Dr. Sanjay Arora, President, English Language Teachers' Association of India, India

Introduction

The English Language Teachers’ Association of India (ELTAI), founded by the late Padmashree S. Natarajan in 1969, is the oldest and largest not-for-profit professional association of teachers of English in India with about 4,000 members and over 60 chapters across the country (www.eltai.in). In this report, we bring to you some of the recent initiatives of the Association in brief and also indicate the future directions for our growth.

Weekly Webinars

In alignment with its Vision, ELTAI has been providing a platform for teachers to meet periodically and disseminate information in the field of ELT. The pandemic brought severe restrictions in achieving these objectives in physical terms. Hence, ELTAI launched a series of weekly webinars on 3rd May 2020. The webinars are held on four Sundays between 4.30 and 5.30 pm (IST), each webinar having a specific focus. Resource persons are drawn from within and outside the membership of ELTAI, including some from overseas.

The first Sunday webinar of every month primarily targets school teachers, focusing on classroom techniques and teaching-learning materials, and helping teachers in updating their knowledge and skills. The second focuses on teachers teaching at the tertiary level, with theoretical inputs and dealing with recent developments in teaching, the use of ICT, skills development, research design, and other related areas. The third addresses life skills for students across disciplines (both secondary and tertiary level), while the fourth is used to discuss topics related to literary studies, the target audience being teachers and research scholars from colleges and universities.

To date, we have had 75 webinars with an average attendance of about 400 participants. In these interactive sessions, resource persons respond to questions from the attendees. The encouragement from the resource persons and the sustained positive feedback from the attendees have given us the impetus to continue the series. Visit http://eltai.in/webinars-2/ for more details.

Teachers’ Day Celebration 2020

In India, Teachers’ Day is celebrated on 5th September every year to commemorate the birthday of Dr. S. Radhakrishnan – a teacher par excellence – and the first Vice President and the second President of Independent India. ELTAI organized a virtual Teachers’ Day Celebration by hosting inspiring talks by motivational speakers and conducting a medley of contests for three days, between September 3-5, 2020.

Through this three-day event, ELTAI aimed at (a) enabling students across the country to participate actively in various competitions that require knowledge of English and the skills to use this knowledge to communicate their ideas, as well as their critical and creative thinking in a variety of formats, and (b) enabling teachers at all levels of education to showcase their knowledge and skills for enhancing their students’ learning. There were ten online contests, targeting three groups of participants:

• School students: (1) Memes, (2) Doodles & Mini-sagas, and (3) Reflections on a Book.
• College students: (4) Twitterature, (5) E-Posters, (6) Quiz, and (7) Poetry Slam.
• Teachers: (8) Blogging, (9) PowerPoint Presentations, and (10) Podcasts.

The winners and the runners-up received cash prizes of Rs. 2,000 and Rs. 1,000 each respectively, and all the participants a certificate of appreciation for their efforts.

Reading Movement and Reading Clubs

It is a matter of grave concern that the ‘visual’ generation of today has strayed away from ‘the culture of reading’ – a skill recognised as the mother of all skills. Even when they happen to read, they seem to be mostly flipping through non-serious texts. If the reading habit is not developed during their school/college days, the possibility of cultivating it ever in one’s lifetime is remote. ELTAI launched the Reading Movement through Reading Clubs, which have the following objectives:

• To create a love for reading in students and enable them to become better, lifelong readers;
• To enable them to reflect on and discuss what they read;
• To familiarise them with different text types (genres) and enable them to engage in appropriate reading strategies; and
• To employ both synchronous (both virtual and physical meetings) and asynchronous modes – Web tools, such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Blogs, Reading Logs, MOOCs (audios, videos, quotes, blurbs, reviews, and so on) to sustain their interest.

Any institution which is eager to start a reading club signs an MOU with ELTAI and starts a reading club. The Reading Club, to a large extent, is learner-driven and learner-managed, under the guidance of faculty members as mentors. The learners meet regularly, twice a week, to discuss a variety of books and other materials they have read, including multimedia texts of different genres. Visit http://eltai.in/reading-clubs/ for further details.

The ELTAI Café: Podcasts for English Teachers

As part of the special initiatives by some of the chapters of ELTAI, the South Chennai Chapter has proposed to launch ‘The ELTAI Café’, a series of fortnightly podcasts, as part of its professional development activities. With the role of the English teacher changing constantly, there is so much to learn, explore, and share. The podcasts aim at enabling teachers from schools, colleges, and universities to explore and investigate ideas about teaching English in Indian classrooms by creating opportunities for teachers to learn and grow. Based on the new-age trend that listening is the new reading, the podcasts, which will include teacher narratives, interviews, book discussions, teaching activities, research practices, expert talks, panel discussions, students’ corner, teaching resources, and tech tips, can be an extremely helpful resource for teachers across the country. ELTAI Café will soon be available on Spotify, Stitcher, and other social media spaces, and will provide the resources free.

ELTAI Vizag Blog

Another newly formed chapter of ELTAI, the Visakhapatnam Chapter, has recently started a blog, ‘ELTAI VIZAG’, as part of its activities for its members, English teachers, and learners. The blog provides a platform for sharing information regarding activities organised by the Chapter as well as about workshops and conferences organised by national and international bodies. Through this blog, the Chapter aims to allow its members to express their views on different aspects of teaching English language and literature and encourages them to share their teaching experiences and practices, use of technology to support student learning, and teachers’ self-development. The blog is also expected to be an inspiration for the members to start their blogs for better expression and exchange of information.

The Tasks Ahead for ELTAI

English, English everywhere but elusive to most, especially in rural India. English arrived on our shores thanks to the East India Company. Now, the signboards along the roads demonstrate its omnipresence; nursery rhymes are heard from every nook and corner; snacks in roadside eateries bear English names; English newspapers and TV channels are available aplenty 24/7; and the Google god doles out everything in English, from ponderous information to trivia. We are immersed in English all the time.

For decades, English has been taught formally as the west dictated, from their grammar-translation method to communicative approaches, but it still eludes the vast majority of young learners and remains only an aspirational language. The same approaches and methods in diverse contexts end in a fiasco. Credible studies have established that only about two percent of Indians have native-like fluency after all these years, which is inversely proportional to the time and resources invested. Thus, we have discovered, rather too late, that transplantations yield only limited success. It has turned out to be nightmarish for too long.

This realisation is important and we have reached a stage where we need to curate our indigenous approaches and practices (cf. TESOL, 2012). Keeping this in view, we have proposed ‘ELT in India: New Needs, New Demands, New Trends’ as the theme of our 15th International and 51st Annual Conference (2021) (http://conference21.eltai.in). ELTAI also plans to embark upon formalising various approaches and good practices for different levels (primary, secondary, and tertiary), catered towards resource-rich and resource-poor contexts (technology-enabled) and for rural and urban contexts.

UNESCO’s 2021 State of the Education Report (SOER) for India ‘No Teacher, No Class’ mentions that there are 1.2 lakh single-teacher schools in the country, of which 89% are in rural areas. The country needs about 11.16 lakh additional teachers to meet the current shortfall. Besides, unqualified teachers, under-qualified teachers, ghost teachers, irregular teachers (they go to their institutions when it is convenient for them), and absentee teachers (those posted in hilly terrains visiting schools once in a while) are challenges the country faces. What adds to this woe is the teachers’ varying levels of commitment to the profession – the 12 million teachers working at different levels bring in different work ethics, which is by and large not conducive to an effective teaching-learning ecosystem. Thus, rural India is seriously affected by these challenges, which have widened the rural-urban chasm and perpetuated the disadvantages of rural learners in learning English effectively.

Against this background, ELTAI, while continuing to provide professional development opportunities for teachers of English, aims to promote the reading movement project in resource-poor contexts, to enable learners not to be too dependent on the facilities provided by the system.

References

TESOL. (2012). A principles-based approach for English language teaching policies and practices: A TESOL White Paper (March 2012).

Bio

Sanjay Arora, Ph.D., is the National President of the English Language Teachers’ Association of India (ELTAI). He has served in the local chapter and the national body in different positions and has been instrumental in the successful conduct of many international conferences and weekly series of webinars ever since the striking of the pandemic. Contact Dr. Arora to share innovative practices, practical classroom teaching tips, hands-on teaching material, which is the USP of ELTAI.