These days, teaching has been my passion though I was not clear about my profession when I initially joined this job. Now I have been striving for the improvements in my profession so that I can update myself of the latest. I can experience a lot of changes taking place in the field of teaching and learning globally. So, I’m interested in exploring the modern trends in English Language Teaching (ELT). While talking about modern trends, I’m focusing on the techno-friendly. My experience says that students are more curious about techno-based learning. Students are found more curious and attentive in digital-based teaching-learning compared to the traditional lecture or book-based teaching method. Hence, these circumstances drive my mind for exploring modern trends in ELT.

I always focused my interest on teaching and practised it in a normal way, but it was the day when I brought a poem from YouTube entitled, “I Wandered Lonely as Cloud” by William Wordsworth for High School students particularly for Class 10 compulsory English. My teaching took a new turn. I made my students listen to the poem through YouTube in the classroom. It was a nice video with clear audio backed by thematic pictures to help the students catch the theme easily. Here, students learned speaking skills such as pronunciation, enjoyed the rhythm and also practised English reading by following the records. This made the students excited to tell the summary of the poem and then do the exercises given in it. More than that the interesting part was finding the students humming the lines from that poem. Students who were often engaged in math-science work were humming the poem with perfect music. So, this particular event touched me a lot and made me realise the importance of technology in class and further motivated me to explore the other ways using technology in the classroom.

For instance, I commonly use British Council website and app as the supportive digital education materials, which are convenient for achieving learning outcomes. Here I used British Council learn English site, which is for all level, Kids to University, here I used Learn English Teens level with exercise sheet for dialogue and equally I used British Council Podcast which is an app and could be used at any time without internet after we download it. While teaching a dialogue, tuning audio record of the dialogue was more productive than just my lecture as the high school students started speaking naturally. Then I started bringing audio clips of dialogues in the classroom, they started learning the conversation in a real sense with the use of figurative language, gesture, mood and many more. Hence, they not only participated in conversation but also developed writing competency than before.

Nowadays, I have been searching for and adopting the technology in my class to yield more learning outcome than before. Technology has been a part of my teaching which eases my teaching and plays a supportive role for students using technology in my class.

*Ram Chandra Pokhrel, is a high school teacher of English language at Him Rashmi High School, Dandagoun, Tarakeshwor – 9, Kathmandu.