About This Course

S-01a: Communicative English Language Teaching (Strategies) focuses on building an understanding of the socio-cultural context language use and learning-teaching processes. The classroom practices will be delved into in this course. The impact of media and the changing n ofeeds and demographics of the students will be the core focus of this course. The course will also evaluate policy recommendations (UN, India’s NPEs, etc) for language teaching and practices adopted across boards, states and nations to enable teachers to develop practices that best suit their contexts.

Course Objectives

At the end of the course learners will be able to

• Analyse the socio-cultural impact on language learning practices.
• Present a critical understanding of their own classrooms (technology and non-technology based) and map their roles and their student roles in language learning and teaching.
• Examine language learning principles and appraise current best practices.
• Create and sustain a learning environment fostering learner autonomy, peer learning and self-reflection.

Course Outline

Unit 1: The Social Context of Language Learning

This unit is concerned with the social reality that affects language learning to enable teachers to identify resources that they might use for effective teaching of language. Teachers will reflect on their own and their students’ socio-cultural background through which they would be able to link the language/s used in the local context as well as the language/s in the home environment. Teachers will critically evaluate various resources for language learning available outside the formal learning environment.

Teachers will also explore the status of English Language in the current Indian multilingual context in order to establish the aspirations of the students within a community. This unit will also help the teacher to comprehend affordances organically available (such as media and other discourse-based exposure) to the students for learning their mother tongue and for learning English. This knowledge will help the teacher to appreciate the ways in which teaching-learning materials shape pedagogy.

Teachers will deliberate upon what language proficiency involves and the various skills that students need to become proficient language users. They will explore the concepts of fluency and accuracy and the importance of each as they arrive at the concept of Common Underlying Proficiency by distinguishing between Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) and Cognitive-Academic Language Proficiency (CALP). The teachers will compare the impact of importance given to fluency in the NEP 2020 and UN recommended documents against traditional emphasis on just accuracy. They will understand the frameworks that have guided the evaluation of proficiency, analyse the varying levels in communicative competence and share strategies (such as positive feedback) to boost student learning.

Implementation: The teachers will be asked to do an analysis of their class participants and look at motivation, aspiration and societal influences on language learning. They may be asked to conduct small activities (e.g. self-profiling / peer-profiling by learners) to document the differences and/or similarities among their learners. The use of ICT such as Google forms, spreadsheet, or word cloud will be a part of the assignment.

Unit 2: The English Language Classroom

This unit will build on Unit 1 to enable teachers to look at multiple sources and methods of providing language input within and outside the classroom that can be used in their teaching practices as they do lesson planning. Teachers will draw on their own classroom experience to review the second language classroom environment in the instances given to them in the form of videos or readings. They will analyse the heterogeneity (such as the home languages/s, gender, socio-economic backgrounds and so on) and the related issues of mixed ability in their classrooms. They will distinguish the use of language as a system focused on content negotiation from that as a means of communication as they juxtapose the practices they would implement as part of the course with the sample activities in their regular curricula.

Through activity planning seen through a sample (e.g. CLIx English Basic or Elementary), the teachers would study their own roles and those of their students in negotiating language input through teacher-learner and student-student interactions and remodel their own classroom strategies to maximise opportunities for students to become proficient in English be it in either in-person or online classrooms. Select classroom observation techniques will be focused upon in this to enable deeper understanding of learner-context dynamics. This will be based on Kumarvadivelu’s work on post-methods.

Implementation: Teachers will plan and implement a short activity based on their understanding of the second language classroom through this unit and explain how it will be done in a second language classroom. Observe the implementation and reflect based on the pointers discussed in the unit. Also talk about the role of students, teachers and peer interaction promoted by the activity. The recording of the class pertinent to this exercise will be a requirement for the submission of this assignment.