‘We must move from tradition to innovation in language teaching’

Karachi
We have to move from tradition to innovation in the field of language teaching. We have to keep abreast of the latest concepts in the field of education and have to mould the classroom atmosphere accordingly.
This was the tenor of the keynote address by Dr Lou McLaughlin, an English language teaching expert from the Republic of Ireland at the 31st international conference of SPELT (Society of Pakistan English Language Teachers) at the Habib Public School on Saturday.
She stressed the teachers’ cognition in language teaching processes. She defined cognition as a combination of belief, understanding, and knowledge. “English language teaching professionals’ beliefs influence both how they learn and behave and in teacher training education concepts,” she said.
She stressed on teachers’ cognition, what teachers, know, believe, and think. “You must innovate”, she said.
She added, “the teacher must identify what his cognitions are, then link the approaches to this cognition, there should be reflection throughout the course and there should be action from this cognition”
McLaughlin’s keynote address was a highly enlightening lecture and she answered many questioners from among the gathering. Rahila Ashraf, the director of professional development, gave a engrossing talk on the use of the dictionary, titled, “Dictionaries: the ultimate language learning tool in the classroom”.
In her highly erudite discourse, Ashraf brought out the extreme importance of the dictionary in the learning process. She removed so many hitherto widely held misconceptions about certain words and their pronunciation. It was a highly informative talk and one was convinced about the never-ending importance of the dictionary.
Ahmar Mahboob, a teacher of linguistics at the University of Sydney, Australia, in his lecture, titled, “Language, literacy, education, and empowerment: Prof Ruqaiya Hasan’s contribution to the study of literacy”, recalled that Prof Hasan was the keynote speaker at a conference on leadership at the University of Illinois, Urbana Illinois, USA. He said her talk pivoted around the process of globalisation and her data was titled, “glib speak”. He said it was all about saying things that went to the advantage of our latent adversaries without our being aware of it. For instance, quoting the late Prof Hasan, he said the word “Liberalisation” had a positive connotation but the World Bank and the IMF, under the cloak of the positive connotation used it to promote their own agenda which was all to our disadvantage.
Similarly, he said, the word democracy had a positive connotation, meaning thereby a government of the people, for the people, and by the people. Yet, in the context of Pakistan, he
said that it just implied the gathering of votes. “By studying how language works, we can impact the lives of others,” Mahboob added.
He said that Prof Hasan was very particular about grammar but not the kind of grammar taught in our schools. Dr Maliha Ahmed, a doctor and a specialist in neuroscience, explained the learning process from the perspective of brain structure. Outlining the steps to maximise attention, she said we could achieve this objective through interaction. Story telling, she said, grabbed attention. Memories, she said, were made up of vast webs of data. She talked of the release of an enzyme, dopamine, on hearing music, which she, said, enhanced learning.
Dr Fatima Dar said that education should enable every person to attain all-round development in the domains of aesthetics, physique, and intellect and lamented that our education system was not paying any attention to behavioural development. Mick King from the Middlesex University, Dubai campus, gave a detailed talk on problem-based learning.