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English
Enrichment Course Dr.
Ranganayaki Srinivas English
Enrichment Course As A Means Of Improving The Teaching Proficiency Of The M. A.
ELT Students And Language Proficiency Of The School And College Students On The
Campus. The
M A [ELT] students are trained to offer special, short-term, need based courses
with the main focus on communication skills.
To improve their teaching proficiency and to give them a chance to try
out the materials and techniques discussed in the methodology classes, they are
asked to offer special English Enrichment Courses for school and college
students. For this they are first given an orientation about conducting needs
analysis, designing syllabuses and
courses, preparing teaching and testing materials and conducting research.
Then they are divided into groups and are assigned a specific area for
which they collect, adopt, adapt or
prepare new materials to teach communication skills. The senior students take up
the responsibility to organize the programme and they work with the juniors to
make the course effective and need based. Regular
workshop sessions are arranged wherein M A [ELT] previous and final year
students work together to discuss the type of syllabus they need for such a
programme and work out the overall and specific aims and objectives of the
course. Then a number of
committees are formed with respect to the areas they would like to focus during
the course. These committees take
up the responsibility of orienting the class regarding
the tasks and materials that can be used to teach specific aspects of the
programme. Then based on the
feedback obtained from the group and from the teacher in-charge they revise,
modify and add to the materials. They
also grade the tasks according to level of difficulty.
Then they collaborate with the other groups and decide the slots for
their tasks in the overall timetable. In
all these activities the M A [ELT] students practise
communication skills specifically related to their future career as teachers of
English. Further, they feel the
activity is more purposeful and realistic mainly because they are not doing this
to get through examinations but to offer a specific English course.
Each committee member has to ensure that their ideas are understood by
the rest of the class and they make them work on the tasks in groups and pairs.
This in itself improves the language competence of the whole class.
The fact that they are preparing themselves to face a real class rather
than a written examination wherein they will be asked questions on specific
tasks to teach and test English, motivates them and prods them to put in their
best ability. In addition they prepare the students for cocurricular activities
like skits and songs in English. On the last day of the English Enrichment
Course, they invite the principal and teachers of the school or college their
students belong to and organize a cultural programme. They
prepare a brochure advertising their course and contact school and college
principals and teachers and also talk to the students who are likely to join the
course. They register the students who wish to join the course, collect a
nominal fee and work out their budget. They decide how much to spend on expenses
like zeroxing materials for classroom use, giving prizes for the students, etc. They
prepare a pretest and a post test to evaluate the effectiveness of their
programme. They also collect feed back from their peers, teachers, students
taught by them and write reflective reports on their teaching and learning
experience. Publications
related to the Research Þ
Innovations in Testing. CIEFL Bulletin. Vol.
10. No. 2. December: 2000 Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages [CIEFL].
Hyderabad. Þ
‘Innovations in
Testing’. Paper presented at the international seminar on Language Assessment
in ESL: Issues and Concerns. CIEFL. Hyderabad.2000.
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H M Patel Institute of English Training & Research, Vallabh Vidyanagar - 388120, Gujarat, India Phone : 091-2692-230193, 091-2692-230079 |
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