ENGLISH—IT TAKES TIME

Background of the School

I work as an English teacher in the Panchayat Union Middle School, Thenpalani. Most of my students hail from a disadvantaged social and economic background. Not only do they have to struggle to attain education, but they also have to struggle to acquire food. It, thus, does not come as a surprise that they have very minimal exposure to the English language.

Why is English difficult for learners?

The demand for English language is quite high in our country. But, most of our students face great difficulties in comprehending and communicating in the language. Acquiring even the knowledge of English alphabets seems to be a big challenge for them. The learners often find English language to be a a barrier to their learning, since they view the language as something alien. It is often found that the basic foundation of the knowledge of this language is not laid down properly. As a result, when the learner tries to acquire the language skills, they find it quite difficult.

The process I adopted to improve my students’ English skills

Building a Word Tree

In this activity, each student is made to write one word a day and tie that word on the branches of a tree. The students are made to keep a record of the words that they use. The students are made to carry a piece of paper containing five new words in their pocket. It has been seen that, at the end of the day, the students are able to utter all the words as a result of this exercise.

Using Smart Classroom

I enriched my classroom with technology to make my classroom more vibrant—the “smart classroom” was introduced to my students. I made use of a software named IVONA to make my teaching effective. This software converts images into texts, and this helps students to read along the texts with the computer. First, I scanned the textbooks and saved the content in the JPEG format. The scanned JPEG is converted into a text with the help of a converter that is downloaded from the internet. The converted text is then copied and pasted in the IVONA software, which, in turn, reads out the text that is inputted. We can also convert these texts into the MP3 format and carry them anywhere we want. This digital usage of texts stimulated the interest of the students while learning English. Some other applications that makes students read English with more interest was also used in the classroom. They are listed below.

Multimedia classroom: Videos and audios that were related to the lessons were shown to the students.

Smart Apps in the classroom: A few apps that help students to learn English in an easy way was made use of to teach the students.

Changes in my classroom

The students were exposed to the language with the usage of proper accents and tones. Multimedia helps students visualize their thoughts and ideas. Learning by doing helps them to refine their articulation of the words in the language. The rural children were quite eager to make use of technology and reap its benefits. The usage of these techniques makes it possible to read continuously without any breaks—when a text is played in the audio mode, the students listen to it and try to comprehend it. The students say that this method of learning is quite interesting for them as it keeps them engaged throughout the duration of their language class.

Way forward

Nowadays, multimedia is spreading its reach in all fields; one such field would be the education sector. I chose to teach my students using this tool in order to make them explore the various means that are available for learning. In the future, I plan to apply the same methodology to teach the students of all other grades with the hope of nourishing the minds of the young learners. This is only my first step towards achieving this goal, and I wish to execute it at a wider range. 

Author: S. Joseph, Panchayat Union Middle School, Thenpalani, Theni