Forty years of SPELT

It was in 1990 that I managed to get my first teaching job as an English language teacher at the Pakistan American Cultural Centre (PACC) in Karachi. I was 26 years old and already working as a copywriter at an advertising agency.

Still unmarried and without a vehicle, travelling from my home in Malir to Clifton by bus was an arduous task. Wanting to buy a car, I was looking for a second part-time job that the PACC offered and I gladly accepted. The PACC was also my alma mater where I had completed numerous courses of English proficiency so that an Urdu-medium student like me could manage to read and write in the language that nearly all jobs demanded. It was in the faculty room of the PACC that I first came across an announcement about an academic session for teachers.

Abbas Husain was the trainer and the Society of Pakistan English Language Teachers (SPELT) was the organiser of the academic session. Curious to learn more about English language teaching I attended the session and found Abbas Husain to be one of the best teachers I had ever listened to. That was my first introduction to SPELT and I immediately decided to become a member. Abbas Husain with his ever-smiling face encouraged this young teacher to attend more academic sessions to hone teaching abilities. Then it became my life-long passion to keep acquiring new skills in learning and teaching.

The story of SPELT’s formation is instructive and interesting. In 1983, the erstwhile University Grants Commission organised a conference for English language teachers from across Pakistan in Islamabad. Seventeen teachers from Karachi met again in 1984 at the same venue and decided to organise themselves as a pioneering body of English language teachers in Pakistan. Upon their return to Karachi, they gathered to formalise their association and Abbas Husain suggested it be named SPELT (Society of Pakistan English Language Teachers) which the others liked and immediately embraced.

The founding group of teachers included names such as Abbas Husain, Ambreena Qazi, Aneesa Mumtaz, Farida Faizullah, Fauzia Shamim, Talat Rafi, and Zakia Sarwar, whose home became a meeting point for regular get-togethers. Zakia Sarwar suggested that SPELT be a non-hierarchical body with some coordinators with equal authority and responsibilities such as academic coordinator, conference coordinator, finance coordinator, programme coordinator, and so on.

Yasmin Jafar of Dawood Public School initially offered her school for monthly academic sessions and the first conference took place in 1985. Anita Ghulam Ali offered help by sending over 100 English language teachers from government colleges to attend the conference.

Then it became a regular feature for SPELT to conduct academic sessions, organise national and international conferences, offer teacher education programmes, and publish academic articles and essays in its journal and in other publications. By the time I joined SPELT in 1990, my closest mentors and teachers were Abbas Husain, Khalida Saadat, and Zakia Sarwar. I found a new community of highly qualified teacher educators who had smiles on their faces, and their homes were open to all junior teacher teachers like myself. In my age group Farah Kamal, Mohsin Tejani, Saleem Ibrahim, and many others kept doing one course after another and then managed to transform themselves as budding teacher educators.

I was actively involved in SPELT for nearly 10 years in the 1990s before moving to England on a British Council Scholarship and shifted from language teaching to education management. In those ten years, I served as coordinator with various portfolios and conducted numerous workshops for teachers. In this process, Abbas Husain and Zakia Sarwar were always there to help and guide me with Fauzia Shamim, Fatima Shahabuddin and Khalida Saaddat as backup support. Those were the years that helped young teachers like me to shape themselves as dedicated teacher educators. Over the years, many active Spelters became inactive and others joined with new zeal.

But the single most significant contribution to SPELT’s growth came from Prof Zakia Sarwar whose home became a second home to me and many others. Always open to English teachers and other friends, ever ready with food and snacks for student teachers and colleagues who could barge in without warning. I remember innumerable days that I spent at her home working on the SPELT journal, proofreading, preparing for workshops, checking student assignments, and taking help from Prof Zakia Sarwar on my own numerous certificates and diploma courses that I did in the 1990s.

Zakia’s husband Dr M Sarwar was a renowned student leader in the 1950s leading a resistance movement from the platform of the Democratic Student Federation (DSF). By the 1990s, he was a senior leftist and progressive stalwart in Karachi whose home had hosted nearly all progressive poets and writers for decades. Beena Sarwar followed in the footsteps of her parents and all SPELTers always felt so comfortable with the entire Sarwar family that played such an unforgettable role in the development of the organisation, offering home hospitality to many of the speakers at SPELT conferences.

After Dawood Public School, it was the PACC that offered its hall for regular academic sessions for years. When SPELT managed to buy its own office, these sessions were regularly held there. In the past 40 years, SPELT has organised nearly 500 academic sessions that are free for all participants.

SPELT activists and officeholders are mostly volunteers who do not receive any salary or remuneration. This inimitable voluntary spirit has helped the organisation survive for that long. It has never missed a conference or an academic session, come what may. From the 2020 Covid days, academic sessions have moved to an online format which has increased participation from around the world.

SPELT conducted over 300 short courses in the past four decades benefitting thousands of English Language teachers from across Pakistan. It has also offered over two dozen Practical Teacher Training Courses (PTTC) that run for 12 months for English language teachers. For 31 years Spelt offered Cambridge University’s Royal Society of Arts (RSA) Certificates for overseas teachers of English (COTE). This year SPELT will organize its 40th international conference in November on English Language Teaching with an expected participation of over 3,000 teachers with facilitators from Pakistan and across the world.

SPELT has also been publishing quarterly SPELT Journal since 1985 and in July 2018 initiated an e-bulletin for all its members and other teachers. There was a time when in Pakistan English language teaching (ELT) mostly used the grammar-translation method but thanks to SPELT’s efforts over the past 40 years, ELT has advanced substantially to a more communicative approach to language teaching. The number of those who benefitted from SPELT may be in the hundreds of thousands and no history of English language teaching in Pakistan will ever be complete without the mention of SPELT and its pioneers such as Abbas Husain, Fauzia Shamim, and Zakia Sarwar.

SPELT has directly or indirectly been involved in developing quality textbooks for the Sindh Textbook Board for grades I–XII, since the late 1980s. In the 1990s, several subject-specific associations were formed with funding and logistic support for the Institute of Educational Development (IED) of the Aga Khan University, Karachi. After remaining a non-hierarchical organization for 35 years, SPELT had to comply with the new laws governing such associations and now it has Mohsin Tejani as its president and Fauzia Shamim as its vice-president. But in their approach, they are still non-hierarchical and that is the spirit behind its continued success.

There are not many voluntary organisations of teachers that can claim the level of success SPELT has achieved.

The writer holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK. He tweets/posts @NaazirMahmood and can be reached at:

mnazir1964@yahoo.co.uk