, and provides a basis for certification. In a nutshell, the SLC can potentially be used as a driver of improving the quality of education (Mathema and Bista 2005, p. 70).

However, the report recommends that the examination papers in SLC be limited on Grade 10 curriculum materials only because ‘historically, SLC examinations were limited to Grade 10 syllabus and question papers were set from the texts taught in Grade 10’. The report goes on to elaborate that SLC examinations are ‘meant for testing the learning achievement of children and that there is no particular pedagogical position as to what should be tested through a level-end public examination such as the SLC’ (p.77). There is no justification provided in the report as to how limiting of question papers to Grade 10 helps improve the quality of education. The report fails to acknowledge that there are numerous studies carried out elsewhere (discussed below) showing that limiting the coverage of question in this way usually has adverse effects on the quality of education system. One another instance of their inadequacy of knowledge of the field can be seen in their justification that the scope and coverage of the tests, therefore, depend on the intent which is essentially a political rather than a pedagogical decision (Mathema and Bista 2005, p. 77). Thus, it is not hard to decipher that the solution they recommended to an educational problem is rather a political one.

Through this article, I would like to open a forum to the Chautari readers to express their opinions about the government handling of the educational problems as far as the educational reforms are concerned. Several Master and PhD level research projects may be encouraged to address such issues as:

  1. If and to what extent, limiting the papers to Grade 10 curriculum and text materials has helped address the issue of ‘cheating’ in the examination;
  2. How and to what extent limiting the papers to Grade 10 curriculum and text materials has lessened the burden on the part of students, teachers, parents and other stakeholders;
  3. What effects the limiting the papers to Grade 10 curriculum and text materials has had on the quality of education in general and teaching and learning practices in particular;
  4. If and to what extent, the SLC results reflects the required abilities and proficiencies of the SLC graduates;
  5. If and to what extent the SLC examination should be developed on the prescribed text materials.

Now I will take on the English language education and the SLC test of English with a view to providing a context for the forum I mentioned above. So far as language education in Nepal is concerned, most of the debate centres on the local ethnic languages and mother-tongue education. If there is any sporadic debate on ELE, it is mainly limited to curricular and pedagogic matters and distribution of ELE facilities. The ELE policy and its examination are rarely publicly debated. The non-existence of the debate on ELE at the policy and examination fronts may be because (a) there is reluctance on the part of the people to explicitly talk about politically sensitive issues such as the language issues in the present volatile political climate. Debating the sensitive and somewhat controversial ELE issue is likely to ignite a whole range of socio-political and educational issues for which Nepal is not politically ready, not at the present any way; (b) ELE is not a part of the overall consciousness of the average people. People are unaware of the fact that the lack of a consistent policy regarding the status, role and teaching English is doing more harm than good to the existing linguistic fabrics of Nepal; and finally, (c) the people see an undeniable, incontestable and uncontroversial role of English, and therefore, do not see the relevance of debating about it (Giri 2009). 

There is no doubt that English today has established itself as a language of power but more importantly, it has become the language of all economic and educational success. Whether it is a simple housemaid’s work or tourist guide’s, or whether it is teaching in a private school or establishing own business, English is an indispensable aid without which, as an academics says below, success is only an illusion:

“People who know English are more exposed, more knowledgeable and therefore, more successful in life than those who don’t. Without English, there is no academic or occupational future” (a professor during interview in Giri 2009).

The Context of ELE reform

English is taught throughout Nepal for academic as well as communicative purposes from primary to higher secondary levels in both the private and public school systems through a centralised system of education with a centrally prepared curriculum. However, due to inadequate resources, under-qualified or inappropriately trained teachers, lack of facilities and widespread poverty in the country regions, the outcomes of school English teaching have not been satisfactory. The SLC results between 1981 and 2009 demonstrate that between 69% and 80% of all students who participated in the SLC failed due to students failing in English (Ministry of Education/ Controller of Examinations {MOE/OCE, 2010}, See also Bhattarai 2004).

The new English curriculum revised in the mid 1990s acknowledges the shortcomings of the previous ELE practices which were based on the knowledge approach and recommends that teaching English is about developing language proficiency for higher education, and acquisition of communicative skills. The new curriculum scrapped the old aims and formulated a new set of aims of developing study skills in students and enabling them to communicate with people of any nationality who speak or write English by exposing them to a variety of texts of spoken and written English.  The two new secondary level courses (one each for grade 9 and 10) claim to be of practical nature with ‘functions’ as the core of the curriculum; and grammatical structures and vocabulary as tools to express the functions. However, the pedagogic as well as examination systems are still traditional in their approach and emphasise testing the knowledge of language.  Instructional schemes, for example, continue to rely on the traditional approach to education in which emphasis is laid on accurate memory and memorisation of information; and rote learning is unduly encouraged. Comprehension questions test the skills of locating information in the text and of answering factual questions.  The ‘old’ SLC English test is still in use despite extensive critiques as to its validity, reliability and theoretical adequacy. Clearly, there is a ‘wash-back’ effect from the old test with a number inconsistencies and discrepancies in the test developing process that is impacting on the potential of the new curriculum to actually make a difference to the way English is being taught (Bhattarai 2004; Giri 2005).

What is not recognised is the fact that the very wash-back effects of the SLC may play a potential change agent for the improvement of the entire ELE process, and as a basis for instructional innovation and amelioration of the teacher preparation processes. An appropriate SLC test may in fact create a ‘positive washback effect’ and hence contribute to change the very ELE process.

The School Leaving Certificate Examination

About 400,000 school graduates from public and private schools sit the SLC held in March-April each year. As a gatekeeper for entry into the higher education and employment, it is implemented after a school level qualifying test known as the ‘send-up’ test. The ‘send up’ test is administered by the District Education Offices (DEOs) for the public schools, and clusters of schools for the private schools.

Like any other external or national examinations, the SLC defines common standards of performance required to demonstrate adequate completion of a syllabus. It has a status in the wider community, and is supposed to provide an objective assessment of a student’s performance.

The current SLC is a 3 hour long test in each subject area which like any other standardised test, covers a limited part of the course syllabus, and can, therefore, capture only a small sample of a student’s performance even on the topics tested within the period of time allotted. According to Marsh (1999) a national examination like the SLC is usually biased against students who do not perform well under examination pressures, encourages a concentration of teaching only those aspects of a course which are most readily assessed, and encourages didactic teaching and rote learning (2005). However, the SLC is deeply rooted in Nepali educational tradition and is here to stay at least for the foreseeable future. In the near future, it is proposed to be given at the end of 10+2 (Year 12). It is, therefore, imperative that the problematic areas of the SLC are exposed and solutions to the problems found. 

The High Stake Nature of the SLC and its Stakeholders

The SLC is a high stake examination, and consequently, it is accorded a great importance in the Nepalese society. It plays a crucial role in the lives of most, even all individuals involved in it.  It has become a major landmark in an individual’s life in the Nepalese society. It provides the ladder for one to get on to higher education and also opens up to vista of making his/her own career development. Success in the SLC examination plays a decisive role in getting entrance to a campus, making the choice of subjects in higher education, taking part in scholarship competition and job competition and opting for a particular vocation.

Whether it is societal frontiers, admission to higher education, employment or personal achievement, the SLC results become a basis for decision making carrying a serious consequence on an individual’s life. The SLC results are seen as the final arbiter of student’s ability and dictate the student’s future.  Failure in the SLC is not only a matter of personal shame on the part of students; it also means the loss of an opportunity for a job or admission to higher education.  The SLC graduates with high grades are eligible to apply for a place at prestigious institutes and faculties like Medicine, Engineering, and Science.  Those who pass with an average mark seek admission in less popular disciplines.

The SLC affects the lives of teachers too. Failure to get students through the examination sees claims of incompetence, neglect of duty and sometimes means the loss of a job.  Teachers with a high success rate in the SLC are given certificates of appreciation or monetary benefits.

Parents, who can afford it, make special efforts to get their children through the SLC by sending them to private tuition classes, getting them extra help during the examination period and sending them for private lessons with teachers who are potential examiners. The SLC holds the key to any walk of life in the Nepali society, so parents endeavour to get their children through the examination no matter what. They adopt any means in order to do so, because failure in the SLC means a great loss of family resources and prestige. A public school’s performance is judged in terms of the success rate of its students in the SLC. Schools securing high pass rate are considered to be ‘prestigious’ and are awarded prizes by the Ministry of Education (MOE). Failure to secure good results is regarded as demonstrating inefficiency, poor management, and incompetence.  Such schools are penalised by withdrawing the grants-in-aid.

In the case of private schools, the rate of enrolment depends on the success record in the SLC. A lower pass rate results in students/parents being less likely to enrol or continue in a school. Loss of students means loss in income for school entrepreneurs. School administrators, therefore, are mainly concerned about training the students with exam tactics and equipping them with well-prepared model answers in order to get the maximum pass rate.  Numerous newspaper reports in the past (for example, Spotlight, 2001; Kantipur, 30 May 2001; TKP, various issues) alleged that some well-off schools administrators have exercised power pressure tactics or even provide monetary incentives to examiners or examination administrators to secure a higher pass rate (TKP, various issues). One example of such an irregularity was the scheme of publishing the top-ten achievers of the SLC Board. This was abolished in 2000 because some schools used unethical practices to secure a position in the top-ten list.

To sum up this section, because of the high stake of the SLC, students develop a ‘must pass’ attitude and use whatever means they can to do so as performance in the SLC is critically important to the students and the school. This anxiety is shared by the parents, family and community in an equal degree. For all these reasons, getting success by hook and crook has become a norm or even motivational principle for many.

There is a long-felt need to ameliorate the English language examination in Nepal which is largely old-fashioned, product based and unproductive. The current English language education (ELE) is in a bad shape. It suffers from a lack of a trained teaching force, mismanagement, under-development of basic infrastructure and inadequate resources and above all it lacks an adequate state policy.  The English language test of the SLC is outmoded, poorly conceived and badly developed. It perpetuates the memorisation-based learning. Furthermore, it does not produce credible and consistent results. More importantly, it does not reveal the actual language proficiency of a candidate. The test exerts negative washback effects on teaching and learning of English at the SLC level (see Khaniya 1990, C. Giri 1995, Awasthi 1995, R. Giri 2005).

The new testing scheme should aim at producing a new and improved SLC test, while at the same time modelling a process for developing such a test. More specifically it should investigate how an English language test can be revised for the changing English language teaching (ELT) context of Nepal and according to the best language testing knowledge available. Based on a comprehensive analysis of the ELT context of Nepal, current theories of language testing, and English as a Second/Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) testing practices in some of the developed and developing nations, a language testing adaptation process can then be modelled and a new test package developed.

There is, therefore, a two-fold challenge: firstly, to adapt, on the basis of an analysis of some of the existing models or approaches to ESL/EFL testing, a language testing model which is theoretically justifiable and functionally appropriate for ELE context of Nepal; and secondly to design a process to use the testing scheme as a basis for educational change.

Role of the SLC English test in Reforming Existing ELE Practices

The role that examination plays in educational reform has led to the ‘examination-improvement approach’ to educational reform (Kellaghan 2000; 1992:102). According to this approach, examination plays a major role in raising educational standards and provides justifications to bring about educational reform (Noah and Eckstein 1992b). It also influences educational processes such as setting up learning goals, determining the teaching syllabus, selecting course materials and organising classroom processes (Taylor 2004).

In a country like Nepal where education is constrained by severe resource limitations, an examination can be a low cost means to improvement. Emphasising the importance of examination in an under-developed country, Heyneman and Ransom (1992) write:

Especially in the context of scarce resources with declining educational standards and the ever increasing demands for better qualified manpower, education officials are looking for low-cost ways to improve their education system…examination can be powerful, low cost means of influencing the quality of what teachers teach and what students learn in school (Heyneman and Ransom 1992:109).

So, where should reform commence? Davies (1985) suggests that examination is the most sensitive, most controllable and most certain change-producing factor in the total educational innovation process. So, if one has to choose an agent of educational change, to begin with, one should always choose examination first because ‘creative and innovative testing … successfully attracts to a syllabus change or a new syllabus’ (Davies 1985:8). I illustrate this point further with a few examples.

Davies (1985), reporting a Malaysian case of ELT reform, describes the problem it can create when examination is not given its due consideration. The Malaysian CDC introduced a new communicative syllabus into the secondary education aimed at developing in school graduates the ability to communicate in English. The lack of coordination between the CDC and the examination syndicate, a separate government agency with responsibility to conduct national examinations, led the examination to be incongruent with the syllabus resulting in a fiasco. The main reason for this disaster was, as Davies pointed out, the mismatch between the syllabus goals and the examination.

After an evaluation of the situation, a further reform package was introduced in Malaysia in the mid 1990s which considered examination as one of the primary components of the reform process, and because of this consideration, the ELT practice made tremendous progress towards the desired goals (Ahmed 1997).

The Alderson Report (1986) on the National Certificate of English of Sri Lanka provides another example of how a national examination can exert a positive effect on classroom practices. The national examination in Sri Lanka was changed along with other sister elements such as the course objectives, text materials and teaching methods. All support materials such as teacher’s guide, test materials, learning materials were prepared on the basis of the skills, sub-skills and activities as specified in the test specifications. The underlying principle of this practice was, as Alderson indicates in his report, classroom practices developed the language skills and abilities, which the course objectives targeted, and which were assessed in the examination. Alderson further points out that tests had a strong impact on teaching and learning. Thus, whether the effect of a test is negative or positive depends on the ‘nature, ingredients and use’ of the test (Alderson 1986:104).

Lee (2000), who studied the effect of testing on freshmen in Canada, found that testing method results in a significant change in the students’ performance in the target language.

The closest example, however, comes from the Caribbean country of Trinidad and Tobago. Essay writing, despite being a part of the school curriculum for so long, had not been taught simply because it was not tested in the national examination. However, with its inclusion in the Common Entrance Examination (CEE), the national examination in Trinidad and Tobago, the change in the school instructional practice was sudden, immediate and direct. As London (1997) writes:

Government policy to include essay writing in the Common Entrance Examination in Trinidad and Tobago has changed the content of teaching. How to write an essay is now deliberately taught, and both teachers and government officials believe that the change in the test represented an improvement in the primary school curriculum (London, 1997:144).

London further argues that the reform in the CEE, a high-stake examination in Trinidad and Tobago, benefited the country’s education system in several ways. Firstly, the reform impacted on the instructional practices. Essay writing, previously marginalized, surged into prominence as soon as it was included in the national test. Secondly, the reform enhanced school education. Signs of students using language creatively began to appear. Thirdly, the reform boosted the credibility of the examination. The reform was viewed as a refinement and modernisation of the traditional examination. Fourthly, the reform also raised public awareness about the national examination, which served as a basis to secure popular support for the intended curriculum reform. The most important gain of the reform, however, was the change in the teachers and the classroom practices where teachers, as the most direct agents, designed, planned and implemented the instructional programmes and evaluated student progress.

Kellaghan (1992) expresses a similar view:

If the quality of examination is changed, then because of high stakes associated with examination in terms of student opportunities and teacher accountability, the educational experience of students will also change (Kellaghan 1992:102)

Khaniya (1990), who researched the washback effects of the SLC, also found that:

if the people responsible for the design of the exam can make explicit what exactly the students are expected to have achieved and if the ingredients [of the examination] are in accordance with purpose of the whole teaching programmes, the teachers and students can work towards achieving that (Khaniya 1990:327)

In summary, examination reform may facilitate more general reform in education. Change in education can effectively be implemented through examination. However, change in other elements of the educational process does not necessarily change the examination process. A good examination does not only monitor learning, but, as Heyneman and Ransom (1992) observe below, it also provides directions for reforms:

A well designed examination system can monitor and measure achievement and occasionally aptitude, provide performance feedback to individuals, districts, schools and students, inform education officials about the overall strengths and weaknesses of their educational system and suggests directions for change and improvement (Heyneman and Ransom 1992:108).

Conclusion

The article documents a number of studies, which focus on the role of a national examination, and demonstrate to what extent and in what way a test can become a basis for improving instructional practices. As I indicated earlier, examination is a powerful instrument and strong catalyst for change. In the process model of educational reform, the content is relatively less important than the process and the purpose. The goals of instruction in this model are derived from current theories of the discipline. However tests and examinations shape the nature and ingredients of goals, content and process of instruction. In turn, the test or examination is shaped by the above factors in a dialectical process. The effect of a test on modes of instruction is, thus, inevitable. How it affects the instruction, however, depends on its nature, and the skills and levels of training of teachers.

The article also reports on the advantage of using a high stake, national examination as a change agent, and suggests that the SLC could be used as a basis for instructional amelioration in Nepal.

Clearly, the new SLC test has potential to reform and improve ELE in Nepal. It specifies language skills and abilities to be tested, outlines the procedures for testing them, and reflects a required level of proficiency.  In order to meet the requirements of the test, the teachers would be expected to change their teaching strategies in ways which would improve English language instruction.

In Nepal where education is constrained by severe resource limitations, examination can be a low cost means to improvement. As Heyneman and Ransom (1992) writes:

Especially in the context of scarce resources with declining educational standards and the ever increasing demands for better qualified manpower, education officials are looking for low-cost ways to improve their education system…examination can be powerful, low cost means of influencing the quality of what teachers teach and what students learn in school (Heyneman and Ransom 1992:109).

[If you would like to contribute to the discussion by posting your opinion, please click Leave a Comment and write your comments in the box that appears]

References

Ahmed, H. H. (1997). Assessment of Student Learning: The Malaysian Experience. Re-engineering Education for Change: Educational Innovation for Development. UNESCO. Bangkok, Thailand, UNESCO – ACEID.

Alderson, J. C. (1986). Innovations in Language Testing. Innovations in Language Testing. M. Portal. London, Nelson: 93-105.

Awasthi, J. R. (1995) A Linguistic Analysis of error committed by Nepali Learners of English. Unpublished PhD thesis. Department of Linguistics, University of Hyderabad

Bhattarai, G. R. (2004) An Overview of Test Materials of ELC English. Journal of NELTA 9(1): 1-7

Davies, A. (1985). Follow My Leader: Is that What Language Tests do? New Directions in Language Testing. Y. P. Lee, C. Fok, R. Lord and G. Low. Oxford, Pergamon Press: 3-14.

Giri, C. (1995). A Survey of People’s Attitude towards the Existing SLC Examination in Nepal. Department of English Language Education, Tribhuvan University

Giri, R.A (2010) Cultural anarchism: The consequences of privileging languages in Nepal. Journal of Multilingualism and Multilingualism Development. 31(1). 87-100.

Giri, R.A. (2005) The adaptation of language testing models to national testing of school graduates in Nepal: Processes, problems and emerging issues. Ph.D. Thesis. Melbourne: Victoria University.

Giri, R.A. (2007). The power and price of English. In Farrell, L. And Fenwick, T. (eds.) Educating the Global Workforce: Knowledge, Knowledge work and Knowledge Workers. London: Routledge

Giri, R.A. (2009). The politics of unplanning of languages in Nepal. Journal of NELTA 14(1-2).32-44

Heyneman, S. P. and A. Ransom (1992). Using Examinations and Testing to Improve Educational Quality. Examinations: Comparative and International Studies. M. Eckstein and H. Noah. Oxford, Pergamon Press.

Kantipur (2002). [Incomplete Courses and its Impact on the SLC Students]. Kantipur, 13 March 2002. Available: http://www.kantipuronline.com/. Kathmandu.

Kantipur (2004). [Recommendation for Making Educational Standard Equal for rural and Urban Schools]. Kantipur, 30 May 2004. Available: http://www.kantipuronline.com/. Kathmandu.

Kellaghan, T. (2000) Using Assessment to Improve the Quality of education. Dublin: Education Research Centre.

Kellaghan, T. (1992). Examination Systems in Africa: Between Internationalisation and Indigenisation. Examinations: Comparative and International Studies. M. Eckstein and H. Noah. Oxford, Pergamon Press.

Khaniya, T. R. (1990). Examinations as instruments for educational change: Investigating the washback effect of the Nepalese English examination . PhD thesis. Department of Applied Linguistics. Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh.

Lee, J. J. (2000). Language Testing as a Technique to Enhance EFL Teaching Effects on Vocabulary Acquisition at the Intermediate Level. Faculty of Education. Philadelphia, The Pensylvania State University.

London, N. A. (1997). A National Strategy for Systemwide Curriculum Improvement in Trinidad and Tobago. From Planning to Action: Government Initiative for Improving School level Practice. D. Chapman, L. Mahlck and A. Smulders. London, Pergamon Press.

Marsh, C. (1999). Perspectives: Key Concepts for Understanding Curriculum. London, Falmer Press.

Mathema, K. B. and Bista, M. B. (2005) Study on Student Performance in SLC. Kathmandu: Ministry of Education and Sports, Government of Nepal.

MOE (2010). Nepal: The country context. Kathmandu, Ministry of Education and Sports, Government of Nepal.

Noah, H. and M. Eckstein (1992a). Comparing National Systems of Secondary School Leaving Examinations. Examinations: Comparative and International Studies. M. Eckstein and H. Noah. Oxford, Pergamon Press.

Noah, H. and M. Eckstein (1992b). The Two faces of Examinations: A Comparative and International Perspective. Examinations: Comparative and International Studies. M. Eckstein and H. Noah. Oxford, Pergamon Press.

Spotlight (2001). SLC Results: Low Pass Rate. Spotlight: The National Newsmagazine. 20.

Taylor, L. (2004). “Current Issues in English Language Testing.” TESOL Quarterly 39(1): 141-146.

TKP (2000). SLC Papers not to be Checked at Home. The Kathmandu Post, 14 November 2000. Available: http://www.kantipuronline.com/. Kathmandu.

TKP (2001a). Non-elite Students Fare Well. The Kathmandu Post. 17 July 2001. Available: http://www.kantipuronline.com/. Kathmandu.

TKP (2001b). New Curriculum Blamed for Dismal Results. The Kathmandu Post, 17 July 2001. Available: http://www.kantipuronline.com/. Kathmandu.

TKP (2001c). Budget for Education Sector Inadequate. The Kathmandu Post, 11 July 2001. Available: http://www.kantipuronline.com/. Kathmandu.

TKP (2001d). SLC: A Test of Cheating Skills. The Kathmandu Post, 22 April 2001.Avaliable: http://www.kantipuronline.com/. Kathmandu.

TKP (2001e). Our Teacher has Become Lazy. The Kathmandu Post, 8 February 2001. Available: http://www.kantipuronline.com/. Kathmandu.

TKP (2001f). Education: Who is to Blame? The Kathmandu Post, 8 July 2001. Available: http://www.kantipuronline.com/. Kathmandu.

TKP (2001g). Uncertainty Shrouds SLC Results. The Kathmandu Post, 26 June 2001. Available: http://www.kantipuronline.com/. Kathmandu.

TKP (2001h). Parsa Bags Better Results in SLC Examinations. The Kathmandu Post, 23 July 2001. Available: http://www.kantipuronline.com/. Kathmandu.

TKP (2001i). SLC Signals. The Kathmandu Post, 17 July 2001. Available: http://www.kantipuronline.com/. Kathmandu.

TKP (2002). Changing curriculum. The Kathmandu Post, 15 march 2002. Available: http://www.kantipuronline.com/. Kathmandu.

TKP (2002a). There is a Dire Need of Administrative Reform. The Kathmandu Post, 22 April 2002. Available: http://www.kantipuronline.com/. Kathmandu.

TKP (2002b). Changing Curriculum. The Kathmandu Post, 15 march 2002. Available: http://www.kantipuronline.com/. Kathmandu.

TKP (2004). Nepal’s Primary School Drop Out Rate 40 Percent. The Kathmandu Post, 10 February 2004. Available: http://www.kantipuronline.com/. Kathmandu.

Exams, Academic Writing, and Nepalese ELT

Critical Outlook

Related to the issue of testing vis-a-vis its role and justification in education, I would like to share in this brief post a few thoughts about the other side of testing: engaging students in academic writing that allows them to express their ideas more freely and creatively.

I recently attended a pre-conference full day workshop at the Annual Convention of the college chapter of US National Council of Teachers of English (the CCC) in Atlanta City, Georgia. This workshop, which brought together scholars of English and Writing Studies from different countries, focused on the need to understand how academic writing is done in different parts of the world. It is traditionally assumed that academic writing is only taught as a separate subject in schools and colleges in the United States; it is believed that academic systems in other places (like our own) only use writing as a testing tool. Increasing amount of research and scholarly conversation is showing that that is not always the case: writing may not be taught as a separate subject in other countries but schools and teachers do find ways to use writing to fulfill more than the purpose of testing students’ knowledge on the subject matter of another course. For instance, when listening to a French professor of writing, I felt that there are much more complex epistemological functions that writing serves between the simple distinctions between writing to learn and writing to be tested on the knowledge gained. However, the workshop made me feel very strongly that the Nepalese education system does not integrate writing as a form of learning nearly as well as many other countries around the world seem to do.

In Nepal, we have not yet developed curricular and pedagogical practices that foster epistemological agency in our students. That is, we do not let students write in order to generate their own new ideas. Students write to demonstrate knowledge, not to create it. This is not a matter of distinction between us/east and the west, but in Nepal (and more generally in South Asian societies) teachers and curriculum developers seem to be still stuck in the classical idea that knowledge is out there, that new knowledge is the domain of the few “jannes,” (the knowers) that the teachers’ job is to transmit immutable truths from the real jannes up/out there to the students down there, and that it is good enough for students to just learn and regurgitate what we teach them. We do not yet see that it is only by generating new ideas as part of their learning process that learners become capable of succeeding in the knowledge economy of today’s world. Our students don’t solve problems, they just understand problems identified by others and solutions found out by others. Like Sajan has said in the editorial, our academic institutions produce owners of certificates, not producers of new knowledge.  We don’t prepare our students to respond to novel situations in life and work with new ideas. We teach theories, they go solve practical problems, rarely making any connections between the theories and the real problems. We never encourage students to question the books, rarely ask them to respond to thula manchhes’ (big people’s) ideas with their own, and we do not instill in them the respect for and confidence in their own ideas. I sometimes mentally visualize our education system as a bizarre place where books written in distant places/times are hanging from the ceiling of a room, with teachers trying to read and explain the  content of the books to the students who are sitting on the floor, passively listening to the teacher. What the books say is not only out of reach and question of the students, it is also out of the teacher’s own ability and desire to critically assess and understand.

But to me more optimistic, let me segue from that bizarre image to how some new and better developments are also taking place in the sphere of literacy and education in our society as well. At the CCC conference after the workshop, I presented a paper that was based on a book chapter that Balkrishna and I wrote recently. Based on our observation and interviews about popular culture and literacy practices of Nepalese youth online, I talked about the ways in which alternative learning spaces on the web are now beginning to provide young people in traditional societies like Nepal some powerful motivations to adopt/adapt knowledge and popular culture practices  from other societies, to create and share new knowledge among themselves, and to subvert the hierarchical knowledge structure that is sustained by hierarchical socio-political structure of our traditional society.

the real jannes and the child

The issue that connects this reflection with my point in the paper is this: educational systems reflect social structures that allow certain groups to “know,”  and and they also reflect social worldviews that legitimize and make respectable some people’s knowledge and not others’.  For example, when people my age or older grew up (and to a lesser extent even today), younger people were/are constantly reminded  NOT to be “janne” in front of the adults: “Janne na ho hai phuchche!” An implicit social norm only allows a few groups of people like the ascetic, the shaman, old men, those with feudal/political power, and recently professional teachers to behave like they know something, to use their knowledge in society. Not kids. In our society, kids can’t act like they know, even if they do know something. And that implicit understanding that only the knowledge of those who wield social and political power should be considered legitimate and meaningful pervades our thinking about education; that understanding shapes the educational structure and prevents new models to enter or thrive. In other words, it is unfortunate but the underlying reason why exams and certificates fundamentally define education itself in our society is because we continue to accept the conventional social structure where knowledge is considered to be the exclusive domain of the few “jannes.” The current model of mass education that lays too much emphasis on examination/testing came from the colonial and Industrial Revolution era of Europe when class and power structured education, not the other way around; but we in South Asia adopted it long ago (from the colonial education in the south) and we are not yet ready to move from there to something more democratic, more learner-centered, an educational mechanism that is more attuned to the knowledge economy of the present century. We don’t want the kids to steal the fire, and that is why we don’t feel the need to ask them to voice their opinions, challenge old ideas develop new ones, and use writing to create and share new knowledge that matters to them. We either don’t know or don’t care how much this old worldview will hurt our future generations’ opportunities and ability to compete in the increasingly globalized knowledge economy.

The strength of a society’s desire for something, or lack thereof, is determined by its worldview. Our educational systems are the manifestations of our lack of desire to help students to create new knowledge; they are designed to make students tell us back what we tell them. In my paper, I talked about how the socio-epistemological structure of traditional societies are changing as a result of the new wave of new technologies, connection to popular culture activities online, and access to information. For example, the fact that Nepalese youngsters now can find more information online–more interesting and more relevant to them–than their school provides them has greatly increased the chances of them sharing their own ideas with others without the inhibition of the janne adults. But unfortunately, while alternative affinity spaces like social networking and media sharing sites online have created such new possibilities, our students have to ultimately depend on our accreditation of their learning with formal certificates, which in turn come from regurgitating what we or the textbooks told them and not from creating and sharing new knowledge.

In my talk, I invoked the idea of the “choutari,” which reminds us that even in the hierarchical social and knowledge structure of our traditional society, there were indigenous spaces where people came together to share ideas, solve problems, and let the younger generations gradually take over the conversation. So it is not that we the easterners had it all wrong in terms of democratic ownership and use of knowledge; indeed, it is our adoption of the “modern” model of formal education that ironically replaced several organic knowledge structures that existed in the society.  The modern model of “western” education is actually what came out of the industrial model that has outrun its purpose and utility for a new knowledge economy in a globalized world.

What we need to do, then, is to seriously think about how we may be able to mitigate the stifling effects of turning education into testing machines, adopt and adapt models of education that make space for learners to engage in creating ans sharing new knowledge, and where possible find out what local knowledge structures are worth drawing on towards enhancing the epistemological agency of our students. The advancement of academic writing as a part of learning is one of the practical solutions to the problem of stultifying education with exams and tests. It is time that we look at other societies and their educational systems for better uses of writing than for administering exams. In the west, hypercapitalism’s invasion of the educational sphere has put the cart of testing before the horses of education; we in Nepal seem to be obsessed with testing because it gives us a false sense of security by disallowing the kids to threaten our power and positions by questioning our knowledge or trying to replace/improve it with their own.

We have taken just enough exams since the establishment of “modern” education: it’s time to really modernize our education by giving our students real opportunities to create and share knowledge–through writing as knowledge-making.

Nepalese English Language Education in New Era

Critical Outlook

Nepalese English Language Education in New Era:  An Interview with Professor  Jai Raj Awasthi

by  Sajan Kumar Karn

Of late, English Language Education in Nepal has undergone a radical change via revision of the Tribhuvan University’s courses for B. Ed. and M. Ed., degrees for prospective teachers of English at secondary, higher secondary and university level. The current socio-political, cultural and philosophical changes home and abroad have been a stimulating factor behind the amendment. Unlike in the past, this time, the course revision process has been bottom up to some extent.  Further, this is the first time in the history of syllabus designing in Nepal that teachers involved in the instruction of the different courses were invited and were sought for their inputs upon the different roughly sketched first drafts. A foreign scholar from Unviersity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Professor Numa Markee contributed significantly to the making of the courses through his expertise.  Different teams of experienced teachers have been involved in writing of the textbooks for B. Ed. and M. Ed.

A number of other striking changes can be noticed in the newly prepared courses, such as a slight diversion towards interdisciplinary approach to language teaching, recognition of nativised varieties of English, divorce of Nepalese ELE from the mainstream. This is truly a paradigm shift in making of syllabuses in Nepalese ELE. The products are in the hands of teachers teaching at different constituent and affiliated campuses of Tribhuvan University.

Though teachers seem to have mixed reactions on the revision, majority have admired the strenuous efforts.  In this connection, I called upon Professor Jai Raj Awasthi, Chairman of English and Other Foreign Languages Education Subject Committee, Tribhuvan University under whose leadership such a change could happen, for his personal and departmental observations.

Here are a few questions and the answers, Professor Awasthi supplied, in his own words:

1. Professor Awasthi, this is truly a far-reaching change that has happened under your vibrant leadership. The reactions from every corner seem to be appreciative. How do you take this success?

Designing or revising curricula is a very tiring but truly an intellectual and challenging work. It requires inputs from various scholars and practitioners working in the field. I have a strong belief that such a kind of academic work is an outcome of the collaborative efforts of many colleagues. There are many people from home and abroad who contributed significantly to this academic pursuit.  In the history of Nepalese English Language Education and particularly in course of revising the curricula of B.Ed and M.Ed (English), so many heads worked together. I can claim that there was direct and indirect involvement of over hundred people to bring the curricula in the present status. I am really grateful to all the contributors, too many names to record here, whose genuine efforts made it happen including Dr Numa  Markee from University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, USA. I really acknowledge the American Embassy here in Nepal for sponsoring Dr Makee’s trip to Nepal.  In the whole process, I simply worked as a facilitator.

I am receiving mixed reactions from the stakeholders. Some people think that it is a big departure while others think that it is timely. Such reactions are, I presume, very common when we start a new venture. However, I am satisfied with the present accomplishment. The credit of this success goes to all the contributors.

2. How did you feel when the challenge of course making came upon your shoulder? You know, working with many heads is always very challenging? How could you become successful in integrating the giants of Nepalese ELT at one?

My predecessors Prof. Sarada Bhadra, and Prof. Shishir K. Sthapit had trained me as a very young practitioner in the matter of curriculum designing. I was one of the members of the curriculum revision teams in the 1980s and 1990s. In course of time, I gained experience in this sector. I am frank in my nature and consider myself a life time learner; as such I feel pleasure in learning, both from my juniors and seniors. During the course of curricula revision, my request was never turned down by any of my colleagues. All the colleagues thought it  to be a life time work. So, I feel so fortunate to get support from all quarters to accomplish this project.

3. How contented you are when all the courses are with teachers and they are doing the courses? You might have received some reactions from the teachers? What is your personal observation?

I am, of course, very satisfied. I think we could make our courses in par with the courses on ELT/TESL/TEFL/TESOL worldwide. I have received mixed reactions from the stakeholders. Some people think that the courses are difficult as they require a lot of reading but a majority of them have shown their satisfaction that they are to their expectations. I believe that our students need to read a lot and read internationally recognized textbooks. The dissatisfaction may have come from some students as well as teachers because they rely solely on plagiarized bazaar notes compiled by non-academic and non-ethical compilers. Reading is a challenging job for both kinds of such people. But I am fully  satisfied with the work.

4.  Textbook compilation has been immensely democratic and inclusive this time.  Involving a number of heads-experienced and new but promising ones- in preparation of the textbooks such as New Generation English, Expanding Horizons in English and others is commendable.

Thanks a lot for the compliments. Text book writing, compiling and editing are very challenging jobs. I think working with many heads and brains yields a better result. We have many capable faculties who can contribute to this field. Many people working collaboratively can bring standard materials. Therefore, I thought, all of us working together can learn from each other and bring something fruitful. This collaborative work has to be expanded to the extent that all our colleagues will, one day, be able to create all the learning materials needed by our students based on their real needs and eventually be able to replace the international authors. We have started this venture in a very humble way including as many enthusiastic academicians as possible. This work will be furthered in case our colleagues think it good for them. I think the meeting of minds is crucial in this venture. So all seniors and juniors can contribute equally and go hand in hand learning from each other.

5.  At a time when English is being nativised in the countries where it is used, incorporating the texts in different varieties is worth appreciating? What could be the justification against the long established tradition of inclination towards British English officially?

You are right when you say that English has no longer been the property of formerly known as English native speakers. It is the property of those who use it and spend money on its promotion.  It is evident that all the countries of the world spend a significant amount of money in its teaching and learning. It is in this context, we realized that our students need to know not only the so called British English variety but also other Englishes prevalent in the world including our own. We all know that varieties emerge in course of time due to various reasons. The British English also underwent several varieties such as American, Australian, etc. which are now termed as American English, Australian English etc. We thought that our graduates need to know all these emerging varieties of English so that they can survive wherever they go and work. We have not undermined the established tradition but have extended it making it richer than before.

6. This is the first time; interdisciplinary approach of language teaching has been followed in the courses prepared by Department of English Education? Is not it like emulating Department of English under the faculty of Humanities? Has there been a realization that language based approach has not fetched much and therefore, let us try out something different?

We have not followed the tradition of Humanities and Social Sciences at all. We have ever been ahead of them in every aspect. We introduced ‘Reading Writing and Critical Thinking’ before they did it in humanities and social sciences.  Some other reading and writing courses we have included in the curricula are continuation of this spirit. Thus, we have more English and ELT courses in B.ED compared to BA. However, we thought that our students need more reading along with the pedagogical knowhow. After completing these courses our graduates will be hot- cake in the global market if the courses are followed in true spirit making the students read all the prescribed textbooks.

7. In M. Ed. Second year, all courses carry 50 marks only. What could the rationale behind such fragmentation? Do we want our prospective teachers to be jack of all and master of none?

The reason behind breaking the courses into 50 marks is to offer wide varieties of courses to our M.Ed students so that there is nothing left unlearned for them, if they compare themselves with the comparable degree holders in ELT/TESOL/TEFL of any universities of the world. This was not possible in the existing curricula structures of our Faculty where our students are bound to study the courses that do not have pragmatic value when they go to the work force.

They will, thus, become experts of their area of studies but not ‘jack of all trades.’

8. How do you justify the course at B. Ed. English for Business Communication for the prospective teacher s of English?

We presume that our graduates can take any profession in future. It is true that we intend to prepare them as future ELT teachers; however they can opt for business as well. The courses on mass and business communication are elective ones, therefore the people who want to go for mass media or business can opt for them. Many so called language institutes in Nepal are doing business without leaning as to how to speak in business English. Therefore, our graduates can establish such institutes and be media persons as well after they take these courses, if they wish so.

9. Particularly the course Expanding Horizons in English has been a hot cake. Even the people from other departments talk about the nature and coverage of the course? This is the whole universe from Humanities, social sciences, human rights education and language teaching globalization east and west etc. This has been felt too demanding on the part of teachers and students? What tips do you give to teachers particularly who find it very troublesome?

Expanding horizons is definitely designed to broaden the linguistic as well as thematic horizons of students through a variety of reading materials. Some of the stakeholders have felt uneasy as they are not used to read new materials. I have received hundreds of calls from both teachers and students. Many of the teachers made their students call me to enquire as to why so many difficult passages are kept in the course as their teachers are also unable to teach them. But I told them that the book is for the students and they are the ones to read it several times and comprehend the themes so that they can go beyond the texts and critically review them. I think, the course is , though demanding and we have introduced  critical thinking and creative writing for the first time in the curricula. It is not different but it is a continuation of the previous course ‘ Reading, writing and critical thinking’ that the students have studied in the first year.

The teachers teaching this course have to read the texts themselves in detail to set the tasks. They also need to know about the authors and the themes on which the texts are designed. They are all authentic texts and contain the themes from a variety of disciplines.

The teachers have to follow three stages of reading: pre-, while- and post- reading. For the background study, they can refer to the manual compiled and edited by Prof.  G.R Bhattarai. A detailed glossary can be prepared by the students in groups. Each group takes five- ten texts and prepares the glossary using appropriate monolingual dictionary, such as Cambridge or Oxford. All the group works can be compiled distributed. The teachers have to set tasks for pre-while and post- reading stages and students read and re-read the tasks to complete them. They can use the exercises given in the texts as well. In addition, for the tasks beyond the texts, the teachers have to follow the process writing approach conducting  brainstorming in the class to facilitate the students create their own piece of writing semi-creatively.

If the teachers use the traditional approach of teaching reading, they can not finish the course in a stipulated time. Hence they need to update their methodological knowhow before they venture to handle the course.

10. Very often teachers complain of lack of level of competency and understanding on the part of students to grasp the course, let alone critical interpretation of the text? How far do you agree with this? How would you defend?

I do not agree this statement. I am proud of our graduates. They proved themselves in the whole world. I t is a lame excuse to say that our students have low level of competence and understanding. They are the ones who have created the people who have gone to Oxford, Harvard, Cambridge, Stanford, Michigan, Tokyo, and similar ranking universities of the world. I believe that we have never exploited their potentialities. We have never made them the collaborators of learning and teaching. We have never practiced autonomous leaning and made them autonomous learners. Thus, I can say that the prejudice against our graduates will ultimately be null and void if the teachers teach them properly using proper strategies.

11. Here are teachers who still paraphrase the texts, give one way lectures and dictate answers to the questions in the class and complain of not finishing the courses such as New Generation English and Expanding Horizons in English? What tips of teaching would you like to suggest them?

Reading and paraphrasing the texts by the teachers do not help the students at all to learn English. The textbooks are meant for the students and the reading texts given in the text books are also ultimately meant for the students. Therefore, the teachers need to design such tasks that require the students to read the texts several times to accomplish them and have full understanding of the themes of the texts they read. Teachers’ duty is to facilitate the learners in their understanding and enhancing their language skills. If they follow the procedures mentioned above, they can finish the course in time with full satisfaction. I request all the teachers to change their traditional spoon-feeding methodology and adopt a student-centered one.

12 .There has been a growing demand of a manual for tackling the courses prepared in accordance with post method trends. Would you like to make any commitments to them?

I am not in a position to commit it from where I am now.  This does not mean that I am negative to it. I believe that manuals are required. As you know, the subject committees under our faculty do not have their own offices, budget and things like that. In case the Dean’s office becomes positive in it, we will rather be more than happy to accomplish this task also.

13. Readings in English for M. Ed. second year seems to be the continuation of the Expanding Horizons for B. Ed.? Is it so?

It is a very advanced reading course. You may take it a continuation of the B.Ed course as well. However, this course is not a compulsory one and as such the students have other options to choose from. Those who still think to take a challenge of reading diversified texts from different themes and disciplines can opt for it.

14. When it is obvious that ELT practicum in most cases has been reduced to a ritual and nothing else. However this continues to exist. How do you defend it?

I agree that practicum has become a ritual now though it is a main and very crucial component of teacher education. There are various reasons behind this practice. One of  the crucial reasons is the rapid increase in the number of the colleges affiliated to TU. In addition to it, we lack the manpower to supervise practicum. We had proposed that we can conduct a year-long micro teaching so that our students can develop the anticipated skills in them but our orthodox system is resistant to any positive change to this respect.

15. At the time when method is said to be dead and ELT is deemed to be in post method era, what do the titles such as ELT methods…..and Advanced ELT methodology indicate? Could the terms like methods or methodology be omitted?

The notion is forwarded by a few ELT practitioners only in order to give freedom to the classroom teachers to make use of their own imagination as how to teach English. This concept was also developed against the tradition of prescribing the methods claiming them to be universal.

I take the term Methdology as the concept and philosophy of teaching and it can not die because the teachers build their teaching strategies on it where as the term Method can be made individual by individual teachers as per their needs. However, a discussion on these two terms in a broader perspective can be made further.

16. What could be the rationale behind introducing the course English Teacher Development in M.Ed. second year?

We are teacher producing institution. Hence, we should not forget to let our students know as to what they need to do after their graduation from our institution to remain updated in their field.  Through this course we have tried to make them feel that the certificate they hold is not enough for their life-long career. Therefore, keeping in view the notion of ‘learning as a life long process’,  we came to the conclusion that the prospective teachers need to realise that they have to practice several things in order to keep themselves updated or else they may not be  able to cope up with the emerging changes brought out in the fields of teaching and learning. This course enables the students with the skills and knowledge they require to play various roles in their life. The contents of the course enable them to be a/n teacher, trainer, and expert as well in ELT.

17. Advanced academic reading and writing is alternative to thesis writing. Some question if they are equal in terms of challenge?

It largely depends upon how we approach them. In case, thesis writing, as has been mentioned below, becomes a ritual and mechanical process only, we do not anticipate much from our students. But if the ‘Advanced reading and writing’ course is taught in its true spirit, the students can get maximum benefit out of it.

18. There has been a voice from some corner that our thesis writing has remained more mechanical and less academic? Do you agree with it? What are we required to do in order to improve the existing scenario?

Thesis writing is a special skill that requires the students to be creative and produce a piece of original work. I agree that this has not been taken seriously by both the supervisors and researchers. I think, the researchers need to show their linguistic, analytical and interpretative skills in thesis writing and supervisors should take it as a learning opportunity, too. I believe that we learn from each other. This activity should be taken as a collaborative one. Many supervisors are found not to have written thesis themselves but they are prompted to supervise the students for their personal benefit. There is much plagiarism in students’ writing. Supervisors seem to ignore them. Students do not have reading habit in them, nor are they prompted to do so.

In order to make thesis writing a creative piece of work both researchers and their supervisors have to take this task very seriously.

19. Often it is heard that learning materials are being prepared? Where are we in the preparation?

We were really busy revising the courses so far. It took us a year and half to complete it. Now we have to think to produce learning materials. The bazaar is flooded with cheap quality notes either the plagiarized ones or written by inexperienced teachers. Now the time has come to team up and do a substantial work.  We need to team up ourselves and prepare the learning materials suitable for our learners. New Generation English and Expanding horizons in English in the students’ hand are the beginning of this venture. There are a couple of them in preparation, which will come out soon. I request all the colleagues to team up and start a new beginning. I am ready to give my support to them in this venture.

20. You have been the leader of ELT survey team too. Where are we in the surveying now? How long will it take to accomplish it? Is the survey too ambitious?

We have developed the proposal and the survey tools so far. I have heard that our new ELF Dr Law has reviewed the tools for piloting them. Since it is NELTA undertaking, I am tirelessly waiting for a go ahead signal. NELTA is exploring the possible financers to see it keep going.

21. How consonant are we with the wave of change in ELE around the globe?  Post modern wave is blowing swiftly and it must have moved us. How do you feel?

We have tried to catch and consolidate the global ELT perspectives in our curricula. We are definitely along with the wave of post-modern world but have not forgotten our own realities. I hope that our colleagues will materialize the spirit laid down in the curricula in their hands.

22. What directions do you think Nepalese ELE should take in the days ahead? What efforts are needed? What challenges do you face ahead?

ELT in Nepal cannot remain aloof from the other parts of the world. It has to change its course, but not forgetting the ground realities we have to work in. We have to set in mind that we are producing human resource capable of working in any part of the world. The ELT survey, if conducted in future, will tell us the ground realities of ELT in Nepal to make future plans for its improvement. The challenges ahead are enormous. We need resource allocations, attitudinal changes, human resource development etc. to go in par with the world ELT perspectives.

Thank you very much for your time and contribution.