Experts discuss ways ‘to teach and research English in difficult circumstances’

The Society of Pakistan English Teachers (SPELT) has turned 36 years old. A virtual panel discussion on this occasion was held on Saturday titled, ‘Teaching and Researching English in Difficult Circumstances’.

The panel discussion was based on two books: Research on Teaching and Learning English in Under-Resourced Contexts and International Perspectives on Teaching English in Difficult Circumstances.

In spite of the pandemic that affected all facets of life, including education, SPELT continued its commitment to train the trainers as it has been doing so since 1984.

Prof Dr Fauzia Shamim, founding member of SPELT and dean of faculty of liberal arts at the Ziauddin University, shared holistic practitioner and research-based perspective on English language teaching (ELT) and teacher education in difficult circumstances.

In addition to extending the current conceptualisation of difficult circumstances in ELT to include broader policy issues that may affect ELT in low-to-mid income countries, the book focuses on the challenges faced by practitioners and learners in contexts of confinements, conflict and special education.

The chapter in this collection, she said, examines the challenges and problems that emerge from the complex current ELT environment, and presents examples of contextualised inquiry-based strategies and interventions to address these challenges. Underlining the need to extend the boundaries of the discipline of ELT to include teaching-learning in less privileged contexts, she said that this wide-ranging volume will appeal to students, scholars and practitioners of ELT.

The questions that the book addressed, she said, are: why do the kinds of difficult circumstances described in this book exist in some contexts? How do policy decisions [planned or unplanned and/or their implementation contribute to creating a difficult circumstance for teachers and learners? What do teachers do to address these challenges for improving student learning outcomes in their specific educational contexts? Is the training provided to teachers in difficult circumstances appropriate, and by extension, how does it help them to teach effectively in large under-resourced classrooms or in contexts of conflict, confinement and special educational needs?

Speaking on the contexts for teaching-learning English in low to mid-income countries such as Asia, Africa, Latin America, she said that there is a need to expand boundaries of difficult circumstances beyond mainstream ELT to include confinement, conflict and special education and to also explore new spaces for learning English beyond the typical classroom such as mobile learning. On the issue of technology, she said that technology can be used effectively to assist the learning of English. She gave the examples of mediated authentic videos for teacher development at a large-scale EIA project in Bangladesh, and The British Council’s Jobseekers project in India and Bangladesh.

She said that there are at least three things at the design or planning stage for ‘product’ uptake by teachers and learners: available technological resources, teachers and learners’ access to these and other identified resources and use of available technology as a tool to develop and/or support context-appropriate pedagogy.

The way forward, she said, is to develop research-based profiles of teaching-learning English in different contexts, including success stories, to improve teacher quality through both top-down and bottom-up continuing professional development programmes, located within a district and school development plan, to encourage teacher research, either by individual teachers or done collaboratively within their professional communities. Other international researchers on the issue also spoke to the virtual panel.