Prithvi Shrestha

The Interactive Oral Assessment (IOA) project: Using Talkback ® for practice and assessment of listening and speaking skills in languages

The Open University has always sought to exploit new technologies to deliver its language modules more effectively. Although students are offered regular tutorials (face-to-face and online) and work through a series of speaking activities on DVD-ROMs, oral practice is a crucial issue in distance learning. In collaboration with Learnosity, we offered a 6-week free pilot module aimed at two groups of students who had just completed French Beginners or level 1 English for Academic Purposes (EAP). We designed activities practising oral competency by using Talkback® (powered by Learnosity). Students accessed them on their mobile, landline, Skype or through an iPhone App. Recordings were instantly available on the Learnosity website to both students and tutors, who could mark and provide feedback. Both groups reported weekly via short online questionnaires recording their experiences. This paper discusses the findings of the project and their implications.

Policy versus ground reality: secondary English language assessment system in Bangladesh

Any policy reform in education is highly effective when it is planned and implemented ‘holistically’ and yet, it is the most challenging way forward. Many countries in Asia have reformed their English language policies and syllabi in the last two decades due to the increasing value of the language worldwide. Motivated by a ‘communicative approach’ to English language teaching, Bangladesh was one of the countries that launched such a reform in the 1990s. However, this reform has been criticised for imposing the changes on teachers without preparing them sufficiently. More importantly, there is limited evidence as to how much the secondary English language assessment system is aligned with the changes introduced in the curriculum. In order to explore this gap, a medium-scale study was conducted in 38 secondary schools in Bangladesh, following a mixed methods approach. The findings highlighted a ‘mismatch’ between the intended English language learning outcomes and current assessment practices, including the resulting challenges faced by the teachers. This paper argues that language education reform is likely to fail if the assessment system is not aligned with the curriculum.

Leveraging Low-Cost Mobile Technologies in Bangladesh: A Case Study of Innovative Practices for Teacher Professional Development and Communicative English Language Teaching

Using mobile technologies, particularly mobile phones, for teacher professional development in developing economies is extremely rare. This article presents a case study of English in Action (EIA) and its use of mobile technologies that moves beyond documenting their functionality as ubiquitous handheld hardware to enhance and extend the reach of teaching and learning. It presents compelling evidence of an effective and innovative professional development intervention that simultaneously improves communicative English language teaching. We argue this large-scale intervention was significant in enhancing teachers’ professional knowledge and presents important implications for using mobile phones in developing countries for teacher professional development and classroom-based English teaching and learning.

English Language Classroom Practices: Bangladeshi Primary School Children's Perceptions.

English language teaching (ELT) has been investigated from various angles including how English language teachers perceive what happens in an ELT classroom. How primary school English language learners perceive their experiences of ELT is rarely reported in the published literature, particularly from developing countries such as Bangladesh. This article reports on a study that examined Bangladeshi primary school learners’ experience of English language classroom practices in which technology-enhanced communicative language teaching activities were promoted through a project called English in Action (EIA). EIA is a large-scale 9-year long international English language development project in Bangladesh, funded by the UK government. A semi-structured group interview was conducted with 600 Grade 3 students from different regions of Bangladesh. The findings showed that the learners found communicative language learning activities such as dialogue and role play more effective than translation and memorizing grammar rules for learning English, although they enjoyed reciting and drills. The results also showed that these learners’ English teachers tended to mix both traditional and communicative approaches in their lessons. The paper critiques EIA and argues that any major language development project needs to consider the local context and learners’ views on language learning for its success.

Construct validity of the Nepalese school leaving english reading test

ABSTRACT There has been a steady interest in investigating the validity of language tests in the last decades. Despite numerous studies on construct validity in language testing, there are not many studies examining the construct validity of a reading test. This paper reports on a study that explored the construct validity of the English reading test in the Nepalese school leaving examination. Eight students were asked to take the test and think-aloud, followed by retrospective interviews. Additionally, seven experts were asked to make judgments regarding the skills tested by the test. The findings provide grounded insights into students’ response behaviors prompted by the reading tasks, and indicate some threats to the construct validity of the test. Additionally, the study reports a low level of agreement among the experts, and a big gap between the skills used by the students and the skills that the experts thought were being examined by the test.

Editorial Vol.19(1-2)

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/nelta.v19i1-2.12669 Journal of NELTA, Vol 19 No. 1-2, December 2014: V-VII

The Potential of Mobile Phones to Transform Teacher Professional Development to Build Sustainable Educational Futures in Bangladesh

Futures thinking is used by governments to consider long-term strategic approaches and develop policies and practices that are potentially resilient to future uncertainty. English in Action (EIA), arguably the world’s largest English language teacher professional development (TPD) project, used futures thinking to author possible, probable and preferable future scenarios to solve the project’s greatest technological challenge: how to deliver audio-visual TPD materials and hundreds of classroom audio resources to 75,000 teachers by 2017. Authoring future scenarios and engaging in possibility thinking (PT) provided us with a taxonomy of question-posing and question-responding that assisted the project team in being creative. This process informed the successful pilot testing of a mobile phone-based technology kit to deliver TPD resources within an open distance learning (ODL) platform. Taking the risk and having the foresight to trial mobile phones in remote rural areas with teachers and students led to unforeseen innovation. As a result EIA is currently using a mobile phone-based technology kit with 12,500 teachers to improve the English language proficiency of 700,000 students. As the project scales up in its third and final phase, we are using the new technology kit—known as the ‘trainer in your pocket’—to foster a ‘quiet revolution’ in the provision of teacher professional development at scale to an additional 67,500 teachers and 10 million students.