Anxiety: Devoted to English Teachers.

Author : Mr. Dhaniram rai

I have an anxiety that always pokes me. The anxiety has been serious, which does not give me to stay in peace. My anxiety is, “why most of the community school students are weak in English language. Why has this been happening?” Being an English teacher for 28 years, I think, I have some percentage of responsibility of making students weak in English. I think and question myself whether I am a good English teacher. Certainly not, I am just a learner till today. It is clear that I have not good skills of teaching English.

When I come to this conclusion, I think I have been cheating the students. I have been giving them fraud. I have just having my job without teaching them well. I think I am not a teacher. Instead, I am a cheater, a culprit and a person to be punished.

Though English language, I think, is 50% easier than Khas Nepali language and 80% easier than Sanskrit, our students are weak in English. On the other hand, English has been an important language. It is necessary to find out the cause of the students’ weakness in this language. We, English teachers need to organize meetings time and again. We need to discuss about the cause and solution of the students’ weakness. We, English teachers need to make a plan to minimize their weakness. I have presented some mere personal concepts in the following points that, I hope, may help in improvement of students’ learning English.

1. Firstly, we must determine learning achievement of every class. We need to focus to fulfil the class wise learning achievement. Too weak students in the learning achievement mustn’t be upgraded. The class wise learning achievement may be:

a. In the stage of child development,100% practice should be done in speaking/listening. We, teachers need to call the students in English. We need to sing in English making them dance. We can act when we talk. We should inspire them to talk in English.

b. In class one, 80% speaking/ listening and 20% reading/writing practice should be conducted. We need to call, converse, question them in English and inspire to speak it. We need to start to teach them write English alphabets. In order to teach them write, we should begin to make them write different lines, straight and curve. Before starting writing practice, we should teach them catching pens properly. I often amaze by seeing the different styles of catching pens. Then, we should teach them the starting point and the ending point of alphabets. Most of the students have not the idea of starting point and ending point of alphabets.

In our schools, even the class 10, 11,12 students have not the knowledge of where to start and where to end alphabets when they write. An amazing thing is that even we, teachers do not have this knowledge. Most of the teachers are writing small liter j as J . We don’t care writing small letter j with a dot (.) over it.

c. Class two students also need 80% listening/ speaking practice and only 20% reading/writing practice. We, teachers should focus on making the students write good and legible hand writing. For this, we should give them the concept of capital letters and small letters. We should teach them only the shape of letters do not determine capital or small. There is size of letters, that distinguishes whether capital or small. Then, we should encourage them to write same sized letters. We should teach them to write letters in words close each other. Joined letter also can be taught. Likewise, we should teach them to give sufficient space among words. From the very class, we should encourage them to care the spellings gradually.

d. Class three to five students need 50% listening /speaking and 50% reading/writing practice. We need to encourage the students to talk in English more. With their friends and their English teachers, they should speak in English. Giving their short introduction, describing about their daily routine, describing their home, school, class room, friends, aims etc. may be the topics of speaking. We should teach them the concepts of singular nouns and verbs and plural nouns and verbs, the concepts of articles, prepositions, reflexive pronouns etc. Punctuation marks also should be taught them here in these classes.

e. When the students are in class six and seven, we compulsorily must teach them modal auxiliaries, connectives, phrases and clauses. In these classes, we must teach them the base of English grammar , TENSE. In order to teach tense, we must make them care the verb forms of irregular verbs. They must be perfect in tense and sentence transformations: positive to negative and interrogative and vice versa. Tag questions also should be taught simultaneously. Another important activity neglected in schools is “making sentences.” Using different words in their own sentences is compulsory, useful and important. This activity helps students to create sentences and ultimately, free writing.

f. Students from class eight to ten need advanced learning in speaking and writing. They need to talk about any given topic without any hesitation. We should teach them letter writing, essay writing, condolence writing, story writing, poem writing, report writing, explanation etc. We should teach them advanced grammar from if clauses, causative verbs, voice ( passive active) to speech( direct indirect).

Thou English is not our native language, we must try to learn and teach the native speakers’ pronunciation by hook or by crook. We can consult the phonetic transcriptions from English to English Dictionary. The correct use of different speech organs while pronouncing is necessary to teach them. We must teach them to read caring the different punctuation marks. It helps them to understand the texts they read.