Retraining Programme for College Teachers

This experimental programme was conducted in Andhra Pradesh.The status of English teacher in Andhra Pradesh classroom, for that matter that of any other state, is like the proverbial piano master who likes to play all by himself without allowing the students to touch the instrument.

In spite of the good scoring in the examination, students lack the basic communication skills because English is not taught like a language but as any other content subject.

The students who have been trained in the old system are seriously handicapped by poor communication skills and have got reduced to second-rate job seekers.

Globalisation has a deeper impact on our education system and the deepest on language teaching. Those benefiting from the outsourcing boom might be a miniscule of our total unemployed population, but the global trends are transforming our education system rapidly. The change is considered good from the point of view of educational standards except for the tendency of commercialization.

In  response to the changing scenario, the Andhra Pradesh Directorate of Collegiate Education initiated a retraining programme for the English teachers in colleges collaborating with the U.S. State Department. Master Trainer George Bishop, Jr. Senior Language Fellow designed a ten-day module, the essence of which is that the student should do 85 per cent of talking in the classroom and the teacher should restrict himself to 15 per cent.

In the revamped classroom, the student is expected to play the active participant and the teacher a passive facilitator. On the retraining programme, all the college teachers turned into active students while George Bishop donnedtherole of an ideal teacher with limited interference in the learning process. The course, which started with sounds of English language ended with a demonstration on communication skills by every participant.

It is going to be a tough job for the curriculum designers too. Subjecting students, who want to master basic language skills, to pieces of classical literature has served no purpose. The curriculum designers have to do the tight rope walking of suggesting materials relevant to the needs and the materials that could be easily handled by the present set of teachers.

The infrastructure available in colleges is grossly inadequate to teach language skills in a classroom situation. Apart from revising the course content and training the teachers, the infrastructure like audio and video systems and plenty of reading material in simple English is desired.

Finally, here is some advice for those who ardently support the use of mother tongue and spit venom against English. It is acknowledged by every linguist that one becomes full only when one studies and thinks in mother tongue.

But no wise person learning a second language, as we cannot think of everybody in the world mastering our mother tongue. Hereafter we should converse in mother tongue among ourselves and in second language with the rest of the world. Our mother tongue gets priority only when we advocate English as second language.

The readers are invited to express their opinion on this retraining programme. ‘The essence of the programme is that the student should do 85 percent of the talking in the classroom and the teacher should restrict himself to 15 percent.’       –Editor.
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