Category Archives: Scholarly Article

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

English as a Global Language

Praveen Kumar Yadav

NELTA Birgunj

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

ELT through Human Rights Perspective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rights Based Approach (RBA) to ELT  

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

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

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

Participation:

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

Accountability:

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

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

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

Empowerment:

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

Non-discrimination:

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

Linkages to human rights standards:

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

 

Sounds and Images… Thinking about Teaching

Global thought, Miscellaneous

To the diversity of ELT khuraks of this month, let me add a different kind of material, a few inspiring web videos, with some reflections and questions on the issue of education in our time.

As a teacher, I believe that we must not just go to class with a lesson plan but we must have a broader understanding of the goals of education, a sense of how our education relates to the challenges of the larger society as well as our students’ futures, and the willingness to engage our students in thinking about larger issues than the textbooks provide–whenever and wherever possible or appropriate.

And as an English teacher, I believe that there is more to teaching this “global language” than language itself; for instance, we can teach English as a means for intercultural communication and understanding, as a means to access and contribute to global platforms of knowledge, and so on.

We need to think how we can adapt our teaching and make it more relevant to the changing needs and realities of our students’ and society’s present and future. If your bandwidth allows, let’s start by watching a video in which a British educational philosopher discusses the changing paradigms of education.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U]

In the video, the scholar, Ken Robinson, says that the current education system(s) in the world–which Nepal has adopted and often lags behind in adapting to the society’s ground realities–was conceived of and developed in Europe in the age of Enlightenment, or the age when positivist science including rather simplistic developmental psychology, industrial progress, and a class division were the order of the day. For example, the very word “class” that we use for describing a group of students tells something about the structure of our education: students move, from year to year, in a linear manner, towards a “higher” grade, until they are ready, like coke bottles in a conveyor belt at a bottling company, to exit on the other side of the educational factory. We can see that this structure was modeled upon efficiency of the industry, and we should ask how it can be updated to fit the information society and the knowledge market where we should be training our students as producers of knowledge, capable of networking with intellectual and professional communities  on a global scale, and so on–and not just train them  with basic literacy and professional skills that the industrial model did. The structure matters, underlying epistemological worldviews matter.

The industrial/enlightenment model of education–which is physically structured like the conveyor belt and is philosophically based on the nineteenth-century European enlightenment values/beliefs–is highly efficient in some ways. But this model seems to also have outserved many of its original purposes. We need to think about what it still does well and what it does not. For instance, what if one student who has the potentials of Einstein in science or that of Picasso in art fails in math or English?–actually what about thousands of SLC students across the country who continue to fail in English, and therefore in “education,” as we watch or talk about “enlightenment bases” of modern education? What can we do at the level of the lesson plan, the exam we are giving tomorrow, the curriculum that we have the power to change as members of a university department’s curricular committee, or at the level of discussions among NELTA members in on and offline venues?

Again, if your connection is not bad, here is another video on the theme that shows how even in the “advanced” societies the persistence of the conventional model of education has clashed with the reality of who the students sitting in the classroom are, what their life is like, [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o]and what their and the society’s changing realities and needs may be–and I am not thinking about changing education by adding technology or anything here, but instead rethinking education in terms of our local socio-cultural as well as material conditions.

Finally, here is another video–I’ll just link and not embed this one, but see the next one–in which another educational thinker, Mike Wesch talks about re-conceiving education from the perspective of what new technologies allow us to do. In our case, not many of Wesch’s ideas will apply very easily or directly; but maybe some of the developments in the fields of communication and information should make us think about how we can utilize those changes towards more locally adapted modes of teaching.

If you watched the three videos embedded or linked above, you might be thinking that we can’t do all those big things, that there’s not much benefit to just thinking and talking about those abstract things because you have to prepare students for the final exams within a system that you can’t change anything about… well, but watch the small things that these big thinkers do in their classrooms.

So, here’s Mike Wesch, the scholar with the big ideas in the video linked above, talking about some really small changes that he makes in his class, changes that we too can always make in our classrooms, not matter how well-resourced our classrooms are, no matter how capable we are making impacts/changes in the larger system of education. Certainly, this is not a community that lacks such simple ideas about improving teaching styles–I’ve learned thousands of things from the NELTA community since I joined it in the mid ’90s–but the changes in classroom teaching that Wesch is talking about here, and which I want to highlight in this entry, are changes that are connected to the larger questions of the goals of education, the need to make education relevant to students’ lives and societies, the changing paradigms of education  as they matter to our local conditions and realities. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alhDCwRSHC4]

I will be delighted to read your response about anything. Thanks for reading.

Brief Experience of Teaching English in Nepal

English as a Global Language, Global thought, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

Alban S. Holyoke

 When I started college I never envisioned myself teaching English, much less in Nepal.  In all honesty English is not my strongest subject; my friends often joke with me about my poor spelling.  When I applied for a Fulbright grant to teach English in Nepal I thought of it as a long shot.  When I received an email telling me that I won the scholarship, I realized that I would have to put my words into actions.  Fortunately, I have some very incredible mentors in the US that got me excited about the prospect of not only traveling to a vastly different culture, but also the joys of teaching.

When I came to Nepal I had little experience of teaching in a formal setting, and none in an English classroom.  During my first month in Nepal I received a crash course in teaching methodology, which bolstered my confidence somewhat.  But when I visited my first Nepali school, my spirits sunk.  I was standing in the middle of a room of screaming kids, with all the classrooms around me.  I sat at the back, observing the class from a dark corner, making notes about the classroom, the teacher’s methodology, and how the students responded.  That night I talked to my parents in the US and told them I didn’t think that I was up to the challenge of being an English teacher.  I had anticipated it being difficult, but nothing like I had seen in that first school.  Our teacher training ended, and I was sent to my school.  Set free to teach as best I could, hopefully to do more good than harm.

That first day when I arrived at my school, there was a snaking line of smiling faces, all thrusting flowers into my overflowing arms.  Their smiles said it all, “we’re happy you’re here!”  I sat in the staffroom with  other teachers while they tried to make me comfortable by making small talk in Nepali, most of which I didn’t understand.  That first day was exhausting, and when I went home after school I lay down on my bed and thought about how tired I was, and I hadn’t even taught.  My first week went by in a blur.  I went from classroom to classroom introducing myself, and having a hundred different kids introduce themselves to me with little hope that I would remember any of their names.  Then came Dashain holiday, and I  had yet to actually teach a class.  Most of my time was spent in the staffroom, or observing other teachers’ classes.  My anxiety about teaching only multiplied over the holiday, and when the school resumed I was certain that my first class would be a failure.

My classes arranged, I went to the school with very low expectations.  I would be teaching class 7, first period.  Although I had prepared for class, I was startled by what actually happened.  I went to class being anxious about how I would do, but to my surprise, staring back at me were twenty smiling faces.  I was amazed at how receptive they were and excited to learn.  When the bell rang for the second period I was surprised at how effortlessly the time had passed.  I smiled and said goodbye, and the twenty smiling faces echoed their own goodbyes in response.  I had done it, one class down.  It wasn’t so hard, and I was surer of myself in the second, third and fourth classes of the day.  The day, just like my classes, passed quickly and before I knew it I was back on my bed reflecting on my first day of teaching.  I was exhausted, but happy.

Over the course of those first few weeks I began to learn my students names, their strengths and their weaknesses.  They very quickly welcomed me into the school community.  At the same time, I was trying new teaching methods that they had never encountered before.  I tried to challenge not only in English, but also to think in progressive, critical ways.  Though all this, they stuck with me. I thought a lot about how mature, and intelligent my students were compared to me when I was their age.  But I learned quickly that I shouldn’t be suppressed by my students’ capabilities.  At the very moment that I would start to think of one of them as a poor or lazy student, they would baffle me and their peers, with an incredible dialog, or answer.    It was this uncertainty, and spontaneity that kept me on my toes, and excited to come to school.

Everyday after school I would go home exhausted.  After a few months I met another teacher and told him how tired I was after school each day.  He insisted that I must have been doing something wrong, that I shouldn’t be so tired.  In reply I said that I was fine being tired, in fact I wanted to be tired.  If I had gone home and felt anything other than exhaustion, I would feel as though I hadn’t accomplished anything that day.

That’s how time passed until a few weeks ago.  It was all of a sudden that I realized I wasn’t a new teacher anymore, and then it was time to go.  I had done it, and enjoyed every minute with my students.  My fears from the beginning were never realized.  I found that I was a pretty good teacher, perhaps not because of superior teaching or English skills, but because I cared about my students.  On my last day of school another teacher told me that the students “really love Alban sir, really really love Alban sir.”  It touched me that she would give me such a compliment.  I would have been flattered if she would have said “the teachers really love Alban sir,” but that wouldn’t have meant as much to me.  I knew that she was right, that my students really did love me.  And I, in return, loved them back.  Perhaps that’s why we had such a good rapport, they knew I cared about them, and they about me.  That also may be why they worked so hard for me, humoring my spelling mistakes, and new teaching methods.

As I sat on the stage at my farewell ceremony I could see those one hundred faces that I met eight months before with little hope of learning their names, smiling back at me.  There was Pratima, Monoj, Swastika, Sajan and so many others.  I can honestly say I have never felt such an outpouring of love as I did that day.  As they left I said goodbye and hugged as many of them as could fit between my arms.

While I may not have been a perfect teacher, certainly making mistakes along the road, I’ve very happy the way things turned out.  I’m going to miss my students when I return to the United States, but I will always remember them and teaching English in Nepal.

A Reflection on Teaching English in Large Multi-level Classroom

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

A Reflection on Large Multi-level Classroom

Janak Raj Pant

This is a short reflection on my teaching experience in a large multilevel class at university level in Sindhuli. In this piece, I discuss the opportunities and challenges in a large multi-level classroom. My focus is on how large classrooms can be made maximally beneficial for the students. I conclude by emphasizing that all language classrooms are diverse in one or another way and the larger a class the more diverse it is likely to be. It is our level of awareness, attention and devotion as a teacher that can address the challenges of the large multilevel class into opportunities for the students in their learning.

There are varied perceptions of a large classroom among the ELT professional as well as the other stake holders. For a teacher who does different activities for which the students need to move around a class in which such activities cannot be done very efficiently because of the high number of the students is a large class. For a teacher who basically delivers lectures the same class might not be a large class so far he or she is audible, can maintain non-verbal communication with the students, and can monitor the activities of the students. In the both of these contexts, the idea of large class is at substance level different but still it is not different at pragmatic level. So, it seems more beneficial not to leave it to the teacher to define a large class in their context, based on their teaching strategies, the resources available, and the strategies they can execute. As Baker and Westrup (2000) state, ‘A large class can be any number of students, if the teacher feel there are too many students for them all to make their progress’.

The class I am going to talk about is the class of B. Ed. first year students a community college in Sindhuli.  Usually more than 80 students attend the class. It is a class on general English. Different learners have different level of language proficiency varying from beginner to upper intermediate. Some of them study major English while others study other subjects such as Nepali education, population education. I found them differing in terms of their interests. Some of them have keen interest to learn English for academic purpose while others are keen interested in English for communication. However, for majority of them to pass the examinations is the ultimate aim. It is quite significant to note that for some others it is simply matter of formality to attend the class no motivation in learning at all. For some of them, being inside the class is equal to learning, they expect everything done by teachers for their learning expect copying, they remain silent in the class. The peer influence, family background, their own life orientation has deep rooted integrative influence in them. There is even terrible group of the students who have their pleasure in disturbing the class and do not have any intention to study. They just behave like visitors; for them learning is not any goal at all.

However, in spite of limitations like the above, there are a number of good things about large classes. First of all, the learners with higher level of English language proficiency have been good model in the classroom and it is good to push the weaker learners too. The learners with higher level of language proficiency have been the source of motivation for the weaker ones. Actually they are made the source of motivation.

Likewise, the learners with different cultural background have been significant in order to create communication gap in the classroom activities so as to form genuine language learning activities. It is also useful to address and illustrate several social issues in general English course.

In such large classes, I have always found willing volunteers to actively participate in classroom activities. Such classes are livelier than the smaller ones. So, it is easy to move them towards any direction. I have found the students learning from each other. One the one hand, it has been source of motivation for the one who have been supporting and on the other hand, he could support rest of the friends. This promotes mutual learning and challenges each learner appropriately. In this case brighter learners have challenges to maintain their position while the weaker ones have challenge to be as good as the brighter ones.

There is another advantage, such situation reflects real life situation as real life situations are also full of diversities. It has caused a number of challenges as well. First of all, it is quite difficult manage appropriate level of input in course of instruction. It is impossible to satisfy individual need as well. It is so because the same input becomes easy for on group and very difficult for another group. However it is possible to address such problems by some of the ways to make the lesson useful for all the learners in one or another way. Hadfield and Hadfield (2008) have shown the possibility in the following words:

It may feel like an impossible task to try to satisfy all the individual needs of your students, and you are right! But there are some practical things you can do to make sure that there is something for everyone in each of your lessons (p.152).

Similar is the case with other activities. Setting home work is even more complicated. In order to overcome this problem, I usually set the multilevel task and graded exercise to promote independent learning of an individual student. I found learning more useful than in a normal case as because we have variety of learners with the varying with varying expectations.

Having outlined some of the advantages of large classes, let me now turn to the drawbacks of them, because it would be unfair to not do so at the same time. But while presenting the challenges, I will also include how to address those challenges.

In large classes, it is difficult to monitor classroom activities and conduct class progress tests because if the teacher cannot reach all the students in order to monitor and we cannot have enough time for individual feedback and whole class feedback might not be very effective. Gallery walk and group feedback can be helpful for addressing this challenge.

Large classes also make it very difficult to counsel the students individually, mainly because of the number of students. In many cases we might not have detailed information in order to support students. When I teach a large class, I know little about most of my students; as a result, I don’t how to counsel students even if I can manage some time for them.

Sometimes, in large classes, students with low motivation influence the students with high motivation level. There is always possibility that students are influenced by the peer pressure. It is equally possible for the laborious and sincere learners to influence the lazy or insincere ones and vice versa. The existence of the latter case is challenge for me. I have found acknowledging former instance has been helpful and somehow preventive for the latter case.

Students in large classes are often likely to dodge classroom activities and can go off the task. Such class is also likely to go noisy. Immediate performance based task can help us to improve the situation. There are always some late arrivals and some passenger students (the students who enjoy the lessons like passengers view (not focused, not intensive, not rigorous). For me nothing is as helpful as being strict in terms of the norms of the classroom.

In large classes, the teacher always has to speak very loudly in order to be audible in the class. Occasional written instruction and the systematic and consistence use of gesture is significant for me in many cases. The existing diversities in such situation takes longer time and how carefully you design the activities in the classroom the are student for whom it does not become very much relevant. It is also difficult to remember their names which can become another complexity in setting activities and designing the activities.

Obviously, dealing with a large group of people requires a complex set of social and professional skills. Let us take a very simple example. Let us suppose that someone slaps a child. What will he or she do? There are so many possible ways in which the child will behave: the child will flee, will respond violently, will start crying, will ask you  why you slapped him/her, will rush to his or her parents and ask them to slap you in turn, and so on and so forth. The same might be the case of positive response. Let’s say you offer a candy to a child in the street: what will the child do? Takes your candy and thank you, looks at you feels shy and goes away, take the candy and goes away, does not take your candy and says “no thank you”, becomes afraid of you and leaves the place, and so on.

Learners in the class have diverse experience, cultural understanding, self esteem, level of motivation, needs, aims, interests, context, facilities, attitude, etc. So, naturally they are likely to behave differently in the language class as well. The similar is the case even in smaller classes so diversity is the norm of language class rather than the exception. You will have diverse students whatever criteria you use in grouping them. It is essential to some extent as well. So, teaching, more than dealing with people in ordinary situations, requires highly advanced skills.

Larger class exerts some pressure on the side of the teachers to be more efficient and deal with the existing challenges. So, it makes teachers strategic and more competent in their profession.

References

Dewan, S. (2003). Teaching large multilevel classes. Journal of NELTA, 8:158-162.

Hadfield, J. K. & Hadfield, C. (2008). Introduction to teaching English. Oxford: OUP.

Baker, B. & Westrup, H. (2000) The English Language Teacher’s Handbook: How to       teach large classes with few resources. London: Continuum.

Ur, P. (1996). A course in language teaching. Cambridge: CUP.

 

 


Within and beyond classroom for teaching English

English as a Global Language, Global thought, Miscellaneous, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

Simon Taranto

 [In his narrative, Simon Taranto shares his experience of teaching English in a public school in Nepal.- Editor]

Family/Village Life Situation

Living with a Nepali family was a challenging but very rewarding experience for me.  There were many cultural, societal, and language differences that I had to get used to when living with my Nepali family.  I could not speak Nepali in the beginning. But my Nepali language skills improved slowly over the last 9 months to the point where I am now able to hold conversations and joke around in Nepali.  During the first few months of my time in the village and at the school getting over the language barrier took a significant amount of energy.

The Khadka family provided me with a very comfortable room, clean water to drink, comfortable facilities, and outrageously delicious food.  Uttam-ji, Manju-ji, Ujjwol-ji, and Hajurama-ji, were incredibly warm, welcoming, and helpful throughout my stay.  They really made me feel welcome into their family.

I met many people who live in the village and over the past many months I was able to foster relationships with many of them.  From the teashop owner to the recent college graduate and from the bicycle mechanic to the fitness center owner I really enjoyed speaking with and getting to know people.  The village is very quiet and pleasant but also located very close to Patan city so it was easy to move in and out of the city to attend meetings and other events.

School Situation

Rimal sir was an outstanding, ambitious, and energetic teammate to work with.  He showed me the ropes when I first arrived, organized an ornate welcoming ceremony, and made sure that my teaching at the school was run smoothly.  Shambhu KC, our school’s principal, was also a key asset that allowed me to work within many classes at the school of 350 students.  I regularly taught Grades 7-10 and frequently filled in for absent teachers in other lower classes.  The students and I got along well and we were able to share cultures and languages easily.  Whenever time allowed I chose to work outside of the textbooks so as to show other teachers some new teaching ideas and to give the students a broader learning experience.  The school does suffer from volatile teacher attendance and fluctuating student attendance rates.  With a new principal coming in next year and a new school building nearing completion, I expect that the future of Siddhi Mangal is brighter.

NELTA/Fulbright Cooperation

I am very grateful to the immense amount of work, time, and energy that is dedicated to NELTA by its numerous volunteer members.  NELTA’s cooperation with Fulbright is a good relationship that I hope continues far into the future.  Many of the trainings that were run by NELTA members were very impressive and helpful for teachers.  The network that NELTA provides to English teachers is an excellent resource that members should take advantage of.

It would be helpful if NELTA were able to alert ETAs with advance notice of upcoming events so that ETAs could plan accordingly.  In addition, with school selection for the next batch of ETAs I would recommend that NELTA cast its nets wider so as to include schools outside of the Valley and with schools that don’t have a traditional NELTA presence so as to spread the excellent benefits of being a part of NELTA.

Teaching Exercise/Lesson Plan

I frequently found that students were very adept at answering questions they were used to but struggled with slight variations of those same questions.  For example, ‘How are you?’ is question that can easily be answered by students.  However, how’s it going?’ or ‘How was class?’, all of which require the same kinds of answers, are very difficult for students to answer.  With that in mind, the following exercise can help students to be more linguistically flexible, feel more comfortable in unknown language territory, and be more confident.

One of my favorite exercises to run with both students and teachers is titled ‘You Can’t Say Fine.’  This exercise teaches students different ways of asking ‘how are you’ and an array of adjectives that can be used to respond to these questions.  There are many ways to run this exercise.  I am a proponent of getting children out of their seats and outside of the classroom.  With that in my mind, this exercise can used while walking around the school or while on field trips or picnics.  Below is one way to run this activity while inside of the classroom:

  1. Ask students, ‘How are you?’  They will likely robotically respond, ‘We are fine.’
  2. Write ‘fine’ on the board and then put a large X through it.
  3. Tell students they are not allowed to say ‘fine.’
  4. Ask them again, ‘How are you?’ and write all the different responses you get on the board.  This may require the teacher to ask hinting questions about other adjective that be used.  Examples of good adjectives are: excellent, outstanding, fantastic, great, very good, good, okay, alright, bad, terrible, miserable etc..  These responses will likely come from the students in an arbitrary order.
  5. Have the students work in groups and put the words in order from best to worst and write the results on the board.  Have the students copy this down into their notebooks.
  6. Next, the teacher will help the students to practice using these words by introducing other ways of asking ‘How are you?’  Some examples include: ‘How are you doing?’ ‘How are you today?’ How is your day going?’ ‘How’s everything?’ ‘How are thing?’  There are many more but this is a good start.  Write these on the board and have students copy them also.
  7. Show an example of how this works by asking a volunteer one of the above questions.  The volunteer must respond with an adjective and a reason why.  For example,
    1. Teacher: How are you?
    2. Volunteer: I am excellent because I am a volunteer.
    3. Teacher: That’s great.  Thank you.
    4. Have students work in groups to practice these different questions and responses.


Notes:

1. The title is given by the Editor.

2. The author would first like to thank NELTA, the Fulbright Commission in Nepal, Shree Siddhi Mangal Higher Secondary School, and the Khadka family for making my stay in Nepal possible.  I am very grateful for all that you did to make me comfortable.  I hope that cooperation between all these hard-working groups continues.

3. The author is a Fulbright ETA-2010 in Nepal.

Encouraging Creative Production

English as a Global Language, Global thought, Miscellaneous, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

Luke Lindemann

 During my ten-month stint teaching English in a public secondary school in Lalitpur district, my greatest difficulty was in encouraging creative production to my students. The students found it very difficult to create spontaneous speech acts, to speak and write in an unprompted and unscripted way.

With regards to reading and writing, I found that most of my students had a good command of English vocabulary and could answer questions as long as they were not open-ended. They were very good at answering fill-in-the-gap questions, in which they must find a particular name or action in the passage and write it down as the answer to a question. But they had enormous difficulty when asked to summarize a passage or write down their own emotional response to a passage. The students were having difficulty with creative production.

As to speaking, I found that my students were used to being called upon individually to answer a specific question from the text. These questions were typically close-ended: there was only one correct answer. If they did not know the correct answer, they would look for a fellow student to answer for them, they would claim ignorance and quickly sit down, or they would stand in silent discomfort. Aside from one or two confident students in every class, the majority of students stood up to answer questions with a look of mild dread, and then answered as simply, quickly, and quietly as possible.

I believe that one solution to this problem is to give students many opportunities to practice speaking English without being put on the spot. This means creating activities in which students work in pairs or in small groups to practice dialogues, write and perform their own dramas, or play simple question-and-answer games. Students who are too shy to answer direct questions during a lecture are much more willing to speak English to their friends during group activities.

It is also necessary to foster the ability to give spontaneous answers. For this it is crucial that students learn to say the same thing in multiple ways (“How are you?”, “How is it going?”, “How are you doing?”, “What’s up?”, “What’s new?”, “Are you well?”, etc.). Speaking practice should not be about carefully translating the one correct answer from Nepali into English without any flaws in grammar or pronunciation. It should be about developing the ability to communicate.

As a student learning the German language, my teacher introduced me to the German word umschreiben. Whenever I was speaking in class and I was stumped by my inability to remember the German word for something, instead of giving me the vocabulary word I needed she would tell me that I must umschreiben. This means to paraphrase, to circle around the elusive word, to use all of the words in German that I did know to describe the word that I did not. This is a very valuable skill because it develops creative production and the ability to communicate even when knowledge of vocabulary fails.

One way to encourage spontaneous speech in a class where students have little speaking practice is to play language games that require students to quickly think of something to say. For example, with many classes I played a collaborative story game. The first student in the first row would yell out the first word of a sentence, the next student would yell out another word that adds upon the sentence, and so on down the line until the sentence is complete and a student yells out, “Full stop!” These sentences can be remarkably creative and are frequently hilarious.

Turning briefly to reading and writing skills, I found that my students needed a lot of practice to produce completely novel sentences on their own. I lead some projects in story writing, letter writing, and cartooning, in which each student was required to put his or her own thoughts on the page. We would brainstorm topics and structures as a class, and then each student would have to write their own stories or letters or cartoons.

The goal of all of these exercises is for students to learn to do more than just rearrange the words and concepts that are given to them, or that they have memorized as a sequence of simple scripts. They must learn to use English to express their own ideas and concepts, to go beyond simple reaction to creation.

If we can foster that ability, examination scores will be much higher and students will have more confidence in speaking and writing. Creative production is essential if we wish our students to learn English as an actual language, a useful tool for communication and business, and not as a mere academic exercise.

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.

 

 

Review article: Shall We Separate Boys from Girls?

Global thought, Miscellaneous, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

–Uttam Gaulee

 “How can I sit on the girls’ bench?”his eyes staring at me, as if I had forced him to do something very objectionable. All the students in the classroom burst into laughter. This was a sixth grade boy at an English medium school I was teaching in West Nepal a dozen years ago. I showed the only available seat for him to sit.This boy had arrived late in the class, and afterperforming a customary “May I come in sir?” at the door, had entered the class. I expected him to take the only available seat but he wouldn’t sit down. I felt obliged to show him the only available space for him to sit and I encouraged him to sit there. The bench was shared by four other students–all girls! He would rather stand up for the entire period rather than condescend to sit on the bench with theother sex.Why would he? Wouldn’t he be insulted by all other friends afterwards? Anyway, I smiled to myself, feeling proud as his English teacher, because he spoke out his feeling so nicely in English.

We are all familiar with the typical Nepali high school classroom: girls flocked together at one side of the class in a couple of benches, and boys taking up all the rest of the available seats. Girls are often a minority and they feel secure when together with other girls. How do you arrange boys and girls in your classroom? Boys and girls alternatively, or all the girls together at one side and all the boys at the other? Or do you teach only boys and/or girls in the “boys-only” or “girls-only” schools? We do have some Kanya schools in Kathmandu such as Ishwari Kanya and Balkumari Kanya Vidhayalaya. Why did St. Xavier’s switch to co-ed at the turn of the century after serving as the “boys-only” school for half a century?Are there schools still in place where only boys are taught, perhaps in some Sanskrit or army schools? What is the rationale behind single sex education? How do these schools compete with their co-ed counterparts?Do boys learn differently than girls? Do boys and girls distract each other in learning process? Shall we rather separate boys and girls in schools or even have entirely different schools for boys and girls, so that they learn better? In this piece, I review an interesting article and present an interview that I conducted with one student as a way of testing the article’s arguments. I would be glad to hear what fellow Nepali teachers think about the issue of gender in education in general and teaching English in specific.

In “Single-Sex Classrooms Are Succeeding,”[1] Michael Gurian, Kathy Stevens, and Peggy Daniels say “yes” to the questions I asked above. The authors argue that their institute, the Gurian Institute, has trained thousands of teachers from a wide range of schools from fifteen countries, including more than two thousand schools and districts of the USA. Hence, they claim that having worked with all kinds of schools; they have seen “what is working and what is not working around the globe.”  As strong advocates of single-sex education, the authors have been able to argue very convincingly that single-sex classrooms are succeeding and that the phenomenon has been gaining popularity again. This popularity is happening despite many legal and attitudinal barriers over the past decade, particularly after the announcement of a change of regulation by the US Department of Education in October 2006.

One of the main reasons cited for promoting single-sex instruction is that boys and girls have both brain and learning differences. Putting forward their argument of single-sex instruction, the authors state that such instruction “offers specific gender friendly opportunities”  for expediting learning by the use of their resources and techniques, which many schools featured in the article have found helpful in setting up and maintaining successful single-sex programs. The article features a series of stories about single-sex education piloted by many different schools in the United States that have utilized the single-sex program model and verified its success. Also, they have experimentally verified the results in different modalitiesranging from whole single-sex academies to single-sex core programs andoptional single-sex classes.

There have been widespread successes in single-sex classrooms throughout USA. After single-sex programs were implemented, usually by teachers of the same gender as their students, but not always, achievement on state assessment tests greatly improved, causing some schools like Roosevelt Middle School in Oklahoma, to be taken off the “at risk” list. Some schools, like B.E.S.T Academy, focused on reading instruction for boys and technology instruction for girls. Moreover, a public high school in Arkansas specifically worked with struggling boys who were failing in various subjects and having problems with the transition to high school. Within two years, the high school found that very few of the boys failed. But not only this, discipline referrals also went down by one third. An independent college preparatory school in North Carolina implemented single-sex instruction and found many advantages in four years’ time, such as stronger mentoring relationships, more trust and feelings of attachment between the students and teachers, more stress reduction, anda greater production of new energy for the teaching and learning environment.

Success testimonials from principals, teachers, students, parents and even counselors all chime in to the wonderful achievement stories of the new initiative. One of the counselors writes to the authors, “There is something incredible taking place …a contagious excitement in the air that goes down to our students. It’s not just me – I am hearing it across divisions – I’m glad to be a part of it too.” While the authors cited many glowing examples of schools implementing and finding success in single-sex programs demonstrating that teachers and students found that the classroom environment and academic achievement improved, very few details were given about how boys and girls learn differently. Also missing from the article were instructional strategies teachers could use to better teach these genders.

I interviewed a person who had had some experience of both single-sex and co-ed schooling and interestingly, she is herself a part-time teacher currently teaching boys and girls in 6th grade. She went to an all-girl Catholic high school for grades 9-12, but she was in a co-ed elementary school for grades up to the 8th grade. I think she can be another testimonial for the authors.  Reflecting on her experiences, she remembers in 7th and 8th grade at a co-ed Catholic elementary school she was “a lot more interested in boys.”  However, “…at the high school, I could focus more on learning and was not afraid to participate in class.” She did take Honors Physics and A.P Physics, as well as Calculus for college credit, due to the suggestion of her Chemistry teacher, who was a male. She doesn’t remember favoring female teachers over male teachers, though. “Actually my History and Chemistry teachers (both male) were my favorite teachers because of their kindness, ability to make the class interesting, and their positive feedback.” Her physics teacher, also male, was not her favorite teacher but she did enjoy the challenging work and high standards for organized notes and classwork that he expected.

When I asked if she would have advanced in the math and sciences if Oakland Catholic would have had boys too, she answers, “Hard to say, I might have been more self-conscious and less focused, but truly hard to say.” She believes that in those years where she was forming her identity, she needed to not be distracted by the opposite sex and concentrate on growing academically, and even taking leadership roles at the Catholic religious retreat, “Kairos.”

As a current six grade teacher, she is very surprised to read of a gender achievement gap. She had worked for four years at a predominantly African American school where the racial achievement gap was discussed and shown in presentations.Asked for her thoughts on the reduction in the disciplinary referral for boys, she also wonders if teachers who only taught one gender were fairer if their student population shared their gender. Were female teachers fairer with girls and male teachers fairer with boys? Would co-ed classes show that male teachers disciplined girls differently and female teachers discipline boys differently? “Are we more open-minded with students who are more like us because we understand them?” She wants to learn more about it too.

While she thought more of brain and gender differences in terms of boys being more active and less willing to sit and study than girls are, as well as the stereotypes of boys being more interested in Math and Science while girls prefer Language Arts, she never really heard much thought about other ways they could be different. She is definitely interested in learning more about these differences now. “I briefly looked at an article about gender learning differences, and while I didn’t understand the Math concept, as it was higher Math, I could see how the teachers tapped more into the boys’ interests by just diving right into the material, while with the girls, their emotions were tapped into in regards to their curiosity about the mathematician, stories that surrounded the concept, real-life application, where they brought flowers and other objects in to use for the lesson.” The article for that suggested using “story problems” for girls because they want more of the real-life application than boys do.

She is intrigued by the section of the article that points out that due to single-sex education, the classroom environment improved, where teachers and students felt more connected to each other, and there was a greater sense of trust. Continuing this thought, my subject wondered when teachers “start from scratch” and not stick to the same routine and classroom set-up, if that helps them be creative and enthusiastic, and the students, sensing that, are more motivated to learn as a result.

The article sounds like a promotion of the authors’ institute in the beginning for a couple of reasons. First,  the authors own the institute themselves. Second, they have made a lot of claims bolstered by lots of evidences and testimonials. As much as they seems to be set out to sell their products in describing how their professional development plan for the teachers have been highly effective, they do have compelling elements in in the article.

After the discussion with my subject, another skeptical thought came to my mind. Every new idea comes with a promise and enthusiasm, such as a newly released film, and the charm wanes gradually with time.Did the teachers become more creative and/or students more motivated simply because it was just another “new idea?”  This notion of ephemeral fascination cannot be generalized to all innovations though, as there are someeducational reform movements like B.F. Skinner’s behaviorism, that have perpetual influence in the educational field, even after losing dominance for a long time.

There aretwo most compelling argumentsin the article: (1) the brains of girls and boys develop along different trajectories, and (2) thefactor of being conscious towards the opposite sex during the onset of puberty causes underachievement. However, details regarding these statements are not discussed much in the article. The interview with my subject also prompted me to reflect my own high school days. Boys and girls never sat on the same bench. Actually, all the girls flocked together in a couple of benches set to one side of the classroom while boys were on different rows. In spite of this arrangement of seating, we boys used to be very conscious about the girls’ presence in the class. It was a big distracting factor for most of us, not only in high school, but also in elementary school often times. Most of the boys were hesitant to speak out their thoughts in class because they feared the embarrassment that would entail in front of the girls if what they said was not accepted by the teacher—and the chance of rejection was always high as the teachers were too much obsessed with right or wrong and little did they care about accepting different thoughts.

While this reappearance of single-sex education has attracted the attention of educators, policymakers and parents, Dr. Leonard places a caveat on the possible global acceptance of single-sex education, though she doesn’t say anything about the success in school, per se. Her findings have ‘fuelled claims from teachers’ leaders and education psychologists that boys brought up in a single-sex environment are less able to relate to the opposite sex than those taught in a co-educational school. There is no such effect on the girls as “Girls seem to learn what the nature of the beast is if they have been to single sex schools whereas boys taught on their own seem to find girls more puzzling.” [2] This leads me to conclude that although co-education has a promise to foster natural human development, and that there are a host of other factors such as motivation contributing to the success of education, the modality of single sex classrooms does seem to have many advantages to consider and their book, I am sure, has a lot to offer for the teachers while opening an important issue for further research in different contexts.

I would like to hear what fellow Choutari readers think about this issue in the case of Nepal. Where are we in terms of single sex and co-ed discussion? Do we need to have it?

 Notes:

[1] The article that the author is reviewing in this work can be viewd at: http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/EJ849022.pdf

[2] Professor Diana Leonard, from the Institute of Education, University of London at a conference at the Perse School for Girls in Cambridge.

[ 3] See http://www.singlesexschools.org/research-learning.htm for single sex issue

 

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. 

An Interview with Professor Khaniya

Interview, Native Perspective

Mr. Test Writer,

Does your test really test what it should test?

It is all apparent that testing in general and language testing in particular in Nepal have been plagued with a bundle of issues. Some of the blazing issues that call for immediate intervention include memory and content based (English language) tests, slipshod marking system, lack of post result analysis, derogatory influence of exams on education, guess paper based exams, abolishment of entrance exams, issue of remarking papers, escalating cheating and so forth. Unfortunately, exam authorities have turned deaf ear to the issues. I put a few questions before Professor Tirth Raj Khaniya, a well known expert on the subject of testing if his visionary perspectives and long gained expertise could offer some guidelines to trim them down. Here are his insights and observations in his own words.

Please also feel free to put your comments, no matter you like or you feel difficult to digest the views expressed in the interview.


1.   Professor Khaniya, you have been involved in testing and evaluation for a long time. We do acknowledge your contribution in exam reforms in Nepal. However, if you look at the current trends in testing in Nepal, are you satisfied with what and how we have been testing?

Your question reminds me of the time when, after completing my PH. D. from University of Edinburgh, I was flying back to Kathmandu from London in the then RNAC flight thinking of how I would be working on bringing about reforms in the SLC Examination in particular (my area of investigation) and examination system of Nepal in general. As a matter of fact, I was able to influence some authorities involved in the management of the SLC exam to initiate some reform activities. I must say that there have been several changes in the SLC exam since then. However, I should also confess that I have not been effective in bringing about the reforms I wanted to bring about in the SLC Exam. What it is that I wanted the SLC to be is both an exit exam, as it is now (administrative), as well as a research process (academic) to bring about reform in the whole school sector of education. What it means is using the SLC exam as evidence of school performance and post analysis of the exam would give us sufficient information about what kind of intervention is needed in the school sector reform so as to make the system better. Doing this every year would obviously build the system better. It is mainly because of our failure in utilizing useful information available from the post analysis of the academic aspect of the SLC exam, even after spending a lot of money on school education, accomplishment is very little.

In response to your query, I must say that my academic pursuit forces me to work on making examinations as powerful instruments for causing learning, which is possible only when we produce good exams, but the situation in which I and we have been working leads me/us to be with the community that understand(s) exam only as an administrative tool. In that sense I have not been able to accomplish my mission so far. I will continue working towards this direction. The new generation is very positive about such changes. I am optimistic about it.

2.   When we look at the tests made in Nepal-whether be them for the English language or for other subjects/disciplines, we find most of the questions can be answered only if students have committed the contents well. Are we supposed to test that at all?

You have rightly touched on the main problem of testing in Nepal. As a matter of fact, we do not care what questions we ask, what answer our questions will stimulate the learners to produce, how to develop a question, how a learner will answer our question, etc. Especially in language testing, asking a question is more difficult than answering it if we really appreciate the art of questioning.

In response to your concern, I would say that the whole lot of the people involved in testing in the present set up does not have adequate orientation to testing. Their main source of knowledge about testing is that they took exams during their study period. But in modern education, testing has become an independent discipline and thus people who want to work in the field of testing need training on it.  Without training they cannot appreciate that a question cannot be a question simply because of its structure and a question mark, rather the one who asks a question needs to know what he is asking for (i.e. the expected answer or response or performance). On most occasions, I have seen people setting questions in such a way that there is no way for creative and innovative answers. To give you an example, in most question papers on the top, you find the statement saying “Candidates are required to give their answers in their own words as far as practicable” whereas you do not find even a single question in the paper not asked in the previous exams. How can the teacher expect original answers from students when he has not used even a single word in the whole set of question paper on his own? The argument is that in order to stimulate students to produce creative and innovative answers, you need to ask such questions and this is possible if testing procedures (e.g. specification) are truly followed.

3.   You have written a book entitled ‘Exams for Enhanced Learning’.  Contradictorily, tests are criticized for exerting deleterious influence on education and for not being able to assess the actual competence of a person. If so, why should test exist at all? Do not we have any alternative to it?

In my views, what we test, if done professionally, represents what we want our learners to learn. It makes the learner clear what they should strive for. In addition, testing is associated with intrinsic and extrinsic values which make the learner work hard. The combination of all these has a lot to do with how teachers prepare students for testing, how students prepare for it and how parents support them for getting through it. Then if we have good tests, working for such tests will enhance students’ learning. By the same token, if it happens to be a bad test, students are bound to suffer from its derogatory influence. The argument is that derogatory influence of an exam is not inherent, it depends upon whether the test is good or bad. A good test allows students to deal with what they are supposed to learn, and through testing their learning becomes powerful.

The main crux is what we ask students to produce and how we want them to demonstrate. Since a human brain is intelligent, and can tell a lie, as you said, it may be difficult to test real competence. However, a good test can lead a learner to truly perform tasks which can be accepted as an indicator of the learner’s competence.

My argument about exams is that at least for a foreseeable future, exams are likely to survive because even the advanced technology could not find a substitute for an exam. If so, why not prepare for using the power of exams which leads towards better learning, and it is possible if we design good tests

4.   Many allege that exams in Nepal have virtually remained guess-paper based? Why is it so? How can we check it?

As I said above, students’ behavior in an exam is shaped up by the questions we ask. When we ask questions borrowed from previous exam papers, commercial notes and guide books, we are forcing the students to be guess paper based. We can change the situation only when we make our students know that questions will not be based on market materials, and marking will be done on the basis of a marking scheme not on the basis of the answers copied from different sources.

5.   Specifically, what are English language testing issues in Nepal? What efforts are to be made in order to check them?

There are several issues in language testing in Nepal. One of the major issues, for example, is that we need to be clear about what we want to test- language or content. For me it is language not content.  If we want to test language we should not put a pressure on the students about contents. Content in language is merely a way of eliciting language. Lack of knowledge about this concept makes the whole process of testing complicated. We do not understand the difference between asking Nepalese students to write on Pashupatinath and The White House. When students do not write, we do not know whether it is because of lack of knowledge or language. In language testing we need to make sure that when students do not give us proper answer it is because of language not because of content.

6.   Particularly what tips or suggestions do you provide to test writers so that they unveil creative and critical abilities of the students?

What we need to understand is testing should not be treated as an isolated activity; rather it is a comprehensive activity. What I mean by this is that testing cannot be improved only by changing tests. Before we produce a changed test in an exam hall, we need to present it to the classroom in the beginning of the academic year so that the teachers and students understand what they are expected of; be it creative or innovative or practical or something they need to demonstrate. Once students and teachers know what they need to demonstrate in the exam, they will work for that and when what we want them to learn and what they need to demonstrate in order to pass an exam become the same, then we can concentrate on strengthening creative and critical abilities of the students through and for the exam.

7.   Language Testing has been established as a separate discipline elsewhere and that has systematized the evaluation of language learning from perspectives to practices. What about ours? Do not you think we need to make it more organized here in Nepal?

Everywhere language testing is emerging as an independent discipline.  In a short period of time, let’s say, after 1960s, it has grown in such a way that it is like any other disciplines which have long history and rich literature. Nepal’s case is the same. When we were students in Nepal, there was no concept of language testing. We were trained through measurement and evaluation concepts under pure education courses. Now we have a 50 marks’ course for language testing. I agree with you that we need to do more like forming language testing groups, publishing language testing journals, organizing special activities for training and sharing focusing on language testing, etc. The increasing popularity of language testing is creating sufficient spaces for doing what you are proposing.

8.   Often fingers are lifted on the marking system in Tribhuvan University and elsewhere. Many departments have been set on fire alleging subjective and careless examination of the papers? What do you have to say on this?

You are right. Our department was set on fire two times during my headship. I see problems not only in marking, but in the whole process of enrolling students for teaching and testing. Recalling that time, I think the students who were serious and regular in the class were not the ones who damaged the department. Those who led the vandalism were guest students but strong enough to exploit the situation. Saying so, I also agree with you that our testing involves subjectivity and carelessness. We need to provide some sort of professional development courses to all who are involved in teaching and testing about language testing. We happen to wrongly believe that good teachers are good testers. Once questions are developed professionally, many anomalies can be sorted out

9.   Students of TU and Higher Secondary Board have expressed their disgruntlement over the marking system time and again. Universities in the world do have the provision of remarking system. Do not you think TU should introduce this system at least for the students’ satisfaction and also to show the fairness of exams?

Many universities have a provision for an appeal when students do not accept results for any reason. In order to satisfy them, the provision for remarking is a way to give them justice. There is another advantage of remarking, that is, making teachers feel responsible for what they do. When teachers know that they are not the final authority for marking, when they know that the answer sheet may be examined again, they would to be more serious and do the job sensibly.

10. Tribhuvan University abolished entrance exams in some disciplines? How justified was the decision? Is there any university in the world which holds open admission?

It is unfortunate that the TU abolished entrance exam in some disciplines. As a matter of fact, it comes under university’s autonomy- a university making decisions on who to be allowed for admission and who not- my argument is, it is a matter of deciding on the quality of students for enrollment. When a university has no say over what kind of students it wants to invite and select, how can it talk about the quality of its product? Our student leaders also feel proud being able to allow those who do not merit for admission. They do not understand how it damages university’s credibility. In my view, this decision should be revisited.

11.    Last but far from the least, cheating has been rampant in Nepal-whether be it SLC or Higher Secondary or even exams of university? It has become a matter of headache for one and all. Why do you think has it happened? What do you think could be the best solution to check it? Can anything be done on the part of test writers to check cheating?

I am of the opinion that cheating is a byproduct. Students go for cheating because cheating is possible in the exam, they have seen their friends passing exams by cheating, questions are asked based on previous exam papers and published materials available in the market, etc. If we do not ask cheatable questions, if we effectively communicate to them that cheating cannot lead them to pass an exam, if we ask them questions answers of which cannot be supplied through cheating, and if we make them that cheated answers would not be awarded marks, I think they would not cheat.

Yes, you are right, we can stop cheating by improving how questions are asked and how answers are expected. But this has to be clearly communicated to teachers and students and classroom teaching has to be improved.

Thank you so much for illuminating us with your viewpoints.


 About Professor Khaniya 

Tirth Raj Khaniya is a familiar name in the arena of Nepalese education and ELT both. A Ph. D. in Language Testing from University of Edinburgh, UK.  Dr. Khaniya led several examination and education reform taskforces. Currently, a Professor of English Education, he teaches language testing in the Department of English Education, TU.  To his credit, he has a number of books and articles published in national and international journals on Nepalese education and ELT. New Horizons in Education in Nepal (2007) and Examination for Enhanced Learning (2005) are his highly acclaimed works. 

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.

TESTING:WHAT?

Miscellaneous, Scholarly Article

Welcome Note!

Hello!

All of you invaluable readers are heartily welcome to some of my words that I have attempted to express hereby on the ground of my experiences as a student, as a guardian, as a language facilitator and as a member of the society where I have directly and indirectly observed and felt the tests of diversities. Since it is based on my perceptions, it is more particular than general, though I have tried my level best to bring some academically supported related facts and trends in some different way. I am hopeful for your making me grateful to you by dropping some comments to help me extend the horizons of vision!

Thank you!

What is testing?

Test! As the word echoes in the ears of the concerned, they feel different kinds of sensations; they get several varied feelings and ideas hovering over their heads, on how to manage, how to tackle, how to get through and many more. Let me place the three ways how people have understood a test. Here they are:

-It is a kind of tension and trauma to most of the fellows

-It is tricks and the acts of teasing to several

-It is of course a great trip to few

Such statistics attached to my experience shows that most of the fellows hate having to face it or recklessly dare to surpass the lines of moral acts, i.e. helplessly breaking the norms and values set for an IDEAL test. Why so? Why does a test sound so horrible to most of the test takers? Is a test really so terrifying? We can confer with the sufferers and disclose that they have always found themselves in odd situations, confused at how to get through with the limited tools available and uncertain supports which they are supposed to get certainly.

Secondly, several of the people who are holding the revelantly responsible posts administratively feel they neither have to do anything with the outcome of test nor need at least to take some moral responsibility for being indifferent to the future of the testees and do something justifiable either by taking firm steps challenging the hindrances like the outgoing Chief Justice Ram Prasad Shrestha or by resigning the post as a bold step like the former finance secretary Rameshwore Khanal. Wow! Let’s give a give hand to them, shall we?

Thirdly, test is simply a great trip to few fellows who have been equipped with most of the advanced educational tools at their own expense, who have made timely preparation without looking to the concerned bodies and considered it as an opportunity to find out how far and how smoothly they have come so far and what would be the fruit of their journey like on getting to the destination set.

“Dear fellows, you have to have been born with a silver spoon in your mouth in this country to be lucky enough to taste a test in the third way!”

Now, shall we have an open tête-à-tête on testing?

Do you agree TESTING refers to the way of carrying out a test? It signals HOW, whereas test indicates WHAT! Are we all, irrespective of designations, satisfied with the way or ways of carrying out a test or tests in our localities except at some institutions? NO will get overwhelming majority, as a landslide victory over YES. Have we ever tried to detect WHY? Have we ever made an attempt to pick holes on our own part? Perhaps, NO! Or, perhaps, YES in words, but NO in action!! Let’s not worry, because it is NONE OF OUR BUSINESS! I am, by God, not making any satire or ironical expression! To your contentment that I am not CHEATING, let’s enter the next episode below, shall we?

Test: in search of identity

I wish I could have named this part Clash of The Titans but my mind found the same more justifiable, since we are not going to watch a Hollywood film though we can get visible Clashes, i.e. disagreements, among Titans, i.e. scholarly heroes, over the identification of test in this part.

According to Jacobovits (1970:75), what it is to know a language is not well understood so the language proficiency tests that are now available and universally used are inadequate because they attempt to measure something that has not been well defined. It means language is a complex human-specific system and it is a brain-racking job what aspect of it is to be tested. Anyway, we are not sure what exactly we are to measure, yet we are to measure! What a puzzle!

Hughes (1989:1) roars shedding light on the imprecision of most of the tests that result in the failure. Simply, test is next to failure. But, for your kind information, he doesn’t advocate for failure to replace tests with. What he has brought to light is that in most of the cases or situations tests have failed to measure what exactly they are administered to. So, they have often served horrible tastes to teaching and learning, perhaps a nightmare for those who make efforts sleeplessly. But, sorrowfully, testing has not been worth disposing till the date. Moreover, they are growing in different shapes and sizes. Aren’t testees getting more bewildered?

Davies (1968:1-2) – Davies seems to have somewhat clear idea about language testing that he opines as the tendency to follow the teaching methodology. That is testing how proficient someone is in the second language is shaped by teaching methodologies. It means the methodologies can possibly introduce the modes of tests so as to measure the second language proficiency.

Farhady(1983:311) – Farhady has his own experience in connection with methods. To be frank, as I have understood Farhady’s, we devise a method today to be thrown away tomorrow as something worthless, just like a knock-out boxing championship, in which a new champion appears knocking out the former one questioning the validity of his competence and performance. It conveys succeeding methods are obliged to come down on preceding ones directly questioning their validity. That may be why today’s methodologists have refrained from such bitter knock-out trends and joined hands and declared post-method era. Simply, it illustrates that no methods are superior to the other ones; methods of any sort having feasibility to help learners get ahead are adoptable whether they are from renowned methodologists or locally developed.

Anyway, some scholars have addressed language ability as a target of test. But, to our amazement, there seems to have surfaced another episode of the clash over what language ability is. A new type of test it is, isn’t it?

Bachman(1990) advocates for a clear-cut definition of the ability to try to find out the ground of consensus. Lado(1961) placed his definition of language ability ;and, it had to face a bitter challenge from Oller(1979) who himself failed to explain to  the  advocates of communicative language testing. It indicates what is to be tested is still unclear. Yet, we are having to give and take a test, as a journey on which we can’t exactly decide what our destination is. Although it is widely acceptable that testing has focused on different aspects of language in different eras, yet it is criticized for failing to zero in on the exact target. To put in different words, it is dynamic; it is changing with the change in the way of viewing the aspects of language as demanded by time.

To speak my mind as a summed-up view in this regard, test itself is incomplete. It has created a big non-ending dispute on the international arena, perplexing even highly renowned scholars, much more Nepalese scholars, and much much more Nepalese testees –  poor fellows. It is just like entering a labyrinth to get out to the desired career somewhere on the other side. So, it is natural that the students, the poor fellows, who have been left helpless at the crossroads, demand enough looseness in course of battling tests, and moreover in the republican system! And, it is solely up to the responsible how justifiably they maintain the balance between the LOOSENESS and TIGHTNESS during the tests with a broad vision. Shall we step further below to enjoy the history (or MYSTERY?) of the balance?

Tests of TU: toddling to the balancing act!

TU, in the sight of many more students and teachers, is still holding high dignity as an iconic figure but its ever/never-changing conditions have long been the matter of concern to the true concerned people. Just as political changes that have occurred in Nepal, similarly to many more students and guardians, the exam systems of TU seem to have had  radical changes just from despotic through democratic to republican. In the past I can still remember the teaching and testing used to hold some reasonable balance. Almost all the subjects used to be complete in time. The teachers were so much worried about how they could satisfy the students, and so were the students’ union as well as the administration. I still recall the extra classes  given by our physics teacher Jagadish Mandal on Saturday. Almost all the students attended the classes. And, the exams were too tight to have even a side-talk! We all felt justice at that time. In today’ version of perception, that was the despotic reign of TU; and no doubt we still feel proud of having gone through the ordeals for our own achievement. Later on, the system got democratized. That is there appeared different unions including those of teachers and administrative staff growing their influences in favor of their interests. As a result, haphazard tug-of-war pulled the established system out of its shape. Sorrowfully, teaching and cheating were seen to have come to the point of agreement compromising the quality students were supposed to have had as their fundamental right. And, cheating started to find logical space during the exams – a democratic slogan: Everything has right to exercise power for its existence and enhancement! By and large, directly or indirectly, TU itself seemed to have given half consent to what had begun as a new practice, i.e. cheating is the new arrangement of the fundamentals of teaching (anyone can get excited to learn that on rearranging the letters of TEACHING we can get a word CHEATING – what a coincidence or a morphological plan the English made for the Nepalese education to suit!). Now we are exercising republican system. We can see countless fragmented groups demanding the security of their own diversified interests no matter what, where and when. All the organs of the system are fighting for their more significant approaches and prominent positions such as teaching department, administrative department, and examination department and so on. And, why can’t the students, the symbol of young blood, the tsunami of changes in any sector, stand in the lead amongst the multiple clashes? Of course, they must have reasonable interference in any field, much more in the exam halls.

Nepal is a wonderland of many more existences. We can get countless mind-boggling phenomena and happenings here. Not to speak of Nepalese even foreign scholars from developed countries can’t help but start scratching their heads in wonders over the dual educational scenario in our country – too flexible and too inflexible. What is too flexible to retain an understandable shape is that today’s exam halls in most of the centers are equipped with the highly sophisticated scientific technologies, such as using cell phones for easy access to questions and answers – exercising human right of unimpeded access to information! And, what is too inflexible to understand is that almost all the systems from teaching to testing in our country are bizarrely outdated in the present context, yet we are still sticking to them and surviving anyhow!

So the tests of TU refer not only to the tests set by TU for the students to go through but also those TU itself is having to undergo. The students are managing anyhow to go through them, but poor TU seems to have failed each and every test it has set itself for itself! The balancing act is at risk, isn’t it?

Silence is now full consent!

There is a common saying “Silence is half consent”, but it dramatically shifts to a novel saying “Silence is full consent”. Just a few days ago, I read a piece of news on the rift appearing slowly in a political party in our soil. That was the state of deadlock the leaders on two sides were in. One leader explained that they were in a great dilemma in the ongoing transitional phase. What he added was ‘The circumstance says: Don’t kill any living creature; don’t bring the flesh of a dead body; and, don’t come back empty-handed’. Now in our educational context in relation to tests, the dialogue might go like this: We can’t say “Do cheating at the exams”, and we can give you neither enough time to prepare nicely enough nor duly guidance! So directly or indirectly cheating is gaining stronger moral ground these days, isn’t it?

It has been my own bitter experience so far. I do feel like adding a lot here, but I do respect your reading patience so I am clarifying in short why so.

It is an open secret to you all what kinds of facilities students are enjoying to pursue their higher studies – libraries with no or insufficient related books, no (updated) teaching calendar, uncertainty of examination dates, course completion in time as a far cry, too great a delay in publishing exam results, no time for re-totaling, the lack of enough time to prepare properly for the papers the examinees have failed in. what could we expect from the students in such adverse situations, if not cheating or something else similar to that? How could the concerned bodies find themselves comfortable to give moral lessons? I can’t at all say I am just advocating for cheating. I am just trying to express that there must be more powerful options for the students to  get allured out of the compulsion of or inclination to CHEATING. What could be the master plan? Isn’t it high time the responsibility holders devised it?

Testing or getting tested

As most of the scholars have undertaken test as a two-way traffic, since it not only tests how far students have got ahead in the line of their competence growth but also measures how successful the teachers have been in selecting the right directions in the line of duty. In fact, it is more crucial on the part of teachers, not students, in relation to how learner-oriented the teaching has been made. And, it also goes without saying scholarly arguments over what exactly tests are aimed at have posed a challenge to the efficacy of tests. In general, tests are meant to measure whether students’ command on the language skills is up to standard or not. And, quality tests are considered to be balanced on the tripod of validity, reliability and practicality, of which validity has held the highest value till today and practicality the lowest. Such an old-established concept and clarification must be open to fresh discussions to evaluate them afresh, as we have found a growing number of teachers, educationists, and experts advocating for deconstructionism. If you let me speak my mind, we must follow the reverse order, that is practicality matters the most and validity the least. If what we are inclined to achieve or have achieved fails to have practicality, it is outdated in the world of technologies and deserves a trash can. Simply, you have spent your time and money on something but it doesn’t make any sense in practice or you cannot use it practicably. Would you like to bear any more tension holding it on any longer? If what we have attained supports us effectively in almost all the related moves of ours, I hope nobody can cast a doubt over its sustainable consistency and it does have high reliability. And, if something is practicably reliable, it is automatically valid, isn’t it? I believe that is the way we now need to be in action – a novel test to be tested, since we may have been exhausted with our countless attempts to make the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language fruitful on the whole. Only then teaching will no longer get eclipsed by cheating. And, the certificate will no longer remain simply a piece of paper but hard-earned bread! And, the exams will no longer remain tilted to the written modes of communication but balanced on written (reading and writing) and oral (listening and speaking) ones. And, it would be wise to commence with what is to be tested and in what ways in consonance with our soil and soul.

Let’s be hopeful for the RISE!

References

Doff, A. (1988). Teach English- A training course for teachers (Trainers’ Handbook and Teachers’ Book). Cambridge: CUP.

Khaniya, T. R. (2005). Examination for enhanced Learning. Kathmandu: Kishore Khaniya.

Sharma, B. K. & P. B. Phyak. (2008). Teaching English language. Kathmandu: Sunlight Publication.

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.

Presidential Address: Sixteenth NELTA International Conference

Native Perspective

– Mr. Laxman Gnawali

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

Past President, Current

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

Prof. Abhi Subedi sir,

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

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

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

Distinguished Guests on the dais,

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

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

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

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

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

Tell me and I will… Forget

Show me and I will. …Remember

Involve me and I will…Understand

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ladies and Gentlemen,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you very much indeed.

Laxman Gnawali

Acting President, NELTA

18 February 2011

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

English as a Global Language

Prem Phyak

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

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

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

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

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


English, multilingualism and cross-culturality

English as a Global Language

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

 

English in multilingual and cross-cultural context


The complexity of culture

Causes and consequences of the loss of Native language among Paharis at Khopasi:Sociocultural and Linguistic perspectives

Native Perspective

Madhav P. Timalsina

This article is a synopsis of a thesis submitted in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. It will be helpful for the students of sociology and those who attempt to prepare thesis in partial fulfillment of Master’s Degree. This study was carried out at Panauti Municipality ward no.12 Khopasi. Only fifty respondents from Pahari community were chosen. The respondents were of different age groups i.e. from twelve years of age to over sixty.They were interviewed duly through structured-interview and ten people from different sphere of life and well known to Paharis and their state of affairs were taken as key informants and they were also interviewed. Apart from interview, observation was also made and the findings were considerably justified with sociological and linguistic theories.

A Brief History of Paharis at Khopasi
Khopasi was named as ‘Kuru Pasak’ during Kirat regime and it is said that Kuru Pasak later becomes Khopasi. The first people ever lived in this place were the Pahari(Sapkota,Rabin 2006).It is said that their traditional profession was to carve stone and make stone grinding mill and water-turbine. It is said that they were the first people who fished in Roshi and Salandu khola. Later Brahmins came over there from Kuntabsi, Newars from Dapcha and Bhaktapur and Paharis living at Khopasi scattered to other places like Lele,Dolakha etc. They had unique culture in marriage, funeral, feast and festivals. They claim that their ancestors were Newar and their language matches with Newar. Moreover, they also employ Napit (the one whose traditional profession is to cut nails of Newars) as Newars do. There were 11505 Paharis in Nepal according to census report 2001B.S. and only 319 Paharis were there in Khopasi. Now approximately 4oo Paharis are living there. No new generation speaks Pahari language and we do not observe any influence of Newari tongue while talking with them. A research work was done about the reason why Paharis living there do not speak their mother tongue and what will be the consequences of the loss. Interview with key informants, interview with the locals and observation were used as the tool of research and was submitted to the department of Sociology/Anthropology,Tri-Chandra Multiple Campus,Ghantaghar. The synopsis of the study is presented below;
During the interview of Paharis and key informants, the causes of the loss of the native language of Paharis were identified as follows on the basis of their responses:
I. School education
II. Lacking interest
III. Assimilation
IV. Acculturation
V. Linguistic policy of the government
VI. gradual loss of culture
VII. Speakers socio-economic status and attitudes
VIII. Literature and script
IX. Social distance
X. theories of language death
XI. Sociological theories
• Conflict theory
• World system theory
• Sociobiology
Most interviewees told that school education in Nepali language is the main cause of their loss of native language. As they did not get chance to use their language in education, they were compelled to learn Nepali language for academic purposes. It helped them to lessen the charm of using their own language. Other causes of the loss of native language of Paharis are described below:
1. Assimilation
Assimilation is a process in which a group gradually gives up its own language, culture and system of values and takes on those of another group with a different language, culture and system of value through a period of interaction (Crystal, 1991) Paharis at Khopasi came to unending interaction with Brahmins and Chhetris and they needed to use Nepali language while talking to Newars and Tamangs. They assimilated the language first then their culture gradually. As a result, they lost their language.
In Nepalese society, we mostly observe linguistic assimilation, the process of interaction between different group of behavior of the majority. Despite being a multi-lingual nation. Nepali language has been given power, recognition while the remains minority languages and their communities are impoverished and marginalized. As a result linguistic minorities have remained socially excluded from harnessing national benefits in fields such as politics, economy, education, employment and so on. promotion of one language, one religion, one dress and mono-cultural nationalism by the state not only hurt the culture of these people but it effectively marginalized them in economic political and social realms(Bhattachan, 1995)
2. Acculturation
It is a process in which changes in language, culture and system of value of a group happen through interaction with a different language, culture and system of values.(Crystal, 1991) Paharis at Khopasi acculturate Brahmins language and culture. They called Brahmin purohit to perform rites and rituals that changed their cultural values and system. It led them to abandon their native language.
3. Social distance
The feeling a person has that his or her social position is relatively similar to or relatively different from the social position of someone else. The social distant between two different group or communities influence communication between them and may affect the way one group learns the language of another(for example, an immigrant group learning the language of the dominant group in a country). Social distance may depend on such factors as differences in the size, ethnic orgin, political status, social status of two groups (Crystal, 1991). For the case of Pahari they found themselves far from their own language as they were surrounded by Nepali native speakers. They could not use their own language in interaction and gradually they forgot their own language.
4. Linguistic and cultural hegemony
Linguistic hegemony is achieved when dominant groups create a consensus by convincing others to accept their language norms and usage as standard or model. hegemony is ensured when they can convince those who fail to meet those standards to view their own language. School have been the principle instruments in promoting a consensus regarding the alleged superiority of standardized language(Wiley, in Mckay and Hornberger, 2007, p.113)
Similarly cultural hegemony is a philosophic and sociological concept, originated by the Marxist philosopher Antonia Gramsci, that a culturally diverse society can be ruled or dominated by one of its social classes. It is the dominance of one social group over another e.g. The ruling class over all other classes. The ideas of the ruling class to be seen as the norm, they are seen as universal ideologies, perceived to benefit everyone whilst only really benefiting the ruling class. (wikipedia.com). For the case of Paharis, they failed to meet the standards to view their own language and school going children found/realized the superiority of Nepali language in the past. As a result, they abandoned their native language. Nepali, as national language and dominance of Hindu culture gave them way out to abandon their culture as well. As a result, they lost their native language.
5. World system theory
World system model and Neo-Marxist divides the world into three parts viz core, semi-periphery and periphery. Standard variety i.e. Nepali lies in core and other ethnic language lies in semi-periphery and language of minorities lies in periphery. Pahari people at Khopasi were in minority and their language was dominated by Nepali language. A.G. Frank’s bi-polar division as Metropolis and Satellite also matches in the case. Pahari language was in Satellite and standard variety i.e. Nepali was in Metropolis.
6. Sociobiology (Reproductive fitness)
According to sociobiology when one loses its reproductive fitness it ultimately dies out. Similarly, Pahari language lost its reproductive fitness and the speakers gradually abandoned the language. Those Paharis who could speak Pahari language felt that they could not express them full with the help of their own language and they might have adopted words from Nepali language. During the study, old people speaking Pahari told that they did not have many words to address nature and happenings. It shows that this language lost its productive fitness and its speakers felt disadvantaged. So they did not practice it and gradually lost their own language.
2. Consequences of the loss of the native language
During the interview, the interviewees gave various responses regarding the consequences of the loss of their native language. The consequences they have perceived after the loss of native language are as follows:
1. They are how worried to loss their identity
2. They think that loss of language may cause them to assimilate with other communities
3. They think that they will no longer be people of minorities Apart from these consequences, the following things can be traced :
2.1. Collapse of culture
They no longer use their language in rites and rituals and their culture is in verge of extinction. They started calling Brahmin Purohitas to perform religious rites and rituals and they no longer celebrated their own festivals on their own. With the loss of language, they lost their own culture and 80% Paharis do not know their culture.
2.2. The Pahari language as moribund language
Krauss defines language as moribund language if children are not speaking them now, endangered if children will probably not speaking the in 100 years. (wikipedia.com) Pahari language in the study area is going to be moribund language as Pahari children do not have any interest in learning their language and even the Paharis over 50 years of age can not speak Pahari language. Krauss has suggested three main criteria that can be used to identify language as endangered. They are :
i. The number of speakers currently living
ii. The mean age of native and/or fluent speakers
iii. The percentage of the youngest generation acquiring fluency with the language in question
In the study area the researcher found only 6% Pahari who could speak Pahari language and they were found to have low and moderate proficiency. People below 48 years could not speak Phari language and the youngest generations do not speak the language at all. It shows that Pahari language in the study area is moribund language.
2.3. Language death
Language death is a process that affects speech communities where the level of language variety is decreased, eventually resulting no native or fluent speakers.
Similarly the most common process leading to language death is one in which a community of speakers of one language becomes bilingual in another language and gradually shifts allegiance language the second language until they cause to use their original(heritage) language. This is a process of assimilation which may be voluntary or may be forced upon a population. Speakers of some languages particularly regional or minority languages may decide to abandon them based on economic or utilitarian grounds, in favor of language regarded as having greater utility or prestige.
A language is often declared to dead even before the last native speakers of the language die. If there are only a few elderly speakers of a language remains and they no longer use that language for communication then the language is effectively dead. For the case of this study 6% pahari people living in the study area of the age of more than 50 and it seems obvious that even before their death, young generation is completely distant from their native language and their language in the study area will certainly die with the death of elder members.
2.4. Blockage for privileges due to loss of linguistic identity
They are not speaking their language and it has been a half-century since they abandoned their culture. They have changed their surname also. If they speak their language, it will be their ethnic identity but they are now unknown to their own language. As a result, special provision announced by the government for minorities’ will be blocked for them. Sudden setback to Pahari from Harisharan and Shrestha in the last six or seven months have shown that they wanted to get the privilege but remarkably they are still hesitating to revitalize their own culture and language. For them surname may help to deserve the privileges announced by the government.
3. Summary of findings
The main objective of this study was to find out why Paharis living at Khopasi lack interest in speaking their own language i.e. native Pahari and causes and consequences of the loss of their language. Among 396 Pahari living as Khopasi 50 people were duly interviewed to collect data and 10 people sharing different profession and social designation were also interviewed as key informants. Before preparing structured interview for the sampled population, key informants ideas were paraphrased as possible and valid option of the questions to selected Pahari respondents. Linguistic as well as socio-cultural theories were taken into consideration while analyzing and interpreting the data preliminary information’s of the respondents were also analysed and concluded.
The findings of the present study obtained from the analysis and interpretation of the data are summarized as follows:
 Respondents from the age of 12 to 60 plus were duly interviewed with structured. Interview. As other people from different communities Paharis of different age group were found to be involving in different walks of life.
 On the part of education, Paharis were not found exceptional i.e. literacy percentage of Paharis was found to be similar to other communities.
 On the part of religion, they were found to be Hindu dominated though Christianity was found to be growing In other words, 90% of Paharis were found to be the follower of Hinduism.
 They were found to be increasing their landholding capacity as they were involving in trade and business and other jobs. No Paharis were found to be landless.
 Regarding the linguistic figure of Paharis only 12% of the respondents from the age over 48 were found to have low and moderate proficiency of Pahari language. People below 48 years of age were not found to be known to their language. Schools and collages going children were found completely unknown to their language. As Krauss defines Pahari language has been ‘Moribund’ ;
 Only 8% of the respondents aged over sixty were found to be well-known to their own culture and 12% respondents knew very little about their unique culture. Remaining 80% of the respondents did not know their own culture. So, not only the language they were found to be abandoning their culture as well.
 Regarding the reasons for lacking interest in Pahari language various ideas were given by them. Mainly parents who did know Pahari language well did not use it for their children and today’s children never heard anyone talking in Pahari language in their surrounding. 88% of the respondents did not find the utility of this language in other walks of life and 80% of them had fear of being pushed back to traditional conservative life if they learned or used. Very remarkably 68% of the respondents agreed that inter-casts marriage among Paharis (marrying with Magars, Chhetris, Brahmins, Ghartis etc.) was the reason. According to them marrying with non-Paharis brought Nepali, language as dowry and children caught up mothers language ignoring father’s one. For academic purpose, they gave up their own language.
 Among the respondents, 80% did not want to revitalize their language and most remarkably all respondents below 36 years rejected to revitalize their language. It means revitalization of Pahari language was found to be difficult and would be unwanted in Khopasi.
 Regarding the cause of the loss of Pahari language, mainly schooling assimilation and acculturation, speaker’s negative attitude and lacking interest, unavailability of Pahari literature and script and linguistic hegemony were found as the causes.
 Regarding the consequences of the loss of Pahari language collapse of the culture, linguistic identity, moribund to the death of language and blockade in privileges provided by the government were found to be prominent.
3.2 Conclusion
Main objective of the study was to carry out the reasons behind lacking interest of learning native language among Paharis residing as Khopasi and to find out cause and consequences of the loss of their native language. The study was based on interview and observation. The nature and universe of the population was 396 Paharis out of which 50 people from different age-group and Gender were selected with purposive random sampling and 10 people from different walks of life but quite close to Paharis were taken as key informants. Regarding education, landholding and religion, Paharis at Khopasi were not found to be exceptional to other ethnic groups. Regarding the linguistic-identity and cultural understanding Paharis were not found to be Pahari in its unique sense. Only 12% people have moderate and low proficiency in Pahari language and they no longer use it in daily life. Due to not having intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and exposure, Paharis are lacking interest in learning native language. They did not find any use of Pahari language. Similarly social distance, assimilation, acculturation, linguistic and cultural hegemony; socio-political aspects of language planning, negative attitudes towards the language were identified as the causes of the loss of native language. 100% Paharis living in Khopasi are found fluent in Nepali and no influence of their mother-tongue could be noticed while they used Nepali language. It can be said that it has been more than half a century since they gave up their language and culture. Consequences of the loss of native language seemed to have collapse of culture, ethnic identity moribund of the language that ultimately leads to the extinction of language. Due to the loss of native language they lost their ethnic identity and changed their surname quite like Newars. Recently the government has provided special privilege for marginalized group and Pahari are included in this group. The growing trend of going back to Pahari from ‘Harisharan’, ‘Nagarkoti’ ‘Udas’ and Shrestha is a bit remarkable. Still, they are not ready to accept language as identity. Not only Pahari language but also some other languages like Newari and Magar around the study area have the same fate.
Malla (1989 ; 452 ) observed that despite the distinct decline in the percentage of Maithili, Bhojpuri, Avadi and Tharu speakers in the Terai zones, ‘the mother tongues of the majority of the population of these zones still continue to be non-Nepali.
As Nepal is a multilingual country and in a multilingual situation, vernacular language (or ethnic language) may decline in terms of prestige, speakers, areas of uses etc. If the decline is severe, the language may be endangered, moribund or extinct. In recent times only, more than 750 languages have already become extinct around the world. Stoll others have only a few known speakers: these languages are called endangered language. The UN estimates that more than half of the languages spoken today have fewer than 10,000 speakers and that a quarter have fewer than 1,000 speakers and that unless there are some efforts to maintain them over the next hundred years, must of these will became extinct(Pokhrel, 2009. p.118)
More commonly language dies through cultural change and language replacement, by assimilation to a dominant culture and language. This process is broad and complex but one major factor is negative attitude to a language, both in government policy and local communities (yee, 2000). Young generation of Paharis at Khopasi has negative attitude to their own language.
Crystal (2000) suggests six key themes in language revitalization. He postulates that an endangered language will progress if its speakers:
i. Increase their prestige within the dominant community
ii. Increase their wealth
iii. Increase their legitimate power in the eyes of the dominant community
iv. Have a strong presence in the education system
v. Can write down the language
vi. Can make use of electronic technology
In the study area, Paharis lack the suggestion mentioned by Crystal (2000) to revitalize their own language. For them, it is quite impossible to use their own language. It assists that Pahari language in the study area is a dead language like Sanskrit.
This study was done for academic purpose and it covers the area of Khopasi and may be applicable to generalize the status of languages of minorities like Magars and some Newars living in other villages of Kavre.


BRANCH SPECIAL, January 2011

Native Perspective, Nelta branch and members

Namaste!

We dedicate this issue to the colleagues from NELTA branches across the country, with special thanks to colleagues from Birgunj, Gorkha, Palpa, and Surkhet. There is no doubt that our readers will be glad and grateful to you if you can continue to publish news updates about training or other professional development events, success stories of individual teachers or schools that take new initiatives in ELT, personal anecdotes, annual summaries of ELT activities in your branch… anything you can share with the rest of the NELTA community and readers around the world. To repeat what we said in the main editorial, our vision is to make this a professional discussion forum where teachers at the grassroots level ARE the ELT scholars and researchers. We don’t need to remind any fellow teacher that the best types of ELT resources are pedagogical solutions that evolve from problems overcome by individual teachers, classroom/action research, teaching tips shared among teachers who are in similar material and institutional situations, and reflections and theorizing done by teacher-scholars in the geo-political contexts of Nepal and the local settings around the country. Simpy, this forum is yours, and you should contribute what you know, what you have, what you are interested in. The discussions of scholars at the center or in different types of professional academic settings around the world are also important, but those postings and discussions will also become more meaningful if they are based on the situations, challenges, innovations that you face at the classroom and local levels.

Here is a special set of materials from NELTA branches from across Nepal. Enjoy the local flavor and promote the conversation!

  1. NELTA Palpa Conference Vibrated the Teachers in the Area (an article by Gopal Bashyal, NELTA Palpa)
  2. NELTA = Novel ELT Activities (an event update and article by Gopal Bashyal, NELTA Palpa)
  3. NELTA Surkhet in 2010 (a branch update from Surkhet, by Mukunda Giri, NELTA Surkhet)
  4. “Teaching English with a Difference” (a report from Birgunj on a recent Training Program, by Suresh Shrestha*)
  5. English Access Microscholarship Program in Nepal (an article about a new ELT initiative in NELTA branches, by Shyam Pandey)
    (also linked from main editorial)

Please remember to leave a comment to these posts and promote updates and discussions from NELTA branches across the country. Please subscribe to Choutari so you will be alerted when there is a new post.

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Towards Local Literacy: Globalization and Nepalese ELT

Critical Pedagogy, Native Perspective, Scholarly Article

Prem Phyak

Introduction

Anything that is ‘local’ is generally better in terms of quality and permanence. Let me give some examples: local chicken is tasty, local fruit is hygienic, local vegetable is fresh, and local people make a big difference in your life. What about local literacy? In this short article, I highlight the importance of local literacy in relation to ELT in Nepal. I will also briefly discuss how local literacy in ELT can be promoted in the classroom. Let me start with some perspectives on globalization as the basis of this discussion.

Globalization and Local literacy: What?

We all know that English has become a part of our social and individual lives: it is not only in our education and professions but also in our homes, through television, internet, mobile phones, and other information and communication technologies. Through social networking and new media in particular, English is continuing to work as one of the most powerful means of globalization (See related article in May 2009 issue of NeltaChoutari). We cannot consider the trends of globalization and the spread of English as neutral without being extremely naïve. As Bourdieu (2001) tells us that

“Globalization” serves as a password, a watchword, while in effect it is the legitimatory mask of a policy aiming to universalize particular interests and the particular tradition of the economically and politically dominant powers…It aims to extend to the entire world the economic and cultural model that favours these powers most, while simultaneously presenting it as a norm, a requirement, and a fatality, a universal destiny, in such a manner as to obtain adherence or, at the least, universal resignation. (as cited in Phillipson, 2004)

The term ‘globalization’ has now become a buzz word in every field, and it has very important implications in ELT because the English language is the most influential means of “universalizing particular interests and particular tradition of the economically and politically dominant powers” as Bourdieu argues. To say that we are simply “using” a “common” language for “communicating” across linguistic borders is both absolutely correct but absolutely ludicrous if we don’t “also” recognize/admit that languages belong to societies that wield cultural, social, and political powers through their languages: as language teachers, we must not limit our understanding and scholarship to dictionary definition of “language” because we must also know that the relative difference of the power that different language communities makes huge difference in both material and intellectual terms for people and societies. So, it is important to understand what role English plays in globalization of ideas and practices of dominant cultures. English is considered a ‘global’ language (Graddol, 1997; Crystal, 1997), and the number of researches on the role of English in globalization has increased in the last decade. Recent scholarship in this area helps us understand why and how the role of English as a global language should be assessed critically. The views about the role of globalization in language teaching are, however, more divergent. In their groundbreaking edited book ‘Globalization and Language Teaching,” Block and Cameron (2002) summarize following major views regarding globalization:

  • Hegemonically Western, and above all extension of American imperialism
  • Extreme of standardization and uniformity
  • Synergetic relationship between the global and the local- globalization

We see that the first view takes Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’ and Phillipson’s ‘linguistic imperialism’ about globalization considering it as a means to disseminate the Western and American economic, cultural, political and educational ideologies. In this sense, globalization is another face of Westernization and Americanization. This view is concerned more with the political and ideological discussion which, as I see, does not make more sense in ELT. But the second and third views have a great impact on ELT.

We can relate two major issues – native speakerism and imported method – regarding the ‘standardization’ and ‘uniformity’ in ELT respectively. Standardization here means many things. The most obvious point related to ELT is that in order to maintain standard we have to follow ‘native’ English representing maybe CNN and BBC English. The uniformity can be interpreted as ‘adoption’ of the same textbook, method of teaching and learning material all over the world without considering the ‘local’ socio-cultural context.

The third view – glocalization – is the negotiation between the global and the local in which we find the mixture of the both. At present, this cocktail idea has come to the fore to soothe the criticisms against globalization on the ground of ‘hegemonic’ and ‘imperialistic’ ideology. With this view, we can argue that globalization has its presence at local level as well. We can also say that it is the continuum which has greater impact at the global context but have less impact at the local context. This degree also differs in terms of power, economy and technological advancement. It is obvious that the societies which are poor, powerless and technologically underdeveloped have less impact of the globalization. In this regard, Block (2008) claims

Globalization is framed as the ongoing process of the increasing and intensifying interconnectedness of communications, events, activities and relationships taking place at the local, national or international level. (p.31)

Although it is accepted that ‘local’ components can also be incorporated in the ‘globalization’, questions which have been ignored are: To what extent we have recognized the value of ‘local’ in ELT literacy practice? Which one (the global or the local) is dominant?  How can we bring the ‘local’ into ELT pedagogy? In the remainder of this article, I discuss these issues with reference to ELT in Nepal.

Local literacy and local society

Going through various literature and studies regarding literacy (e.g. Wallace, 1999, 2002), we find three major interpretations of local literacy. First interpretation takes local literacy as teaching through local languages. This is concerned more with the anti-linguistic imperialistic discussion pioneered by Phillipson (1992). Second interpretation is grounded on the use of language for daily communication. Teaching of English, in this regard, is considered as a planned and systematic academic endeavor to help ‘local children’ [Nepalese] use English in informal communications outside the classroom. But to what extent, Nepalese children, studying at Grades 1, 2, 3 in rural areas have to speak English while shopping, for example? Does such a projection of the English language as a means to achieve commodity help children achieve true essence of education? These issues are often ignored in academic discussion especially in the global ELT discourse. At the same time, as Cameron (2002) claims, ‘The dissemination of ‘global’ communicative norms and genres, like the dissemination of international languages, involves a one-way flow of expert knowledge from dominant to subaltern cultures” (p. 70).

The third view, which I want to focus in this article, is concerned with the contextual sensitivity of any language literacy including ELT. According to this view, ELT should be in consonance with the socio-cultural and politico-economic realities of particular context where literacy in English takes place. Moreover, this view believes that English language learning is a ‘situated practice’ which happens with the ‘bottom-up’ fashion rather than ‘top-down’ and through so-called expertise-delivered-knowledge. To be more specific, let me ask some questions (although there are many) regarding teaching English in Nepal;

  • Do the methods we are adopting while teaching English address our children’s values, beliefs and expectations?
  • Are the textbooks that we use for teaching the English language appropriate to our local socio-cultural and politico-economic realities?

We cannot answer these questions in a ‘yes/no’ manner. However, we can be realistic while discussing these issues. Elsewhere, Canagarajah (2002) vehemently argues that the global methods of teaching (e.g. communicative language teaching) have created inequalities in the global pedagogical village. Following a single method with ‘fits-in-all-context’ assumption does not really address learning needs and expectations of local children. Moreover, such an assumption does not empower children rather it marginalizes them psychologically and cognitively as well. This clearly indicates that we need to think about exploring our own practices of teaching English which is relevant to our own soil and people. At the same time, I am not claiming that we should not be aware of the global practices. We should be well informed with them but we should critically scrutinize those practices keeping our realities in view. I think I can discuss much about this when I come to textbook issue in the following paragraph.

In many parts of the world like in Nepal, textbooks are sole source of teaching and learning English. In that sense, textbooks are the most important component of ELT pedagogy in Nepal. However, it is not bizarre to say that, writing and production of textbooks is the most neglected agenda in Nepal. Let me start with the textbooks prescribed by the government. The textbooks in many cases include ‘foreign culture’ as reading texts and situations for conversation, which are difficult to conceptualize for children, are also foreign in some cases. In a way, such situations and texts take children away from their own context. If our goal is to develop reading skills of children, why don’t we bring the texts which deal with local issues, cultures, realities and challenges? Let us research which text (related to local or global text) is effective for enhancing reading skill of Nepalese learners of English.

The textbooks in private schools are more frustrating in terms of local literacy. The global textbooks like Headway/New Headway which are considered to be the global textbooks are prescribed in private schools without any approval from the government. Such global textbooks seem to promote more European and American culture, and project an affluent commodified life style (Gray, 2002). Through the texts like how much Bill Gates earn (New Headway/Upper-Intermediate, 1998) and going on holidays in London, New York, Paris and other expensive cities of the world, the global textbooks are projecting pleasure in life but they are ignoring pain of how a farmer in rural villages works hard to earn and feed his family. Why don’t we have reading texts on holidaying in Jomsom, paragliding from Sarangkot, trekking in Karnali and so on? Can’t we think about including the texts related to Maruni, Kauda, Dhan-nach, Deuda, Goura, Maha-puja, and so on? Are they not useful in teaching English? Of course, YES.  On one hand, such texts promote interconnectedness between society and classroom teaching/learning and on the other hand, they help to address precious linguistic and cultural diversity we have. However, we, teachers of English, should always be ready to take the role of ‘transformative intellectuals’ (Kumarivadivelu, 2003) by going beyond our traditional role – teachers as a passive technician in the classroom – to accepting the extended role to show our concern in social reflection and situated practice of teaching English.

Future Directions: Critical Literacy and Postmethod Pedagogy

The above discussion implies that the so-called global textbooks and methods of ELT do not seem to be inclusive and appropriate in diverse world contexts. ELT in Nepal has the same problem. The fundamental reason behind this is that ELT policies we have made are so far shaped by the traditional notion i.e. ELT means teaching about the English language only. But this notion is already obsolete because ‘methods’,  ‘textbooks’ and ‘assumptions’ which work better do not fit in other contexts. Moreover, ELT is more than ‘teaching about English’ it is a part of education which is heavily loaded with culture, identity and ideology which need to be scrutinized in relation to local contexts.

How we can promote local literacy is another crucial question we need to discuss. I am not expert at prescribing ideas which work better. But I think, Critical literacy and Postmethod Pedagogy are two major approaches which are helpful to promote ‘local literacy’ practices in Nepal.

The basis of critical literacy is Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) in which he criticises the transmission or ‘banking’ model of education (teachers are depositors and learners are depositories) and advocates for ‘dialogic’ model  in which learners are not passive recipient but  an active ‘agent’ of whole learning process. We have already discussed this issue in a January 2009 article of NeltaChoutari.

One major issue that critical literacy addresses is inequalities that persist in ELT. It focuses on bringing social issues and controversies into the classroom. Moreover, this approach involves students in a continuous process of thinking critically through a dialogic process in which students are provided opportunities to discuss the issues which have relevance in local socio-cultural context. Thus students clearly see the relevance of learning English in their life which, moreover, promotes local literacy.  In this regard, Norton and Toohey (2004) claim

Advocates of critical approaches to second language teaching are interested in relationships between language learning and social change. From this perspective, language is not simply a means of expression or communication; rather, it is a practice that constructs, and is constructed by, the ways language learners understand themselves, their social surroundings, their histories, and their possibilities for the future” (p. 1).

The Postmethod Pedagogy (Kumaravadivelu, 2001) is another approach which may be helpful in promoting local literacy in ELT.  The three parameters of the postmethod pedagogy include particularity, practicality and possibility. According to the pedagogy of particularity, “Language pedagogy…must be sensitive to a particular group of teachers teaching a particular group of learners pursuing a particular set of goals within a particular institutional context embedded in a particular sociocultural milieu” (p. 538). Similarly, the pedagogy of practicality “does not pertain merely to the everyday practice of classroom teaching. It pertains to a much larger issue that has a direct impact on the practice of classroom teaching, namely, the relationship between theory and practice” (p. 540). Finally, the pedagogy of possibility is concerned with “participants’ experience which draws ideas not only from the classroom episodes but also from border social, political and economic environment in which they grew up” (p. 542). We can see that ‘local realities’ and ‘experiences’ of participants (teachers, and students) are core of ELT in every world context. This indicates that we need to share our experiences to generate more local knowledge which can be a treasure for the whole ELT community of practice. To this end, we have initiated NeltaChoutari as a voluntary work to tell Nepalese ELT stories to the rest of the world. We hope this sharing through monthly publication in future will provide a basis for producing local materials for ELT in Nepal.

Conclusion

The looming trend of banishing ‘local practices’ due to acceptance of ‘global practices’ as a granted is one of the serious global issues in ELT around the globe. The notion of uniformity and standardization do not seem to be appropriate in linguistically and culturally diverse world contexts. At the same time, the expectations, values and beliefs of learners should be addressed through all kinds of pedagogy including ELT. In this regard, we should think about the use of locally produced materials and be fully informed with the process of adapting ‘creative and critical instructional practices in order to develop pedagogies suitable for their [our] community’ (Canagarajah 1999 p.122). Moreover, as Holliday (2005) has argued, we should discuss whether methodological prescriptions generated in BANA contexts (British, Australia, and North America) have ‘currency’ in our contexts, whether they are locally validated or appropriated. In this sense, whole idea of local literacy in ELT is concerned with the idea of (re)generating locally appropriate methods of teaching, (re)producing local materials using local resources and incorporating local issues and identities and accommodating learners’ experiences through a dialogical process in the classroom.

I am not saying that the ideas discussed in this article address all dimensions of local literacy nor I am saying that we should not be aware of global issues. What I am saying is our full dependence on global methods, norms and textbooks in ELT may not help to promote and sustain our identities and treasure of local knowledge.  What I am saying is that we have wonderful ELT practices that we are not able to share with the people from other parts of the world which we need to do urgently. Let me give some example: we have very precious linguistic and cultural diversity in which English is being taught as a foreign language. We have been teaching under the shade of tree and sometimes in the open sky. We have been teaching more than 100 students in the same classroom even without chalk, duster and blackboard. We are teaching students who come from various linguistic, ethnic, religious, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Don’t you think that such realities and experiences are important source for teaching English? Of course, they are. We need to document these experiences so that other members of ELT community of practice will benefit a lot. Why don’t we take initiation of using local cultural texts (in addition to the texts given in the textbooks), for example, to teach reading and writing skills and see how it works? Can’t we bring stories of child labor, gender discrimination, inequality, poverty and so on to teaching English in the classroom? Of course, YES. But we need to work hard to achieve this end. We cannot make changes overnight but if we collaborative through different means like NeltaChoutari we can accomplish so many things for better ELT in Nepal.

Finally, the future of ELT in Nepal will be even better if we don’t consider teaching of English not simply as teaching about the English language but also as part of education that aims to empower children and to bring some positive transformation in the knowledge-based society. I argue that English teachers are not merely ‘classroom teachers’, we are ‘agent of change’. This is possible only when have a strong foundation at local level. We can access global means only with the strong ‘local foundation’.  I would say that the best ELT practice is the practice which accommodates local realities and helps learners to link them with global ones. For this, we need to be aware of maintaining balance between local and global.

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References

Block, D. & Cameron, D. (2002). Globalization and language teaching. London: Routledge.

Block, D. (2008). Globalization and language education. In S. May and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 1: Language Policy and Political Issues in Education, 31–43. Springer Science+Business Media LLC.

Bourdieu, P. (2001). Contre-feux 2. Paris: Raisons d’agir.

Cameron, D. (2002). Globalization and the teaching of ‘communication skills’. In Block, D. & Cameron, D. (eds.) Globalization and language teaching. London: Routledge.

Canagarajah, A.S. (1999). Resisting linguistic imperialism in language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Canagarajah, A.S. (2002). Globalization, methods and practice in periphery classrooms. In Block, D. & Cameron, D. (eds.) Globalization and language teaching. London: Routledge.

Crystal, D. (1997). English as a global language. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Graddol, D. (1997). The future of English? London: The British Council.

Gray, J. (2002). The global coursebook in English language teaching. In Block, D. & Cameron, D. (eds.) Globalization and language teaching. London: Routledge.

Holliday, A. (2005). The struggle to teach English as an international language. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

Kumaravadivelu, B. (2001). Toward a postmethod pedagogy. TESOL Quarterly, 35/4, 537-560.

Kumaravadivelu, B. (2003). Beyond method: Macrostrategies for language teaching. NewHaven, CO. Yale University Press.

Norton, B. & Toohey, K. (Eds.) (1997).Critical pedagogies and language learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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

Phillipson, R. (2004). Review article: English in globalization: Three approaches. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 3:1, 73 — 84.

Wallace, C. (1999). Critical language awareness: key principles for a course in critical reading. Language Awareness 8, 2:98-110.

Wallace, C. (2002). Local literacies and global literacy. . In Block, D. & Cameron, D. (eds.) Globalization and language teaching. London: Routledge.

NELTAChoutari, Networking and Nepalese Teachers

Native Perspective, Nelta Networking

Kamal Poudel

Until about two decades ago, information technologies that were widely available in the world outside were either out of reach for us in Nepal, or we lacked the basic skills needed for using what was available. Even teachers did not have access to teaching materials on the Internet, not to mention the possibility of using it in their classrooms. But in the last ten or so years, there has been a quantum leap in the availability, access, and popularity of information technologies in Nepalese education.

Students directly benefit from the access to knowledge and professional development opportunities that their teachers have, and in the long run the society benefits from those resources and opportunities. From that perspective, teachers are the vanguard of social change. The incredible development in the information technology field has brought all of us quite close that we can find our entire sporadically scattered friends within our room. The new discovery of science and technology have always some pros and cons, and it will be the job of teachers to select the texts appropriately, and use them to maximally benefit the students. The dark sides of the new technology should be left in the dark world itself, and encourage the students to move towards the world of self-enhancement. The development in the societies always gives birth to new cultures, and to my belief, cultures are as dynamic as language, and thus they are prone to change all the time. The new generation people (in this context: present day students) are quite likely to adopt and adapt the new cultures as they are truly native to them. In this context, although the elder generation people (in this context: present day teachers) are immigrant to the newly developed culture, they are required to acclimatize themselves to the new climate or say the cultures developed by the IT. Not only this, they also need to enhance their pace so as to meet the students and be able to lead them. No modern teachers now can escape any student’s problem or question simply saying, ‘well, I am not quite aware of technology things….’ The students are very likely to feel underprivileged to be taught by these types of teachers as they do not get the sufficient learning materials and resources from their teachers. Their expectation is marked with newness and fast pace. The newness can be in the field of using language, for example, as the new culture leads the people to change their linguistic behavior as well. We can refer to this as a kind of paradigm shift in teaching and learning. Along with the pace of modern life, the pace of learning has naturally had the quantum leap.

Public media like BBC concentrates on the value of IT and spells that fame in the modern world can be doubled or easily be enhanced by means of the use of technology. A newly published book or article can be read by millions of readers immediately after the click on ‘upload’, which makes it easier for the the contributors to be attracted by those readers. This positively encourages the beginners to upgrade and update themselves, and thus will always be in such a world where they cannot stop browsing, uploading, collecting materials and be connected in the wider world.

Considering this as significant factor to change the life-style of teachers and the dire-need of the present day world, we have been encouraging our readers, teachers to come to the world of information technology, and thus be connected with the rest of the world. We have the principle of ‘learn and let learn’.  With the motive of empowering Nepalese teachers (ourselves), NELTA is committed to create the new ways of teaching and learning. For this, would like to invite you all English teachers and be the part of NELTAChoutari, and help the Choutari finally in order to help yourselves and thus transform yourselves. Cheers NELTAChoutari anniversary!!!


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