English Language: News from Kathmandu #5

Today the focus of our process changed. Previous days had been based in-school and used observation and demonstration as the vehicle for development, but today it was time for a teacher training workshop. Based at the Greenwich Hotel in Patan M&M put the Heads and teachers from Bal Vinod and Bal Bigyan schools through their paces. A very important lesson here for our volunteers of 2011: Run part of the session as if in-school with the teachers as pupils!

"Overall, we felt the workshop was a success.  We thought the teachers picked up a lot of useful tips and new activities that they can use in their own classrooms.  The practical component worked really well - we used the teachers as pupils, thereby letting them experience this "new" method of language teaching from the pupil's point of view.  We made an effort to explain how each activity worked: which learner type was targeted, how the activity could be used at different levels, and speaking/reading/writing/listening were also highlighted in the course of each activity.  All the activities were theme based around a unit concerning Sports.  We wanted to show how they could transition from their current grammar-based system to a theme-based approach to language teaching.  The practical section was very well received and we could see some light bulbs going off.

As foreseen, there was indeed a bit of language barrier between us and the teachers who attended the workshop today. This was more apparent in the morning, when we were focusing on the theory behind different learning types and styles. We are wondering if this is a result of different pronunciations (us versus Nepali pronunciation) or whether it is actual language. Some basic culture differences emerged during the course of the workshop as well.  We found many similarities between the pupils we had observed in the schools, and the teachers who came to the workshop.  It is apparent that they are accustomed and trained to copy - they were constantly picking up their pens to write something down, even when it wasn't part of the activity!  They were hesitant to challenge or question concepts or information we were presenting (again, this may be a language issue).   It's apparent that the role of the teacher is respected - which is great on one hand, but on the other hand, it made the feedback forms we received at the end of the workshop not very useful. The feedback forms simply repeated the questions back to us, with some affirmative answers.  During the course of some of the auditory activities, it was clear the teachers were not listening to each other.  We saw this in the schools, where pupils were talking or writing while other members of the class were answering the teacher's questions.  After this workshop, we realize that the  most important thing to concentrate on in the future of this project is language training for the teachers. As the teachers learn more English, they can transfer that knowledge to the pupils.  This will take some time.

We are altering a few things for tomorrow's workshop, as some of the school participating have very little knowledge of English.  Wish us luck!"

Until then,

M&M