‘Dialogue and practice imperative to rapid learning’

The 32nd annual conference of SPELT opened in town on Saturday at the Habib University. The conference is themed, “Expanding your horizons in ELT”.

While there were no inaugural or ceremonial speeches, Dudley Reynolds of the Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar and President of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) started off the inauguration with a purely technical lecture on the teaching of English and language teaching at large.

He said, “Anybody who knows a language can teach it. Teaching is nothing more than following instinct.” He said that students could learn a language on the internet faster and within a time-frame determined by them. All they had to do was to immerse themselves.

As regards the way students should learn, he listed practice which comprised a role play plus acting out a dialogue; present plus practice which involved explanation of requests and pretending that you were in a restaurant. He also advocated video, gapped transcript, role play, identifying request, and transcript edit. He also talked about interaction strategies.

Earlier, Lubna Mohyuddin, conference coordinator, in her welcome address, said, “Pakistan has a growing community of ELT professionals and practitioners and this year’s conference is geared to bringing experienced and the not-too-experienced teachers into the ELT fold.”

Starting out in ELT always seemed like a daunting task, she said, with hundreds of resources available online in this era of informational boom. Sifting through all the clutter to find relevant and concrete ELT practices and methodologies is not always easy. Bringing together ELT experts from around the globe under one roof helps newcomers to the ELT field as well as ELT veterans in learning the latest techniques and research.

“English Language Teaching is ever evolving and expanding and as SPELTers too often we find teachers who do not have access to the right information and materials to expand their knowledge base and help their students be the best they can be. This conference will provide new ways to develop listening and speaking skills, and new ways of teaching how to read and write coherently,” she said.

“I wish all the presenters the very best of luck. Some of you are veteran presenters and some are first time presenters at the conference, and I am sure we hope to learn a great deal from all of you,” Mohyuddin said.

After the inauguration, there were technical sessions on a whole lot of aspects of teaching, teaching both English and education as such. One of these was classified as “Language skills in the service of personality and nation”, conducted by Shirin Khan of the Goodwill Network.

“Grammar counts,” she said and described the difference it would make if the words “in” and “on” were inappropriately were used. They could, she said, give rise to very acrimonious and embarrassing situations. She also dwelt on the implications on the use of the words “this” and “that” and said that one could not be substituted for the other.

While the word “this” was supposed to be connotative of something very close or very recent, the word “that” connoted things that were distant or from the remote past. Her 50-minute lecture dwelt more on child psychology and human behaviour and factors motivating it rather than the English language.

Then there was an interactive session on promoting diversity through English. The session was conducted by Zill-e-Huma of the Oxford University Press.

It was a highly interesting session whereby the participants were made to walk across the room in two concentric circles to the beat of music.

The moment the music stopped, people in both the circles had to indulge in a conversation. In order to promote harmony in diversity, Zill-e-Huma said, people had to be tolerant of each other and respect their culture and their views.

A lecture on writing was delivered by Dr Christine Ludwig of Australia to wind up the day’s proceedings.