Making English Easier
As a Master Trainer, I have got a few opportunities to visit various Government primary schools. Today I am sharing such an experience here.
Once, I was invited as a guest teacher in a well known government Primary school to attend the upper primary classes with Guruji Shri Karsanbhai Desai, an assistant teacher in Kesarpura Kampa Primary School. The school was in one of the interior villages. When we reached there, the staff, along with the Principal, welcomed us warmly. There I met some active and dedicated teachers arrived from nearby schools. We attained the prayer assembly enriched with varied activities which opened the window for the students to present as well as to develop their artistic skills to live a wonderful life including a few enlightning knowledge activities.
The school had a great strength of well disciplined students with a committed staff. Students belonged to well settled parents and a prosperous families. After the prayer assembly, the teaching
session started. My first session was in eighth standard. I found students who are good and competent at their studies. But they were using improper pattern of letters in English writing. That made me worried. I asked the language teacher to make them habitual of writing in the four-line notebooks. As soon as I suggested, amidst my wonder the Principal of the school immediately provided four line notebooks to all the students studing in upper primary standard. This would help them improve their writing pattern in English.
In the case of seventh standard although it was a brilliant class, I found that some students still had a bit of problems in memorizing spellings of multisyllabeled words. I helped them to prepare such spellings with my ‘word-deviding pattern’. For there wasn’t any spelling that was too hard to keep in mind e.g. I took some words from their text books like ‘con/gra/tulations’, ‘dic/tio/na/ry’, ‘grate/ful/ness’, ‘ad/ver/tise/ment’, ‘ex/pla/na/tion’ and so on.
After the interval was over, it was a time for the students of sixth standard. It was quite an activeclass full of vitality and curiosity. When it was the time for blackboard work I found three of the students who were mistaking in reading the two letters ‘b’ and ‘d’. Suddenly a chart of animals, hanging in a corner of the class drew my attention. Fortunately, there was a picture of a cat facing left side and of a dog facing right side in that chart. I tried to resemble the left side facing cat’s picture with the letter b (as for Billi, cat called in Hindi) and the picture of dog facing right side with letter ‘d’ (as ‘d’ for dog).
And the right faced image of dog with the letter ‘d’. Moreover, I suggested their class teacher to capitalise those two pictures along with the letters ‘b’ and ‘d’ by their sides.
As for the last two periods, all the students, teachers and the Principal, along with us, gathered in the assembly hall of the school with few activities, language games, including ‘Raja says’, ‘What is in my hand?’, and ‘Lottery bowl’.
I conclude that as “the novelty captivates one’s attention”, students are also interested to see, to hear, to know and to learn something new everyday. It becomes a big responsibility of a teacher to introduce new techniques and new activities daily in the classroom. As English is a foreign language, students generally don’t get the environment to learn this language out of the school ground. This is a great challenge for a language teacher. But these teachers have many skills and different ways to make the language interesting such as telling stories, singing rhymes, playing language games, conduct role play and many more activities, keeping the teaching-learning processes vital.
Pallavi Gupta | A teacher at Juna Balvantpura Primary School
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