Teachers play a vital role for implementing education curriculum at the field level especially in the classroom situation. Government develops education policy with the help of policymakers and implementation part is organised by Ministry of Education, different government bodies, administrators and teachers. Current Education policy of Bangladesh 2010 has highly recommended student centred participatory based teaching-learning, which mainly focuses on students' creativity in which teachers are asked to engage the students in different classroom activities such as pair work, group work, role play, demonstration, discussion, debate, presentation etc. Earlier, main methods of teaching were teacher-centred in which most of the classroom activities were done by the teachers, where students had limited opportunities to share and participate in the classroom. In the traditional methods memorization is the key focus. In the current education policy of Bangladesh, present government is trying to bring out a change in the process of teaching-learning. Creative questions have been included in the assessment process and different development projects of the government (TQI-SEP, A2I, SEQAEP) are constantly providing training to the secondary and higher secondary teachers about creative questions and other subject based teacher training such as Continuous Professional training, Curriculum training, ICT based digital content based training whose objectives are to make the teachers confident about their respective teaching areas. As an English Language teacher trainer I work with the secondary level school English teachers in different parts of the country as a representative of the government. My working experience with them indicates that most of the teachers are not still familiar with the curriculum guidelines. Though National Curriculum and Textbook Board (NCTB) has introduced and published books and curriculum on Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), very few teachers have good understanding about CLT. At this point in time there are tensions between the curriculum guidelines and current language assessment in the secondary schools in Bangladesh.
According to the curriculum report of the NCTB, 2012, the communicative method has been introduced in the secondary and higher secondary level. This method focuses on four language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) and aims to address participatory based activities in the classroom situation. However, there are still some fundamental problems such as physical facilities in the institutions, large numbers of students in the class, classroom settings, and duration of the class. Above all, the lack of trained teachers might be one of the main causes for a generally poor standard of teaching.
However, although the curriculum emphasises four language skills, examinations are based on only two skills; mainly reading and writing, while the other two skills of listening and speaking are not formally assessed. In some cases, some English language teachers in more effective schools often informally assess the listening and speaking skills of the students in the classroom. Despite this, most students have difficulties in communicating orally in English even after passing secondary level.
The same is true for writing. In the assessment of writing skills, students are encouraged to write on the requirements for the examination only. Though there are some practices of guided and semi-guided writing in the classroom, students have limited opportunities in the classroom to practise creative writing. Students are expected to write according to the prescribed set of questions that reflect the content for passing the examination and obtaining a high score. Limited vocabulary knowledge results in students' facing difficulties in constructing sentences for developing ideas regarding the particular topic. Besides this, they do not have enough grammatical knowledge and accuracy with the mechanics of writing. The focus is frequently on the grammatical errors in their writing.
The reasons behind the poor quality of English teaching is that most of the teachers (about 90% or above) both in urban and rural areas do not have English background (other subjects teachers teaches English). Though government is providing training to these teachers, their overall performance in teaching is not at all satisfactory; their presentation in the English class is very much traditional, mainly exam based to prepare the students for passing the exam. This situation has made a tremendous impact on the standard of students' quality of their performance. Students get GPA 5 in English but few students can neither write any topic freely nor speak fluently. This alarming situation is also noticed in the university admission test in the recent years.
However all concerns including government, institutions, administrators, policymakers, teachers should think about the issues to come out from the existing situation. The government should take long term policy to develop to upgrade some issues such as recruitment policy as the current locally teachers' recruitment policy is questionable which always doesn't recruit right people for the institutions. A central recruitment policy may overcome the problem. English teachers should teach all the four language skills in the classrooms and at least 20-30% marks in the school exam or even in the public exam should be uncommon so that both students and teachers are motivated to put much emphasis on free writing and free speaking. Similar ideas can be applied on all other subjects. At least 50% marks should be included from English for Today (EFT) books in both school exam and public exam, current NCTB guidelines says no comprehension will be set from the EFT textbook. So definitely questions arise why teachers and students will be motivated to teach and practice EFT in the class. This has diverted the students to be dependent on guidebooks. Inclusion of ICT in education especially at the secondary level in Bangladesh is the recent development of the present government. Besides these, Bangladesh government should pay special attention on 'Teacher Education Programme' as there is a good mismatch in this sector. Most students/trainees are attending to Private Teachers' Training Colleges/Universities for easy availability of 'degree' rather than quality. Teachers getting degree from the institutions mentioned above are creating a negative impact on the quality of education. Therefore to develop students' creativity government should pay attention to institutional support, increase teachers' faculties, reduce local domination on the institutions, ensuring monitoring and accountability, change in assessment system.
The writer is an Associate Professor of English, DSHE, MoE & PhD Research Fellow at Department of English, Jahangirnagar University. E-Mail: [email protected]
© 2024 - All Rights with The Financial Express
