Trial Run of English TPD Certificate Course
The Communicative English Language Teaching course is a certification course TISS will offer to teachers of the four states where CLIx is being implemented.To assess whether the content and pedagogy are suitable for learners and to improve the course based on feedback, a trial of the course ‘The Second Language Classroom’ was conducted with teachers of Shankar Rao VishwasVidyalay, School No. 28, Vashi, Navi Mumbai, on 6 March 2017.
Three teachers from the school participated in the trial. The CLIx team had four members — two from the English domain team, one from the Technology team and one external advisor tothe CLIx English team.
At first, connectivity issues caused a delay in starting the trial and in loading videos. Once past the glitches, participants enjoyedthe videos and answeredquestions related to the videos.
Answers attempted by a participant during the course trial
The online course has videos, activities and discussions related to each topic. During the session, participants watched videos, read case studies and completed survey questionnaires on the languages spoken in their classrooms. The session showedhow use of the mother tongue helps in learning asecond language.
The CLIx team observed that teachers answered questions in their diaries and later discussed the pedagogy of the course. A one-to-one conversation with a CLIx team member after the trial helped participants as they compared their own classroom strategies of English language teaching with the pedagogies used in our course.
This trial alerted the English team to the importance of using simple language and giving clear instructions. We alsorealised that, when designing activities, we must take into account the average time a participant takes to read an online article.
It was an enriching experience that gave the English team a clear picture of how the certification coursewould appear and be received by participants.
(Mayuri Kulkarni, Research Assosciate, English team, CLIx)
Hi!
I teach English at a local college in Bangalore. I would like to connect to your English teaching program. I’ve developed an innovative, interactive audio-visual course to teach Basic English. This is a very methodical and highly graded course to teach all the four language skills concurrently. It seeks to make language learning similar to mother-tongue learning, keeping grammar well hidden in the background. It also has a lot of practice exercises as language is a both a skill-based and creative activity. Doing this course would give a firm foundation in language and preclude to a large extent the possibility of language errors usually made as a result of haphazard learning, which is the case of most ESL learners.
I’ve tried this out on some children and it seemed to work, as they found language learning easier and more interesting. I’m looking for ways to make this reach a larger audience, and I thought your organisation might aid me in this. I give my educational credentials below:
Master’s in English (1987-89), U of Toledo, Ohio-passed with A grade.
MA in English (1982-84), Central U of Hyderabad-passed with I Class.
BAEd (1979)Regional College of Education, Mysore-passed with I Class.
Looking forward to a response,
Prema Prasanna.