An Unforgettable Teaching Technique

Teacher's Experience/anecdotes, Teaching Tips

Dipendra Kanu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the Author:

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

An effective teaching through a student’s eyes

Teacher's Experience/anecdotes, Teaching Tips

*Jyoti Tiwari

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benefits of using the above strategy

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

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

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

About the Author:

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

Resources for Researchers

ELT Resource

THESIS writing in Nepal seems to be a hard nut to crack for many university students and researchers. No doubt, they require a great deal of patience, research skills, writing proficiency as well as analytic expertise for such writing. However, finding a relevant body of literature is equally important. Especially for the beginners, it is always a challenge. We have seen that they visit libraries and resource centers or send out emails to their colleagues and teachers or google the internet.

Are you writing your thesis or guiding/supervising theses or helping you students and colleagues carry out research? You must be looking for some useful resources especially some sample theses related to your topic. To ease your task of researching, Choutari has brought you a resource link (click here or see the url below) from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, that can be a good resource for language teaching scholarship in general and writing theses in particular.

Since this is an open access source, it can be accessed freely from anywhere and all you need is internet access. The beauty of sharing this link is—you can download the theses as most of them are downloadable. We hope you will find it useful. The link to the source is: https://www.jyu.fi/hum/laitokset/kielet/tutkimus/hankkeet/paattyneet-hankkeet/varieng/en/publications/masters_theses

Acknowledgments: We’re grateful to Bal Krishna Sharma for researching the source link and forwarding to Choutari. -Eds.

Editorial, July 2013: Local Pedagogies in Multilingual Settings

Critical Outlook, Editorial

Madhav Kafle

So what happens when a place gets deterritorialized? Does the local expand beyond its borders and become global or does it evaporate all the localness because the borders disappear? And I could ask similar questions about language too: what happens when we teach a language as a separate entity with fixed meanings rather than teach Language as a dynamic semiotic process?

Evidently, both local and multilingual in the title of this issue are hotly contested categories. The term local is often tied with a boundary whether that is a rural village like Togi, my birthplace or a megacity like New York or Kathmandu. For me local used to mean homegrown. But, mainly because of migration of people, ideas, artifacts, and technologies on much broader, often global scales, it is becoming more challenging for many people to pinpoint where the local and the global meet. Easy availability of cell phones, as well as relatively cheaper rates for international calls, and faster travel have made flow of social and cultural practices even more intense. It is interesting to note that while most of us in Nepal look toward the West as the point of reference for the methods and techniques of  ELT education, we often fail to see that pre-colonial communities in our own area had such practices, although in different forms (see Bal Krishna Sharma’s article below).

To talk about the next part of the equation, the concept of multilingualism as a conglomeration of multiple languages learnt and processed separately is a myth as argued by the contributors of this issue. While it might be hard to ignore the current fact that our instructional objectives are based on fixity of multiple languages, we should also not forget that these languages were once invented (often along with the birth of the nation-states) and they have all gradually but dramatically evolved into the forms they are used today.

The articles in this issue guide us to find appropriate pedagogies when the “borders” of both nation-states and languages are getting porous. This special issue as a whole should help us to answer questions such as: what kind of  pedagogies we can adapt and adopt  in language teaching in the face of increasing globalization? Should nation-states be still the frames of references for our pedagogies? How can we possibly assist in  diminishing the divide between the hegemony of Standard and emerging vernacular practices? In terms of teaching English, are we always supposed to be norm dependent? Additionally, I believe the issue also helps in brainstorming about how we reached in the present condition where we have viewed multilingualism from the perspective of  monolingualism, and  how we draw the borderline between local and non-local practices. It also helps us rethink the power dynamics of the medium of education (language) versus the mission of education (making learning relevant).

If we are to understand the dialectics of social change,  it is necessary to destabilize the binary of local and global and better understand the shifting relations between space and place,  whether real or metaphorical, as well as recognize existence of multiple positions along the continuum. After all, as Canagarajah argues in his 2002 book Geopolitics of Academic Writing, global knowledge is basically one particular local knowledge with power that is presented, promoted, and adopted as globally relevant.  If we are truly living in a knowledge society where one’s value is determined by what one knows, what counts as knowledge is of prime importance. If we do not care to reflect upon our own practices, call ourselves a minority when in fact that is not the case, and easily buy into discourses that discredit our own identities, we are self-colonializing ourselves. The writings in this issue confront issues like this critically.

Basically the question is what should be done in today’s language classrooms where the teacher has to mediate between  global and local discourses. When the quality of education is measured by evaluating what students do not know rather than what they do know, most of the emerging voices get crushed or washed away by a system that fails to serve the majority. And I’m not speaking from an ivory tower as I have taught in rural parts of Kaski, Lamjung, and Myagdi and sadly seen nil results in multiple public schools of the country. I hope all five articles in this issue will provide us some food for thought in reimagining better pedagogies.

In the first article, Ofelia Garcia offers a vital approach to that end.  She argues that rather than language we need to be looking after translanguaging. Translanguaging refers to the process of meaning making by dynamically utilizing one’s repertoire.  The failure of nurturing emerging voices, Garcia reminds us, is in fact a global problem. By destabilizing major myths about language and language learning, she shows how multiple languages students bring to schools can be used as resources.

Along the similar lines, Rama Kant Agnihotri argues that if we were to develop local pedagogies, we should start to learn to respect the languages student bring in the classrooms. Unlike our common view of seeing them as major obstacles, Agnihotri indicates that to lessen the gap created by the private-public school divide, we can explore cross-language relations.

Another reason of not seeing our own local practices as authentic comes from the inferiority complex caused primarily by the discourse of non-nativeness.  Challenging such status quo, Davi Reis encourages all of us to attain our professional legitimacy by being cognizant of the damaging effects of such oppressive ideologies, and by dismantling the false dichotomies, by not undermining ourselves but by reaching out for help to the global community.

In a country where diversity of languages, religions, and cultures has existed for centuries, researching older practices might provide some insights even for today’s societies as Bal Krishna Sharma exemplifies from ancient Hindu texts. It is our task to study many more traditions such as Buddhism, Jainism and others that have co-existed there for years and save them from being lost, left and thwarted.  We can even develop wholeness of body, mind, and spirit and integrate teaching, learning, and evaluation as they once were in the past. Ironically, as Sharma emphasizes, we might be surprised to find that these “neglected” practices had features that we borrow today from the advanced societies.

Finally, reflecting on our assessment practices at SLC exam, one of the key stages in Nepalese education system, Shyam Sharma urges us to accept the harsh reality of how we English teachers tend to be disinterested in the big picture of education as we often buy into the myth that English medium means quality education. It seems that we are hardly successful in creating global citizens demanded by today’s knowledge economy because we are not even successful at developing pedagogies that are  socially and culturally meaningful. It has been now well argued that over-emphasis in the “Standard English” amounts to short-sightedness.

I hope articles in this issue along with lists of further resources provided by the authors will help us to reflect on important issues about the global/local dynamics in English language teaching and education at large.

Here’s the Table of Contents:

1. Translanguaging to teach English in Nepal by Ofelia García

2. What should one do in a language classroom? by Rama Kant Agnihotri

3. NNESTs and Professional Legitimacy: Fighting the Good Fight by Davi Reis

4. Hindu educational ethos and practices as a possible source for local pedagogy by Bal Krishna Sharma

5. SLC, ELT, and Our Place in the Big Picture by Shyam Sharma

Before closing, I would like to express my deep gratitude to all who made this issue possible despite their unimaginably busy schedules. And I’d like to request you to please leave comments in order to encourage writers (as well as share your ideas), to like and post entries to your social network, and to consider contributing your own blog entry to Nelta Choutari’s future issues.

On Behalf of Nelta Choutari Team

Madhav Kafle

Translanguaging to teach English in Nepal

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

Ofelia García*

 

Introduction

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

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

Translanguaging

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

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

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

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

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

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

English is not a system of structures

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

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

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

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

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

Learning English does not proceed from scratch, is not linear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What should one do in a language classroom?

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

Rama Kant Agnihotri*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NNESTs and Professional Legitimacy: Fighting the Good Fight

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

 Davi S. Reis, Ph. D.*

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

A PERSONAL ANECDOTE

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

A PERVASIVE FALLACY

 

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

USEFUL REMINDERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TAKING ACTION!

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

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

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

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

REACHING OUT!

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical Outlook, Global thought, Miscellaneous

Bal Krishna Sharma*

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

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

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

Learning in Hinduism

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

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

Methods of Teaching

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

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

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

 Student-teacher Relationships

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

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

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

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

Final Words

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

Suggested Readings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

SLC, ELT, and Our Place in the Big Picture

Critical Outlook, Native Perspective, Scholarly Article

Shyam Sharma*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—————-

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

Editorial

Editorial

A very warm greetings to you all from Nelta Choutari team.

As you know, Choutari in Nepali refers to the place where people take rest and invigorate themselves with a breath of fresh air. Since Choutari  is an open space to discuss and transfer knowledge and ideas, it also behooves as an equal footing  to solve social disputes and problems- thus providing a judicial aura. In Nelta Choutari, we invigorate our minds and hone our skills in English Language teaching. Through the help of our write ups, we share the problems that we face while teaching and try to figure out possible solutions through the help of ongoing dialogue.

This issue of Nelta Choutari  contains a lot of important information which are directly associated with our way of teaching, our way of perceiving things and other facets of education system. I hope this issue will be able to build on our past issues and create a virtual choutari for all of us to churn out our raw ideas and hunches.

This issue contains four write-ups. In the first article, Laxman Gnawali, Associate Professor of Kathmandu University,  shares his experience of a recent professional (Liverpool) visit. In the second post, Dinesh Thapa, Asst. Secretary, NELTA Lalitpur, raises issues related to teaching learning process by reflecting on his own practices.  Umes Shrestha shares his perspectives regarding error analysis along with back up of pertinent data from his mini research in the third post. Last but by no means least, Manita Karki shares her experiences regarding action research and how it can be used as a tool for professional development. I hope that the readers will find the varied content of this issue interesting.

Here is  the table of contents for convenient navigation:

IATEFL 2013 Liverpool: My Experience  by Laxman Gnawali

The English Teacher: Where Is The Shoe Pinching? by Dinesh Thapa

ERROR ANALYSIS – Third Person Singular Subject-Verb Agreement by Umes Shrestha

Action Research for EFL Teacher’s Professional Development by Manita Karki

I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank all the contributors including the Choutari Team for their support and contribution. Thank you all for your enduring effort and involvement in Nelta Choutari, and we anticipate more contributions for the next issue, which will highlight the local pedagogies even more. Please keep sharing with us  new ideas which you think can make Choutari better.

We always welcome your constructive response to make our publications more reader friendly but at the same time not devoid of hot content and pressing issues in ELT. I hope as in the past you will keep the conversation going by providing comments to the recent posts and  by publicizing Choutari to various local and transnational network you have for even broader dialogues.

Enjoy Reading!

Ushakiran Wagle

On behalf of Choutari Team

Action Research for EFL Teacher’s Professional Development

Miscellaneous, Teacher Training, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

Manita Karki

M.Phil. in ELE

Kathmandu University

School of Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

The English Teacher: Where Is The Shoe Pinching?

Miscellaneous, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes, Teaching Tips

                                                                                                                         Dinesh Thapa, Lecturer of English

Kitini College, Godawary 

 (Taukhel) Lalitpur Nepal

Email: dtdthapa@gmail.com

NELTA Life Member

Asst. Secretary, NELTA Lalitpur 

 

 

The English Class

(Good Morning Sir). Morning. Sit down. Hello, why are you talking? Listen to the attendance. Roll number One. (Yes sir). Two. (Yes sir)……..Sixteen. (Absent sir). Don’t talk. I said…..Don’t talk. Seventeen. (Yes sir)…fifty six. (Yes sir). Give me your book, please. (one student gives the English textbook to the teacher). Ok. Students, take your book on. Today we are going to read on page no. 47. (Students turn the page there.)  Turned- Found? (Pointing to another student) Hello, don’t you have the book? (No Sir, I’ve forgotten). That’s it! You always have to say the same. Share it from your friend, then. Now look there. Listen. Then the teacher reads aloud some lines from the textbook and translates the meaning into Nepali. S/he writes some unfamiliar words on the board and gives the meaning, possibly in Nepali. Students copy them onto the exercise book. There is a short comprehension- check- in through oral questioning. Often, it is the teacher who supplies the responses as it takes longer to get one from the students. By then the time gets over. The teacher leaves the class asking the students to write answers to the questions from page no. 48. The following day the teacher writes an essay on the board and the students copy it and recite for examination.

Where Is the Shoe Pinching?

The Nepalese classroom, especially in the secondary level, displays some unique features which are quite challenging from the viewpoint of teaching English. There are a considerable number of students in one class, possibly over fifty seated in the immovable iron-made furniture. The classroom is highly heterogeneous- in terms of age, ability and culture of the students.  Mostly, the class is a teacher dominated one. S/he exhausts almost ninety percent of the hour, but there is talk in English hardly the half of the period. Presentation of the lesson is generally unaided with visuals and student practise by making written exercises. Although, the students respond to the teacher sparingly, they do not talk in English among themselves. Again, they do not reply in English; they simply understand the prompts…… like facts of biology…..understand them, but they cannot produce English. The response happens in Nepali itself. Also the motivational topics, like jokes, anecdotes, news sharing, and so on are told in Nepali, for the students cannot grasp of what is said to them. There is hardly a speaking class, except the teacher’s questions answered by the students. Teaching for speaking and listening skills does not have a scheduled class; most of the students experience listening to the cassette at exams only.

The teacher- talk during deliberation is directed to make the things clear to the students; so students do understand the matter but rarely can produce it in speech or writing. Similarly, the teacher gives answers to almost all questions, and students copy and rewrite them. Some few students recite the answers, only a few try on their own, whereas many simply do nothing. Although the teacher asks students to complete an assignment (generally in writing) at home, s/he can hardly compel them to do so. Only a small number of students have the habit of self-study at home, but the majority of them do not have even a dictionary and other support materials with them. The texts put in the book are simply unintelligible for them as they have never attempted so yet. For many of them, the grades scored earlier than in grade ten are simply promoted ones. If looked through, English and Mathematics happen to be the- never- passed subjects in all the previous grades. That’s why home study for English is almost impossible for the students. Even if some students do their home tasks, the teacher rarely provides feedback after correction. Correction is generally done teacher-privately, sitting in the teacher- room, in the absence of the concerned students, and the students rarely go over it back. The notes and exercises completed earlier in the session start getting lost over time. Once the course becomes over and revision starts, again the texts and exercises become anew, and are started afresh. All the previous teaching seems to have become a great waste.

There is the structural factor as well in play for the lower proficiency of the students. There are eight subjects for the students to learn in a day; among them seven are delivered fully in Nepali medium, even to such an extent that the terms like ‘ecology’ in environment, ‘evolution’ in biology, ‘rectangle’ in mathematics, etc. are also translated into Nepali. Teaching of English thus becomes the absolute business of the English teacher only. Also the single teacher teaches in classes at over four grades vertically. As the same teacher is taking charge of English, students are devoid of variety in the exposure of English. On the other hand, as there are only a few teachers with the ability to speak English in the whole, the English teacher barely gets a chance to use his/ her English with people other than the students. His/ her English thus erodes gradually. The problem is compounded by the reality that there are not any English medium newspapers, journals, magazines, videos and other reference materials available in school. The library contains books never- used and unsuitable- to be- used by the students. For the students, library seems to be available to see occasionally from the outside only.

 

The other residue of the problem lies with our culture. Absenteeism on the part of the students is still high. Only when the term-exams approach, attendances become more regular. Both girl and boy students have strong cliques to share about private matters; group dynamism is simply directed towards non-academic matters. Similarly, the role of the parents seems very nominal for making learning environment of their wards. They appear in the school only to get their wards admitted and to get the results. Other times, there is hardly only communication with the parents.

Reflections

I raised some pinching issues that might be our practical realities going on in the English classrooms. I want to share with you our present reality and our possible corrective measures for the improvement of our overall teaching scenario, so that the practicing teachers also have a say in the discourse of teacher professionals; so that they could restore the dignity schools possessed in the past. Whether we realize it or not, we are heading towards a challenging future. Our valued bases of faith and dignity are eroding day by day, leaving none of us untouched. Only our sincere efforts and visionary deeds can help us rescue from this ongoing quicksand of the eroding quality of our education. In such a situation, improvement in English teaching practices can work as a rescue rod.

Now I’d like to share with you a simple strategy that works for the improvement of learning English in our school, i.e., student motivation and teacher’s continued reflection over what went well or not. Student motivation is the drive that clears itself from all the barriers impending in the learning environment. We have the history that our former generations, and probably ourselves, learnt sitting under the direct sun. The buildings, sofas, chairs, videos, computers and lifts are not the causative factors for learning to happen. Rather it is the strong willpower on the part of the learner that works to crumble all the barriers. The English teacher should create such an environment that boosts up a feeling of ‘English Thrust’ in our learners. We need to make our classes pleasant, using simple English- in- English method, supplementing the class with tasks that arrest the interest of the learners (like jokes, tales, poems, puzzles, magazines, debates and presentations). The important factor here is that the students themselves should build up the feeling that ENGLISH IS IMPORTANT, NOT FOR OTHERS, BUT FOR THEMSELVES. Unless such a feeling germinates in the learners, all our efforts go in vain. We may get thinner day- by- day, but at the end of grade ten examinations, our students still remain unable to compose even a small paragraph, unable to speak general ideas, unable to comprehend moderate reading texts and to decipher normal spoken English. In order to check this, we need to make sure:

–           that we teaching English as a means of communication, or as a subject like Sciences or Social Education;

–          that our students are genuinely motivated to learn being involved in the learning environment

–          that our students feel (not only think) that ability in speaking and writing English is really important in this modern time;

–          that we exposing our learners to English as a language, not  to the tit-bits of English;

–          that we do create situations in which our students feel a necessary requirement to communicate in English in the lively communicational settings;

–          that we have arranged the class in a scheduled form for the exposure of all skills and aspects of language;

–          that we have sufficient language generating materials other than textbooks to assist to our duties, and

–          that we are dedicated, reflective and change oriented all the time.

Once we consider changing the way we teach bit- by- bit, the challenges will turn into opportunities. The students will be proficient and communicative. The teacher will find his/her own face smiling in the beaming lights of the students’ achievement. Then the responsibility of the boatman will be successfully discharged when the passengers go across the river undisturbed and safely.

ERROR ANALYSIS – Third Person Singular Subject-Verb Agreement

Miscellaneous, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

I teach in a secondary school in Sanepa, Lalitpur. I have found that many students in the school commit the errors in “subject-verb agreement,” especially that of third person singular, even when they seem to know the grammar rules. Generally, in private schools, students start learning English grammar when they are in Grade Two and they do so throughout the school years. Despite learning and knowing the rules for multiple years, many students come up with sentences like “He have book….”, “Sir have the book……” etc., in both written and spoken form.

I carried out a mini-research from the perspective of  error analysis to find out the reasons why students commit these types of errors (the omission of simple present marker) and, importantly, to propose a remedy for the problem. I conducted this study among the 22 students of Class 9. For the same purpose, I told the students a story titled “Nashruddin and the donkey” and asked them to write the story from their memory. Since my focus of error analysis was to analyze the errors in subject-verb agreement, I told them the story in present tense and asked them to write the story as homework.

(What follows is a stripped down version of the mini-research, without citations and references.)

Error Identification:

After the students submitted their written work, I went through their work line by line and marked the errors in subject verb agreement. My first task was to determine if the errors done by each student were systematic errors or just random mistakes. Since most of the students made the same error consistently, I concluded that those were errors, not mistakes.

Here’s a sample table of the data that I collected.

Participant 1

Participant 2

Participant 3

Participant 4

Participant 5

Participant 6
All villagers calls him a stupid guy… He wokes up… He have a goose… The boys thinks… … the money he have… All the villagers calls him…
…two naughty boys sees that and tries to trick… There is two naughty boys. …he keep an secrecy… One of the boys untie the rope… One boy go along with… …and he realize that…
So, Nashruddin catch his ears… He sell all the… Nashruddin reaches home and turn back… … goes to buys a donkey… … needs a donkey to works in the farm…
… he kill the goose… Two naughty boys sees and tries to …
…he become very sad…

The above table illustrates that the students commit errors by omitting -s inflection from the third person singular verb in their attempt to make the verb agree with the singular subject like “he kill…” and “he become…”. And, they also add –s inflection with plural subjects.

Explanation of the errors

As you all know, we teach our students that  a verb must agree with its subject. We keep repeating: A singular subject takes a singular verb, likewise, a plural subject takes a plural verb. For instance, the third person pronouns such as “he, she and it” take a singular verb with the -s inflection as in “The boy eats…., She eats….”. Similarly, the plural subject and pronouns such as “I, We, You and They” just take the bare form of the verbs as in “I eat…. We eat….”.

Subject-verb Agreement in English and Nepali:

Subject-verb agreement means the verb will change its form depending on its subject. The subject of a verb may be singular or plural and it may be first-person (I, we) second-person (you – singular/plural), or third-person (he/she/it, they, dog, cats).

In English, in the present tense, a verb changes its form only when its subject is third-person singular (he/she/it). Here’s the confusion and a factor leading to over-generalization. The inflection –s can be used with both third person singular verbs as well as plural noun subjects. Whereas In Nepali, there are different inflectional makers for plural subjects and for verbs.

I walk. // We walk.
Ma hidchu // Hami hidchaun
You walk. // You walk.
Timi hidchau // Timi haru hidchaun
He walks. // She walks // It walks.
Tyo hidcha // Tini hidcha // Tyo hidcha
They walk.
Tini  haru hidchan
Dog walks. // Cat walks.
Kukkur hidcha // Biralo hidcha
Dogs walk.// Cats walk.
Kukkur haru hidchan // Biralo haru hidchan

While it might be hard to generalize, these contrasting rules seem to be causing a lot of confusion on the matter of subject-verb agreement.

Reasons for the errors:

Here are the possible reasons why the students make error in subject-verb agreement of third personal singular.

1)      L1 influence: possibility of structural interference

2)      Overgeneralization: the learner creates a generalized structure on the basis of a single rule of the target language.

3)      Erroneous input: the teacher makes similar mistakes and feeds wrong input to the learners

4)      Lack of enough comprehension of the rules of subject + verb agreement.

In addition to my own observation, I asked the students about their opinion on this type of error. When I explained the error analysis jargons to them and told them the possible reasons, they opined that it is because of mainly two reasons: over-generalization of the rules and lack of ‘conscious’ practice. In other words, they blame their ‘wrong habits’ as the reason for errors.

Here’s how they normally over-generalize. If sentences like I run… We run…. You run… are correct, the students have developed a habit of assuming that He run… She run… Rabi run… are also correct forms.

Plus, it has to do with native language interference as well. Here’s a case of verb “chha”. In Nepali, “chha” is used to express possession (have/has) in present tense. For example:

First person: Ma sanga gadi chha (I have a car.)
Second person: Timi sanga gadi chha (You have a car.)
Third person: Sir sanga gadi chha (Teacher has a car.)
Third person: Madan sanga gadi chha (Madan has a car.)
Third person plural: Sathi haru sanga gadi chha. (Friends have a car.)

The verb “chha” is used invariably with all forms of subjects – first person, second person or third person and with both singular or plural form. Since “chha” means both has as well as have in Nepali, students unconsciously transfer this concept into the production of English language.

A peculiar pattern

Interestingly, some participants not only removed simple present marker ‘s’ in the case of third person singular subject, they also added the same marker in the case of plural subjects as well. Here’s a sample from the Participant 1.

*All villagers calls him a stupid guy…
*…two naughty boys sees that and tries to trick…

And from the Participant 6.

*All the villagers calls him…
*Two naughty boys sees and tries to …

What these errors show is that there is a pattern among the students to do the opposite – i.e., to use the singular marker ‘s’ with plural subjects.

Let me try to explain this pattern, again from the first language interference point of view. In Nepali, when the subject is plural, the marker ‘chhan’ is suffixed with the verb.

For example:

Madan ghar janchha. (Madan goes home.)
Mera sathi haru ghar janchhan. (My friends go home.)

And since, the equivalent plural marker of ‘chhan’ is the suffix ‘s’ in English, students come up with sentences like “All the villagers calls him…..” by adding ‘s’ to the verbs as well. Just as the English rule says, plural subject requires plural verbs in present tense.

This puts the Nepali learners in a very confusing and complex situation. The Nepali rule of adding equivalent plural marker ‘chhan’ on the verb when the subject is plural contradicts or interferes with the English rules of removing plural marker ‘s’ from the verbs when the subject is plural.

Recommendation and Conclusion

I am in line with N.S. Prabhu that there is no best method (I’m applying this in a narrower sense here) . How I think of going about such errors is to have a mixed approach. Whatever works out fine in our individual context is the best way out. Experimentation is the key. In addition to that, it is illogical to assume that this error will be solved within a day or a week or a month. No one can be sure without further research (locally).

However, here’s what I think is a good approach to go about solving  common errors.

  • Raise the students’ awareness about common errors. In the present case, letting them know that present tense singular is a very common error and even professors at the university level commit this mistake occasionally might boost the morale of the students.
  • Explicit teaching and explicit error correction. Teach them rules and make them practice. Focus on form.
  • Implicit teaching. Give them enough comprehensible input, focusing on activities that enhance their understanding of tense and verb system of English
  • Provide ‘authentic’ opportunity for practice.
  • Mix different teaching methods. Bring varieties into the classroom.
  • And, most importantly, CONTEXTUALIZE. If students can relate to what they are learning, their retention will probably very high.

Because of the L1 interference and the tendency of over-generalization, Nepali students find the use of present tense marker complicated. They have to be constantly conscious of the contrasting rules of singular and plural subjects in Nepali and English.

So the first step to remedy this error might be to raise the students awareness about contrasting system of rules. They need to be conscious about these differences in Nepali and English structures, then practice the rules, develop a habit, in a hope that the habit eventually gains automaticity.

Another remedial step might be to implement Krashen’s comprehensible input hypothesis, which is to provide and expose the students to massive amount of inputs regarding the subject-verb agreement. Thus, the students might be able to acquire (and learn) the rules unconsciously and ultimately produce the correct forms. However, acquiring a language is not enough. The students should be given enough opportunity to practice in an authentic environment. Hence, authentic classroom activities implicitly focused on the form of third-person singular would help students overcome this error in time. We can follow possible steps for other common errors too.

Reflection

In my experience, I have seen students (and many teachers alike) from all level of classes committing this error. Even the students of Bachelor’s level frequently commit this error regarding subject-verb agreement. I was clueless about how to correct the students but now I have realized that teaching them the rules and correcting them is not enough. The students must be made aware of this type of error. And, with student’s conscious participation, remedial steps have to be taken.

I have seen many teachers jump to the conclusion that the students are not intelligent enough or hardworking enough and thus they make the errors. However, intelligence and hard-work might only be two insignificant factors out of so many other crucial variables that affect  second language learning. There are factors like language transfer, interference, lack of enough input, lack of opportunity to produce and use language, context, motivation, and so on. As language teachers, we need to give the benefit of doubt to the learners before condemning them on the basis of their personal ability. In fact, we ourselves are nowhere near competent enough and we commit errors on a different level than the students. (Plus, we are unaware of it.) If we are to expect better language competency from our students, we need to first change our own view towards teaching and learning a second language.

Umes Shrestha
Kathmandu University
www.latebecame.wordpress.com

IATEFL 2013 Liverpool: My Experience

Miscellaneous, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

Laxman Gnawali

Last year I felt a strong urge to plan to attend the IATEFL 2013 Liverpool for several reasons. The main reason was that I had attended the conference before. When you have a taste of something and you like it and know the value of it, you want to go for it again.  So, I made up my mind to submit a presentation proposal and plan for other arrangements. I eventually attended the conference and I am recounting the experience of it.    

Whether our proposal is accepted or not, the process of writing it as per the guidelines is a learning experience. There are two documents we need to submit: a 50-60 word presentation abstract outlining what we will do during the presentation and a 200-250 word summary briefly discussing what is that we would like to establish. Though I was not working on it all the time, I spent more than a week writing, revising, editing, starting over again and the same process again and again. I also turned to friends for their input.

I was very careful about the proposal for a valid reason: apart from being accepted for a presentation, I also wanted a scholarship.  If the organizers liked the idea and saw that the proposal was not in a good shape, I would probably be asked to revisit it. But in case of the scholarship, there would be no second chance. I had to write a good proposal. So, I worked very hard. When I felt that my proposal was in good shape and would be competitive, I looked up the list and the descriptions of the scholarships the IATEFL was offering.

I had seen the list of scholarships before but had not minutely studied it to see which ones I was qualified for.  So, I visited the website http://www.iatefl.org/ and followed the scholarship link http://www.iatefl.org/scholarships/scholarship-overview There I saw that the criteria for each scholarship were different. Some were for those who had never been to the IATEFL conference, others for those who had never received any scholarship. Some were for teachers and others for teacher trainers. Some scholarships required the applicants to have an extensive experience in a given area and others looked just for an interest in it. Some scholarships offered a small grant and others had a generous amount for the winner. There were some that covered all the costs. Some scholarships required IATEFL membership, others did not. The deadline for all of them was 22 August. I considered them all and I finally submitted my proposal for five scholarships: IATEFL Gillian Porter Ladousse, International House Global Reach, International House Training and Development, Pilgrims Teacher Trainer Journal, Trinity College London Teacher Trainer.

Come the first week of October, I received an email which read:

Dear Laxman (if I may)

The IATEFL Scholarship Working Party (SWP) is happy to tell you that you are the winner of Gillian Porter-Ladousse Scholarship, congratulations. Please can you let me know immediately if you will accept the award and attend the Liverpool conference in 2013.

Very best wishes

SWP co-ordinator

I accepted the offer right away. Then the preparation started: the registration, the hotel booking, flight tickets, the visa, everything in place. I was at the Arena and Convention Centre in Liverpool on the 8th of April 2013. There were five of us from Nepal.

The 47th Annual International IATEFL Conference & Exhibition was a great experience: A state-of-the-art venue, world class book exhibition, gathering of 2500 delegates from around the world, about 40 parallel sessions at any given time, five key speakers including Prof. David Crystal, out-of-the-box evening events, networking events, live streaming on http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2013/, the list goes on.

My presentation was in the late evening and I was worried if I would have participants. To my relief, my session which was on “When Participants Experience, Understand and Articulate” was attended by sizable audience. I was also interviewed for the Liverpool online.

I spent five busy days in Liverpool and returned home re-energized. Two weeks later, I was asked by the scholarship committee to write in 80 words what I achieved by attending the conference, I wrote the following:

“Winning the IATEFL Gillian Porter Ladousse scholarship was instrumental for me to showcase an experiment on teacher training made at my University. Sharing the outcomes of the experiment from Nepal in the IATFL’s international forum was a concrete achievement for me and my University. This sharing enabled me to expand my network with fellow teacher educators from around the world. I also met great ELT names in person and brought home beautiful memories of the interactions I had with them.”

I feel that for ELT professionals, attending international events such as IATEFL has a number of benefits. To list a few: a) It is a great exposure to world Englishes. We experience Englishes from all over the world, b) We meet face to face those writers we have been citing, c) We are updated with the latest development in the field of ELT. We can bring home latest ideas in ELT, d) We can showcase what we have been doing at our workplaces and see where we stand and how others take it. I had all these benefits.

I am grateful to the IATEFL for accepting my proposal and providing me the scholarship. I am also thankful to Kathmandu University, NELTA and the British Council, Kathmandu for other support.

Appendix

This was the Presentation Proposal I submitted  for IATEFL Liverpool 2013.

1. The presentation title: When Participants Experience, Understand and Articulate

2. Type of presentation: Talk (30 minutes)

3. Presentation abstract (50-60 words)

In this presentation I shall focus on a primary EFL teacher training programme in Nepal that requires trainees to design and deliver a training course for working school teachers. How this process allows trainees to articulate their understanding of teaching learning principles thereby deepening their own understanding EFL pedagogy will be discussed; training structure and components will also be shared.

4. Summary (200-250 words)

Apart from experience and theoretical understanding, articulation of the experience and understanding is a firm way to learning (Edge, 1996) which is not realised in most teacher training programmes. Unless trainees explain and express their own experience and understanding to others who belong to the same professional community, their own understanding either will not be clear and even if it is, it will not last long.

With the idea in mind, we designed a primary EFL teacher training programme with touch of innovation. Normally, the teacher certification courses are of one year within which trainees complete course requirements including practice teaching. In our case, we added one more term. During this fourth term, participants are required to assess the needs of working teachers at local schools, design a twelve-hour training course based upon the needs, develop sessions and materials, deliver the training and evaluate the whole process. We saw that this act of expression actually helped them to develop a clearer understanding of the teaching learning principles for which they were trained. As they delivered the training, they not only organized activities but also had opportunities to express their own understanding of teaching and learning.

This has been a successful experiment of preparing principled teachers who know the rationale of their actions. The result is that the graduates of this programme are in demand and there is zero unemployment. In this talk, I share the programme structure and its components, the process and the attributes the trainees graduate.

The link to access my interview for the Liverpool Online:

http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2013/sessions/2013-04-09/interview-eryl-griffiths-laxman-gnawali

Help Emerging ELT Professionals Grow

Editorial, Miscellaneous

– Lal Bahadur Rana

Every year, hundreds of university graduates in English go to the job market in Nepal. A few of them are involved in foreign affairs, civil services, mass media, tourism, business etc., but the majority of them are involved in teaching English at colleges and campuses. They start their teaching career without special kind of orientation or specific training. Therefore, they are not well-prepared to cope up with many challenges related to teaching and learning they encounter in course of fulfilling their duties and responsibilities as teachers. This tradition seems to be one of the reasons why novice teachers do what their teachers used to do when they were students, instead of thinking what activities or practices best befit in their contexts, how they can support their learners etc.

Many teachers working in under-resourced areas unknowingly deteriorate their knowledge and skills year by year, because they hardly ever get opportunities to keep their knowledge abreast and hone their skills. Nor can they share their problems and pitfalls with other colleagues so that they can collaboratively find alternative solutions of their pressing problems. In this scenario, NELTA Chourati as its name implies in Nepali is a common platform where teacher, trainers, teacher educators, mentors, etc. can come together in this virtual space and grow themselves helping tyros grow. With this belief, I have included almost all write-ups of those colleagues who have just started to teach English or who are to start soon. I hope all the viewers of these posts will leave their constructive comments so that the ones who have written these posts will get insights and inspirations of improving their writing in the days to come.

This issue contains five write-ups. The first entry is of Binod Luitel, Associate Professor at TU, who has been undertaking an action research project at Surkhet Campus (Education), Surkhet and Mahendra Ratna Campus Tahachal on how learners’ vocabulary achievement and reading skills can be developed. In this post, he discusses the learner hierarchy in terms of their proficiency level over English. He asks five thought provoking questions related to the topic in question. The second post is of Vishnu Kumar Khadka, who raises issues of teaching and testing listening and speaking skills in SLC examination. In the third post, Ashok Raj Khati shares the strategies which he found to be very useful while he was teaching.  In another post, Resham Bista critically argues that teaching and learning is not confined to language, but also with the policies and politics of the western countries. Last but by no means least, Maheshwor Rijal shares his experiences and process of academic writing with a particular focus on writing thesis.

Table of contents

1. Towards exploration of pedagogical pyramid in the context of Nepalese ELT by Binod Luitel
2. Teaching and testing tastes of listening and speaking by Bishnu Kumar Khadka
3. Student Centeredness: Reflection on my teaching English at secondary level by Ashok Raj Khati
4. Let’s leave English as English by Resham Bahadur Bista
5. Exploring realities of revisiting research practices in Nepal by Maheshwor Rijal

We hope you enjoy reading the posts in this issues.

Happy Readings!

Lal Bahadur Rana
Editor, NELTA Choutari
May, 2013 Issue

Towards Exploration of Pedagogical Pyramid in the Context of Nepalese ELT

Miscellaneous, Scholarly Article

Dr Binod Luitel
Associate Professor, English Education
CERID, Tribhuvan University

Introduction
‘Pyramid’, one of the ‘7 wonders of the world’, is a marvelous achievement of human civilization, which is flat on the bottom with pointed shape on the top. In this article, I am trying to draw the readers’ attention towards the metaphorical rather than literal meaning of ‘pyramid’ and apply the meaning in the context of classroom with mixed-ability group of learners where their population is extremely varied in terms of the level of language competence. This kind of pedagogical pyramid, instead of being a ‘marvelous’ phenomenon, has been a source of bitter experience for teachers and learners. Moreover, while the physical pyramid has been discussed quite a lot, the pedagogical pyramid depicting the classroom reality has not been a matter of discussion in the mass of Nepalese pedagogues.

If we analyze the traditional classrooms of Nepalese schools and colleges (particularly if the class size is large in students’ population), as I had hypothesized previously (Luitel, 2010, 2011), we can notice such a pyramidal structure of learners’ population – with several layers that make a hierarchy of ‘strata’. Such a structure is noticed from the point of view of learners’ preparatory condition required for learning (such as aptitude and motivation), their participation in learning, and the level of learning achievement – whereby we find a few learners on the top stratum, and the size of the strata increases as we move down from the top in the hierarchical structure. In most cases, this situation either goes unnoticed by the teachers or is neglected even after knowing this ground reality due to various reasons.

To support the hypothesis of pedagogical pyramid, this article seeks data from two works of the author: (1) a research work that has been completed (Luitel, 2012), and (2) an ongoing research (Luitel and others, forthcoming). While the first one was carried out for the purpose of surveying the existing situation of vocabulary knowledge among the students of B.Ed. studying in the campuses of Tribhuvan University who had just completed their study in compulsory English, the latter is being undertaken as an action research among the students who are now studying the same subject at the same level.
Quantitative data derived from learners’ performance in the testing tools designed to test their vocabulary and reading comprehension (vocabulary in the first study and vocabulary plus reading comprehension in the second one) were analyzed. In both the studies, achievement scores were converted into percentage and the students were categorized under various layers of score range, as presented below.

Previous Study
The students’ vocabulary achievement was tested in context as well as out of context. Based on their response in a battery of 5 different vocabulary tests (checklist test, multiple choice test, matching test, selective deletion cloze test and L1-L2 translation test) conducted among 59 participants, the result depicted in the following table shows a hierarchical situation of learners’ population divided into the various layers or ‘strata’.
Layer categories (Score range)          Students
Layer 7 (85-100%)                                    0%
Layer 6 (70-84.9%)                                   12%
Layer 5 (55-69.9%)                                    24%
Layer 4 (40-54.9%)                                  42%
Layer 3 (25-39.9%)                                   22%
Layer 2 (10-24.9%)                                   0%
Layer 1 (0-9.9%)                                         0%

 (Source: Luitel, 2012)

Thus, the total sample population was found in four different layers (6th, 5th, 4th and 3rd), while there was no student in the 1st, 2nd and 7th layers. As such, keeping the case of the bottommost layer of students aside, the figures clearly depicted a pyramidal structure with a narrower space on top and relatively wider space on the bottom. The data showed that the hypothesis of pyramidal structure of learners’ population was proved true at least among 78% students in vocabulary achievement. However, since the sampling of students in the study was completely ‘voluntary’ instead of being ‘random’ or systematic (the subjects were asked to participate in the test if they wished), the study might not have represented the actual bottommost layer of students’ population in the classrooms. A significant portion of their population having poor level of competence had not shown their willingness to participate in testing. Had the students of all intellectual levels participated in the study, the bottommost layer could yield a figure greater than that shown here.

Ongoing Study
In the ongoing action research project, as mentioned above, students of B.Ed. first year have been tested in vocabulary as well as reading comprehension, using the same vocabulary testing tools employed in earlier study; and multiple choice test has been employed to test reading comprehension. These test items were based on the reading texts given in New Generation English (the textbook of General English for B.Ed. students) being taught to the students. Altogether 197 students from 2 campuses of Tribhuvan University (Mahendra Ratna Campus Tahachal; and Surkhet Education Campus) had participated in testing. Unlike in the previous study, the participation of students was not entirely ‘voluntary’: All the students present in the classrooms were encouraged to participate in testing. Based on their correct responses in the testing tools, the students’ performance has been demonstrated below after categorizing them into several layers.
Layer categories (Score range)              Students
Layer 7 (85-100%)                                          0%
Layer 6 (70-84.9%)                                        1.02%
Layer 5 (55-69.9%)                                         0.51%
Layer 4 (40-54.9%)                                       4.06%
Layer 3 (25-39.9%)                                         29.4%
Layer 2 (10-24.9%)                                         56.9%
Layer 1 (0-9.9%)                                               8.12%

It should be noted that students’ performance in the tests has ranged from 4% to 74.4% – showing a drastic difference between the two extremes. As depicted in the table, 6 layers have been identified using the same scale for categorizing students employed earlier. Keeping a small size of students’ population (9.14% including those in layer 1 and layer 6) aside, data have clearly depicted the situation of pyramidal structure of learners – the population size increasing progressively as we go downwards from layer 5 till we reach layer 2.

Reflection
When we confront the situation of a vast degree of intellectual difference between the students studying English in our colleges on one hand and the highly demanding standard of course materials in English offered to them on the other, we are in a dilemma of how to handle the lessons. If we think over why such an ‘unwanted’ kind of disparity occurred among the students who have passed the same level exam, our minds start ‘roaming around’ the contemporary educational situation in the country and mull over the issues related to unhealthy practices in the exam, lack of conducive teaching-learning environment, lack of proper efforts on the part of schools and teachers to transform the situation of teaching-learning, etc.
The quantitative data from two sources just mentioned, of course, represent a huge world of evidence from the English language classrooms at various levels in Nepalese context, whether the language teaching professionals are aware about it or not, and whether the circumstances they are working in is encouraging towards initiating something to deeply reflect on the problem or not. However, the situation can be explained further only after studying our learners closely – including their psychology, personal life stories, educational history, family/household situations, parental education, community situation, etc.

If we are in a position to consider the problem of learner hierarchy with importance, the situation depicted here instigates the need for further exploration into the qualitative dimension of the phenomenon. In this connection, our temptation of inquiry needs to be directed towards studying the variation in learner characteristics associated with the pyramidal structure of classroom population from elementary school to the level of higher education.

Some of the questions that deserve our attention in this regard include the following:

  1. Designated as the ‘same grade students’ (studying in the same class and taught through the same course), what are the factors contributing to such a vast degree of variation among the learners? How far are the factors related to the institutional functioning and environment associated with the hierarchy among learners? Is the environment external to school/college playing role in creating the problem?
  2. Have the learners noticed this situation? What is their perception about it?
  3. Do the learners of different strata have the willingness of working together? Are those in the upper strata willing to support those who are in the lower ones?
  4. How far are teachers noticing this problem? What do they feel about it? Are they thinking creatively to address the issue?
  5. Is the hierarchy temporary or permanent in a learner? Can anything be done to minimize the problem in classrooms and enhance the learning of students from the lower strata in particular?

Concluding Remarks
Particularly for addressing the problems of English language teaching (in schools and colleges), there is the need for focused attention in transforming our classrooms after a thorough study of existing situation incorporating the issues pointed out above and the like. Awareness among stakeholders is an essential condition for initiating any new action in this regard. The traditional ‘preaching’ in the name of teaching without concern for students’ learning cannot address the problem at all. Some of the efforts made by the Campus Level Action Research Team (CLART) members working in two campuses of TU for addressing the learning problems in the areas of vocabulary and reading comprehension in the ongoing action research project mentioned in this article are noteworthy in this connection. The result of this intervention is yet to be seen.

References
Luitel, B. (2010). ‘A Cooperative Learning Model: Strategy to Address Learner Hierarchy’. A paper presented in the 15th International Conference of NELTA, Surkhet, 24-25 February 2010. NELTA Conference Proceedings 2010. Kathmandu: Nepal English Language Teachers’ Association.

_______(2011). Samajik rupantaranka lagi kaksha kotha (“Classroom for social transformation”) Terhathum Today, Monday, 19 Poush 2067 B.S. (3 January, 2011).

________(2012) Vocabulary in the English Language Pedagogy: Input, Process and Product (A Study in the Context of Bachelor’s Degree Level under Faculty of Education, Tribhuvan University). A research report submitted to University Grants Commission/Nepal. Sanothimi, Bhaktapur.

Luitel, B. and et. al. (Forthcoming). Improving Students’ Learning of English and Teacher Professional Development through Action Research: The Case of Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension at B.Ed. Level. An ongoing research project undertaken by CERID with the support of University Grants Commission/Nepal.

Teaching and Testing Tastes of Listening and Speaking

Miscellaneous, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

Bishnu Kumar Khadka
Vice-chair of NELTA Surkhet


Like in the previous years, the teachers who have been teaching English at the secondary level in Nepal have already examined the listening and speaking abilities of those students who have appeared in the so-called iron gate examination-SLC. The result is due to be published in a few weeks. Perhaps, most of the students will have very good marks of listening and speaking in their mark-sheets irrespective of their actual listening and speaking abilities, because both the students and their subject teachers expect the monitors to assign very good grades. It is because the marks students get in practical examination can also be of very high importance for the divisions they deserve. This is why it is not a matter of surprise for the monitors to give full marks in the listening and speaking tests, no matter how they perform in the practical examinations. In other subjects-accountancy, health population and environment education, science and even computer science students deserve twenty-five by twenty-five without carrying out specific projects or tasks. Thank god, the teachers of the English language require their examinees to listen to the tape and appear in front of them!

My Reflections as a teacher
When I began to teach English some five years back, like many other enthusiastic novice teachers of English, I was proud. I thought I had done the best job, because I could make all the students understand the text. What I would do was to go thorough reading texts and translate each and every line into Nepali from English and ask the students whether or not they had understood. The students would also reply that they had understood. Their affirmative nodding made me feel happy. I also did not think the other ways, because that was how I was taught while I was studying at schools and even colleges. I am deadly sure that teachers in govern-funded schools in Nepal have been doing so, for the one or another reasons, such as students do not understand if teachers teach them in English only or there are more than one hundred students in their classes and so on.

My happiness lasted until I began to think critically on my own teaching. When I was in my third year of teaching, I began to ask a number of questions such as-‘ Do I really help my students in learning English?, Why do I practice teacher centered techniques of teaching though I know that in order to facilitate learners in learning language I should adopt learner centered ones?, Why are there such incompatibilities? and so on. Having pondered in the answers of these questions, I thought that I should change my teaching activities in the classrooms. Since then, I have been trying my best to play the role of a facilitator or co-worker of students. But I faced and even have been facing a lot of challenges. For reading lessons, I ask students to read in groups or individually. While students busy themselves reading the texts, I go around them and support if they have some challenges. Once they have finished reading the given texts and doing the exercises, I ask them to go for the next lesson. Often some of the students say to me, “Hami lai yo path padhaunuhunna sir? (Don’t you teach us this lesson, sir?). Students have stereotypical feeling that if a teacher goes in front them and tells everything in Nepali then only they think that they have learned and the teacher has taught.

In my contexts, teaching English means teaching reading and writing skills only. For these two skills also, learners are confined to the texts or exercises given their text books. Theoretically, I know that teaching language means teaching all language skills and aspects, but practically, I cannot help confining myself in teaching reading and writing only. Listening and speaking are the primary or natural skills of language and therefore teaching and learning of these two skills equal to preparing learners to understand others who use English and make others understand by using English. Despite the importance in real life communications, these two skills are often neglected in our classrooms, may be because we can mange students get good grades even if they perform very poorly in the practical examinations.

My Reflections as a monitor
After getting the monitor training provided by District Education Office for conducting listening and speaking test, I and Parbati, my life partner got the responsibility to conduct the test in one of the SLC examination centers of Surkhet. When we reached the exam center, the administrative personnel of the examination were eager to welcome us and most of the students were waiting there without having lunch. No sooner did the students see us, they hurried to say ‘Namaste’. I found them to be eager to return their homes. They did not seem to be worried about their practical examinations at all. I thought that the test I and Parbati were going to administer had no face validity, because it did not appear to be like a test to the students.

While conducting the listening test, first of all, we gave them a set of instructions on how the students were supposed to take the test. Having distributed question papers and answer sheets, we played the tape. The students looked at us without considering the questions. After playing the tape for the first time, we asked them to write down the answer of the first question and after five minutes we again played the tape for the second question and finally, we played for the third time for proving students with an opportunity to review their answers. But to my great surprise, most of the students had not written the answers of the listening text; rather they were just looking at one another’s face and waiting someone to do something for them. I asked them to write the answer soon considering the time. They shared their inconveniences that they had not listened to any listening texts during their school life and they didn’t understand anything about the text. They said to us, “How could we write the answers if we have not understood the text?” Their question reminded me of my own ELT classes without any practice of listening and speaking skills, meanwhile I missed my students who were expecting high marks in the listening and speaking test. Then, we read out the scripts for the students slowly so that the students could answer the questions.

After completing the listening test, we immediately started to take the speaking test. I asked simple questions starting from the name, address, number of the family members, name of English teacher etc. but most of the students found these questions difficult to respond in English except their names and their English teachers’ names. There were few students who tried to respond in English. When I asked them to describe the pictures, then most of the students started to look at my face rather than at the pictures. I created a fun during the time saying that, “I am not as handsome as the man in the picture “. I asked you to describe the picture not my face. Therefore, please describe the pictures given to you. Most of the students nodded their heads and some of them tried to describe in English and some others replied in Nepali too. I was in moral crisis to circle the marking score because both the students and teachers had expected me to assign high marks in the test. When I checked the answer sheets of the listening test, their scores were very low. Since I was familiar with their listening abilities, I had assigned high scores in speaking test disregarding their performances so that they would get at least pass marks in aggregate. One thing for sure is that they will certainly curse me when the result is out.

Here, my serious concern is not for their performances but for the lack of practice of listening and speaking. Both teachers and students know the fact that they should teach and learn these two skills not only because they are very essential for genuine piece of communication but also for the practical examinations to be administered at the end of an academic session. Undoubtedly, the result of the poor performances in listening and speaking is caused due to the lack of exposure in these skills. Of course, it is we teachers who have to manage the necessary exposure to our students. If we don’t provide exposure and only test the learners in these two skills, it is a kind of injustice to the students. How do we expect the learners to demonstrate their performances in listening and speaking skills without providing them ample opportunities to get exposure? Did we achieve the goal of communicative competence as envisioned by the secondary level curriculum of English?

Testing of listening and speaking skill should be considered as integral parts of teaching learning process and these skills need to be tested on regular bases and the tests should reflect the real life listening and speaking events. These two skills often go together except in very few situations. Therefore, these two skills should be taught and tested in an integrated way. For example, we can make our students listen to the news, sport reports, chatting at a party, hearing announcements over the loudspeaker, interviewing, hearing speech/lecture etc. and let them speak about what they have heard As our present secondary level curriculum suggests, we need to test our students in the use of language functions and this can be done best if we give them situations and ask them to perform in them. If the goal of teaching and learning English is to enable the learners to use English, teaching and testing activities should also be geared towards it.

It is the fact that language is for communication; language means primarily speech and speech means listening and speaking. If we don’t teach listening and speaking, then how can we enable our students to make the users of language? If the students cannot produce single simple utterances in English having been taught for ten years, it is a matter of shame for us. It’s high time to think what we have done so far to support learners in learning English. Therefore, it is mandatory to give due emphasis on teaching listening and speaking in our EFL classrooms. The provision of testing of listening and speaking should not be made just the formality; rather they are to be made an integral part of teaching.

Student Centeredness: Reflection on my Teaching English at Secondary Level

Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

Ashok Raj Khati,

Life member NELTA

 Abstract

I have been teaching English as compulsory course at secondary level for eight years in outlying part of Nepal. Each year both classes hold around 80 to 90 students. In this brief write-up, I am sharing my own reflection on some key strategies I adopt in my classroom to boost interactions and learner centeredness at this level.

Introduction

When I reflect back to the first year I commenced teaching at this level, I was excited to facilitate the course, though I failed to do it one or the other ways. Now I could recall those days. To me, my lessons were ‘marvelous’ presentations for the first two or three months. I basically did not apprehend the students’ interests and their level of English. Neither was I able to collect feedback from them at earlier. Later, I came to know that students had not enjoyed my classes, nor had many of them got any points in grammar and reading lessons.  Then I thought there was an urgent need to make some changes in my classroom practices, strategies and activities. Some of the following strategies really assisted me to make the class interactive and lively, and to sustain learners’ motivation of the heterogeneous class I was teaching.

Sharing experience

I often share interesting events and moments with the students, I have experienced so far. Sometimes, sharing of training or conference related events, visits to different places and meeting with various people including singers, political leaders, writers; popular comedians and so on really excite them.  If I were a good narrator, they would float with the series of events along with me.  I do not mix the lesson randomly with these stuffs rather I share when certain learning situations come and find them beneficial for the students, particularly when I (not the students) myself find excited to share. I normally start with once, last year, few years back, when I was in … and share it entirely in a narrative style. It is very interesting to see a kind of complete silence in the classroom. Later, I commonly tell them to share different incidents they have experienced on their own. Many of them gradually seem to have developed the sharing skills of such in the classroom. This has been proved a very useful activity while writing short stories. At the same time, while recalling the earlier instances, they learn to visualize the contexts; and make the verbal expressions of the events in narrative forms.

Recognizing students

I try my best to call the students by their names. I approach them at personal level to cope with their problems. My voice is audible, I give clear instructions and I directly tell them the value of learning English as foreign language. I sincerely respond to their queries, as I am very much interested in them. I participate in group works and sometimes play with them. I value their ideas and different opinions. Each student is important.  I make positive comments even if they commit some errors. For instance, I appreciate their voice, the way they speak in English and the body language they use. I know they talk about the lesson and me on the way home with their friends. I believe that it is essential to participate with them, treat them individually and respect their ‘self’ because these groups of students particularly expect a kind of self-recognition and respect among other students. On the other hand, whatever the plans and activities we employ in teaching English, what it seems to be that unless the students have full faith on their teacher, who will guide and lead on the right way, they won’t invest much effort in learning activities. Hence, bringing out some of the essential potentials in them is also necessary on the part of teachers to make them positive and keep their motivation sustained.

Using worksheets

These two classes are large ones because they consist of more than 80 students.  It is natural that the level of noise is high in large classes.  When I start the lesson with oral presentation, students do not listen to me. But when I start writing on the board at the beginning, the whole class starts copying whatever I write and stop making talk by their sides. Then only I start speaking something. Secondly, I use handouts for teaching different reading texts, particularly when there are many exercises that the students have to practice. I can see all the students engaged working with worksheet on their own.  In a few minutes, they will be busy in working in pairs. I don’t need to cry, neither I need to clarify nor I have to explain. They read the text, they interact with the text, they reread it, they discuss in pairs and finally they come to me. In this light, it is very comfortable to deal with the large numbers of students using worksheets. The lesson is effective in terms of effort, time, activities and student centeredness.

Moderate use of Nepali

By nature large classes are heterogeneous ones. In other words, there are many students with the varieties of levels in the English language. To make them feel ease, I occasionally use the Nepali language. They do not enjoy any lesson without funs. To make funs, and the classroom lively or bring laughter in the classroom, switching to the Nepali language is crucial in my classroom. I do share some humorous events in Nepali. I do not use Nepali language for the purpose of simple classroom instructions including managing classroom, group and pair works. Furthermore, using English in different stages of lesson gives ample exposure to them. Later on, they copy the teachers’ language and use on their own in appropriate contexts. However, while explaining grammar rules and some vocabularies, I often use Nepali. Besides, students most often find themselves hard to express some concepts in English, which they may do in Nepali without more effort.  Many studies carried out in Nepal and abroad also support the thesis that moderate use of mother tongue facilitates in learning the foreign language. However, it might be problematic to define the term moderate, occasional and judicious in this light.

Introducing short ‘chatting’

I often start the lesson with a new topic of interests among students. Then, I allow them to comment or opine over the topics. Topics might be from the national dailies, interesting TV programs or radio programs and popular piece of local news. Ongoing political developments in the country, sports events, natural disasters, festivals, feast days, holidays and so on might also be some topics.  For instance,

T: What did you do yesterday?

S: I went to a party.

T: A party? That’s nice. A birthday party?

S: Yes, my friend’s birthday party.

T: OK, tell us…. what happened? What did you do at the party?

(and so on)

These topics create an opportunity for real language practice and create an English language atmosphere in the class. Even more importantly, it establishes contact with the class, and helps students to feel relaxed and ready to learn (Doff, 1995). The common procedure is to introduce topic and let the students opine individually. One important achievement of this strategy is that even the low achievers in the course comment and put their views over the topics. On the other side, these types of topics are introduced at the start of a lesson. The students can express their real experiences. Gradually, it helps them know how other friends and the teacher perceive the same thing differently and to put the ideas rather systematically. As an output of interaction and their own reflection, introducing these themes promote to build new perspectives and knowledge on several issues, topics and themes of day-to-day lives.

Conclusion

There are definitely many strategies, best practices and activities to make the learning productive and enjoyable. A certain strategy may not be applicable and justified to be the best among others in all contexts. However, sharing experiences, enhancing interactions on real issues, letting the students opine, valuing their ideas and using their mother tongue can lead the teaching learning process to be more students centered.

 Reference

Doff, A. (1995). Teach English: A training course for teachers. Cambridge: CUP

Let’s Leave English as English

Native Perspective, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

Resham Bahadur Bista
bista.resham@yahoo.com

I joined my college and started to study English without knowing the real purpose of studying English. I was enchanted towards English because of its charming in my school. There was always the scarcity of the teachers of English in the school. The people who used to speak English were supposed to be great and unique in the context of the village. Many people of my village want to make their children prefect in English. Because of the latent influence of English in my immature psychology, I started to study English. With the passage of time, basically I knew that we get pleasure reading English and to be extra-ordinary in the society.

Now my realization is quite different about the influence of English. I think we waste our half of lives reading the bulky English books about European and American lives, arts, cultures, philosophies and the English language. Most of the students are enrolled in English department for the study of English in our universities. The Nepali language, arts, cultures, literature etc. seem to be ignored in our universities because there are very few students to study these subjects. We all are enchanted towards English to seek jobs, name and fame. We are lured towards it with a hope of being consumed in the international market. English has been taken as a subject to minimize the distance between the local and the global in the contemporary world. It brings the people of world close together, creates the global village as a contact language. It is an international language, spoken all over the world, and a medium of developing the bilateral and multilateral relationships among the countries of the world today.

These are the basic widespread assumptions of the English language which we share in our classrooms. After completion of my masters’ degree, I started to teach in schools and colleges and shared such assumptions of English that I had got in my studies. I am pursuing my career by teaching the English language, literature, culture, history and sociology of Europe and America. Our issues of classroom are the issues of dense technologically advanced society of Europe and America which may not match in our society. Now questions are raise in my monotonous mind influenced by English: Is our mind not colonized by the English language? Are we wasting our time and efforts by reading those bulky books of English which are intend to colonize our mind and body? Are we independent as the legacy of colonized mind? These unanswered questions always haunt my parasitic mind. Frankly telling, we are parasitized by the hidden agenda of westernization and Americanization.

Everyone knows that literature is the mirror of the society and should serve the society because human consciousness is always determined by the political, social and cultural phenomena of a society. But what the western literary texts teach us is that non-western people are vulgar, lusty, spiritual and uncivilized whereas westerns are calm, civilized and superior. They labeled us as uncivilized by creating dichotomy between the East and the West. Although we people always worship to westerners and imitate their life-styles and behaviors, we have forgotten our own socio-economic values and the smell of maternal soil but we only dream of Europe and America. What is our own academic uniqueness? European and American are in our schools and universities with disguised forms; we are coloring their notions in our ground and adopting them in the name of being enlightened.

Most of our universities have prescribed the English curriculum as designed by the west in the name of meeting the international standard. Bulky books of art, philosophy, literature, pedagogy and theory and teaching methodology developed and designed by the westerners are taught in our schools universities. To some extent, all these may not necessarily be suitable in our contexts. The ideas given in their books can not correspond to our local realities. What is the utility of those theories, philosophies, teaching methods, and techniques developed by westerns in our contexts, where almost half of the population is either illiterate or semi-literate? Why does our government not make any strategies to make them literate and cope up with the problematic situations of our context? What is the use of these different Isms to us who do not have even a nice pair of cloths to put on?

Such a condition of English has exploited our freedom and virginity. It does not lead us to freedom, prosperity, and liberty. Instead it corrupts our body and soul. We are absurd puppets dancing with the tunes of others. After 1950s, the formal colonization of the West was stagnated by the third world countries and the movements taken place in different epochs of history. Then the notion of imperialism starts to spread in the world in disguised forms to spread its knowledge, culture, and manner in the developing and undeveloped countries. It comes in the East to learn and support us in different sectors. They are imposing colonialists’ discourses through the English language. The influence of English upon the colonized people was started from the time of formal colonization. In this regard, Tyson mentions, “that so many people formally colonized by Britain speak English, write in English, use English in their schools and universities, and conduct government business in English, in addition to the local languages they may use at home, is an indication of the residual effect of colonial domination on their cultures. In fact, the dynamic psychological and social interplay between what ex-colonial populations considers their native, indigenous, pre-colonial culture and the British culture that was on them constitutes a large portion…”(p.419).

Tyson says that the influence of English was started during the time of British colonization period. Colonized people started to speak English because of the colonizers’ influence. So English does not depict our own identity. The long history of English in the non-western world is influenced by colonizers. Now the English of our classroom is also an indirect and latent form of colonization. So, let us be aware of this fact and not support imperialistic tendency. As we all know that the truth and facts of life are not solved by studying the Westerners’ arts, literature, and philosophy. There are no more rubbers than the Western hegemonic books and tendency.

In such situation what should be done? Do we avoid the English or not in the context of non-western? In Nepal, it is very difficult to adopt the English absolutely because Nepal is very rich in diverse culture and language. There are many languages communities in Nepal like Tharu, Kirat, Newari and Maitili, etc. There is a danger of elimination of Nepali and indigenous languages unless the proper policies and their effective implementations. On the other hand, the craze of English is expanding day by day because of the hegemony of westernization. So, non-westerners are in the ambivalence position about the adopting the English.

In Nepal English was once the language of elites and rulers but now it has reached the access of mass from urban cities to remote village. It has become the indicator of civilized, educated and qualified persons in the context of our country. Whether rich or poor each class has tested the fruit of English. Now people of third world cannot separate from English because it has hallucination to them. America produces the coca cola and sends it in third world, people of third world start to drink it. They are habituated with its taste. Now, they have forgotten the taste of MOHI (local drink made by curt which is replaced by coca-cola). In the same way English in our context is in the form of coca-cola, which is replacing our indigenous languages.

In Nepal, thousands of English academic institutions are mushrooming day by day treating their areas as an ‘English speaking zones’. Nepalese literary texts; poems, essays, fictions etc. have also been written in English. Likewise, mass media- FM radios, newspapers and online editions have accelerated towards the use of English. A number of journals, books and periodicals are produced in English. The professional organizations such as NELTA, GAN have been enhancing the use of English in Nepal. Even in government funded schools children start to study English right from the grade one. Many such schools are shifting their medium of instruction from Nepali to English. The middle and high class families of Nepal prefer to send their children in English medium schools to government funded schools, not because the public schools do not have good infrastructure, teaching staff, environment etc., but because of the medium of instruction. Whether or not we like the spread of English, it is spreading with its leaps and bounds all over the world.

The use of English has also created some questions. What types of English Nepal should adopt either American or British? Does Nepal develop the Nenglish? If we adopt American or British English certainly it will kill the local dialects and harm for indigenous lives and culture. Nenglish in Nepal is not possible to exercise because of the limited resources and small population. So in this situation English is not adopted as its American and British form in the context of Nepal. It is essential to advocate local varieties of English, because a language cannot be taught without properly knowing the account of socio-economic and cultural system of certain places. In one of the training sessions of NELTA, a professor from the west is taking a class about how to teach color to the deaf child. He pointed out that it is necessary to explain the activities of wedding ceremony to tell about the white color to the deaf child. But it is not suitable for the people of Hindu community because Hindu people wear red dress in the wedding ceremony. So the socio-cultural and geopolitical conditions should be considered for the excepted outcome of using English.

There are different varieties of English because of which the teacher also gets confused. An event of my life, I went to a school to apply for the post of a +2 level English teacher with my resume. I handed my resume to the principal and said, “This is my resume, sir”. He winced on his face as soon as he had a glimpse on it. He told to me, “You do not know how to write bio-data and I provide you a sample of it”. Our conversation broke down and I returned home from there feeling embarrassed. I had formed it in American format so he did not like it. It should be developed in British format for him. Recently my 10 years nephew, Anil, was angry and blamed me for that because I had recommended him to write color, center and sox instead of colour, centre and sock respectively. His English teacher crossed those words in red due to the incorrect spelling. I tried my best to convince him about the variation of English words but he never believes me. Now he never comes to learn English with me thinking that my English is faulty. There are variations of words in British and American English like cab or taxi, center or centre, organization or organisation, underground or subway, gas or petrol, fall or autumn, candy or sweets, cookies or biscuits, movies or film etc. If we ask questions to the professors of English about the difference between British, American, New Zealand and Australian English, they say that there is no difference in the use of those words. But when a student writes program instead of programme, do we accept? So, to my knowledge and understanding, English is itself a contradictory and deconstructive means because of its nature and variations. It is the symbol of western hegemony as mentioned by the Antonio Gramsci. So let’s leave English as English.

Revisiting Research Practices in Nepal: My Reflection

Miscellaneous, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

Maheshwor Rijal, KU
maheshwor.rijal@gmail.com

There are several issues related to testing and evaluation in our education system in Nepalese context. Some of those include carelessness in marking systems, delay in examination results, abolishment of entrance exams, habit of reading guess- papers and designing question papers. As a student of Kathmandu University, I accomplished different practical assignments. The educational standards of Kathmandu University (KU) have broadened my horizon of thinking, particularly in terms of almost all the aspects of testing and evaluation including general principle of testing, evaluating test item, designing and conducting test, alternative approaches to students’ evaluation and so forth. However, there are some issues related to testing and evaluation which touched my heart and I have made an attempt to explore current realities of testing particularly research assessment through this blog entry. I believe that my reflective understanding will be one of the lessons for improving and minimizing aforementioned issue allowing conducive environment for learning.

A couple of months ago, while I was busy in finalizing the first draft of my research proposal for my supervisor, one of my friends came into my study room. Observing my hard work and time I was putting into my research proposal endeavor, he was amazed to see piles of reference books on educational researches and EFL pedagogy. We had a long tea-talk until I came to know my friend’s secret suggestion to purchase a ready-made thesis paper. “Oh my God, What a terrific and shameful crime!” I replied to his suggestion. On hearing that, all of my enthusiasms and vigor were gradually going down and down.

Some days later, while I was on my way to Tribhuvan University to search for reference materials in the library, I saw an advertisement of thesis writing services, which was an utter surprise to me. The ad was pasted in the electric pools and walls with contact address and phone numbers of the service provider. It read;

“Available!! Available!!! Thesis of M.A. M.Ed. only for 7000 rupees”

The fact that was more astonishing to me was the contact number of the advertiser explicitly printed on the ad. I moved with my camera and captured the photos of those ads hanging on the electric-posts. I could realize the disgraceful and pitiable fate that is waiting ahead of us. Who is responsible for this? Where is law and order to stop this kind of sinful business? Then, what is the value of testing and evaluation? Such kinds of questions are roaming in my mind even now.

In Kathmandu University, I learned that a research should aim at transforming a society towards further progress. If so, can this type of activity really contribute to the debunking of the existing myth of the society? It is difficult to believe how education can be an efficient instrument for reshaping the quality of the individual, society, and nation at large. I was overwhelmed and stressed even though I am carrying out on my research activities very seriously. Based on my observation and experience, I have found there is no reading habit developed among the youths. Majority of them nowadays hardly go to libraries since majority of them are habituated to pass exams without rigorous studies.

Making educational and intellectual exercises profit oriented cottage industries like selling the thesis is undoubtedly a criminal act. These kinds of crimes should be identified as sharp indicators of overall social degradation, particularly among intellectual circle of the society. Such activities will have negative backwash in teaching and learning. There will certainly be no value of testing and evaluation in terms of dissertation writing and other types of examinations. Unless these heinous and deplorable activities are stopped, there will be no efficiency, validity and reliability of testing, assessment, and evaluation. It will generally affect entire education system.

The famous leader Nelson Mandela said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which can use to change the world”. Does such issue of testing and evaluation prevailing in our education system be the powerful or destructive weapon to change our society?

It is high time the concerning authorities need pay attention to the prevailing issue or it will adversely affect the whole education system; input, process and output at large.