It naturally happens when an approach or method cannot fully serve the purpose, the alternative approach appears. Grammar Translation dominated European and foreign language teaching from the 1840s to the 1940s, and in modified form it continues to be widely used in some parts of the world today.The grammar translation method showed its sluggish process to satisfy the growing needs of the time that expected quick process to develop a procession of manpower equipped with the ability to communicate in English at the global standard. On the horn of this quick necessity, Communicative Approach appeared but how far it has served the purpose remains a debate. It started working in many countries since 1970s but it came into our part of the world in 1996-97 and our textbooks were first time designed on its principles that witnessed a paradigm shift of teaching learning English in the country. We took it easily as any jerk puzzles the passengers and it needs some time to get settled. The same we thought in the process of CLT introduction. Two decades are almost passing but we actually find no such improvement of the learners rather it seemed to downgrade their standard in acquiring this subject that has become a serious concern for the educationists and linguists. Now is the time to ask the question to ourselves ' should we continue the CLT Approach?"
"Dr. Fakrul Alam, Professor of English at Dhaka University expressed his opinion about CLT in his article titled’ Bengali, English and the anxiety of influence, in the Eid Magazine June 2017 of the Asian Age.”Things got worse when in the 1980s the Great Dictator, as grotesque and as omnivorous as Charlie Chaplin's movie monster declared with an eye to populism that English would no longer be taught in degree colleges. He did his best, let us remember, to minimize its presence in Bangladesh although his son was sent to an English Medium school. The final blow in the downsizing of English came surely from the DFID/British Council sponsored plan to teach what British Universities and their ELT graduates branded optimistically as ' Communicative English' in 1990s. The chief consequence of this and the other initiatives discussed above was that the infrastructure that had produced Bengalis who knew Bengali perfectly and English adequately till the 1970s was done away with. From the mid-1990s schools and colleges began producing graduates supposedly equipped with English language ' Communicative Skills' propagated through the ' teaching of English for Today' the textbook created by ELT experts mostly created and promoted by the British Council/DFID scheme, but the truth was that the products of this pedagogy knew little or no English because only the skeleton of the language was being taught to them by their trainers and that too through rote learning in most places.
What we need also is to get rid of the bunkum of so-called ' Communicative English' and reject all short term quick fix solutions to teach the language. We also need to go back to traditional ways of teaching that had worked well in our part of the world for generations and that is still working well in our neighboring country, incorporating of course, the best of ELT pedagogy that prescribes drills and teaching methodology appropriate for large classrooms. But more reading, more writing, more grammar and translation work and an attempt to make classrooms participatory must be the solutions to our English woes”
The students who read CLT in private universities don't take up teaching as profession in the secondary and higher secondary level where the practice and propagation of CLT is a must. These people either go for English Medium School teaching or corporate job or multinational job or go abroad for further higher education. It clandestinely shows that the root level people and root level necessity is hardly met up by the production of CLT people by private universities and the English departments of public universities. Source of this article.
No comments:
Post a Comment