8 December 2008
Yesterday afternoon, I decided to talk to Gagan (I remind you that there is only one day off in Nepal, and it is Saturday, so there is school on Sunday!), another teacher at school, about how English is taught here. I help him at school in the afternoon (in grade 4 and grade 5), and I’m simply horrified to see what happens during the class! Usually Gagan reads a text (although I now do it while I’m here) and children repeat after him. Then he asks one student to read, and again, the children repeat. And that a few times. And that’s it! My goodness! As a result, a few students kind of know how to read (although I’m sure they don’t understand much of what they’re reading) and the others just repeat by ear. Gagan explained me that he’s just starting doing that because he realised that in the past years, his students couldn’t read. He thinks that now, at least the students who are interested can read. But two problems: first, the good students don’t really read. They kind of recognise the common words, but if there is a new word, they’re lost, and I’m sure they don’t make any sense of what they read, because they’re unable to answer the questions that are asked in their book. And it’s very often that they just recognise the beginning (sometimes only the first letter!) and then guess: for exemple, ‘everywhere’ will be read as ‘everybody’ or worse, ‘absolutely’ as ‘Australia’ (no, I’m not kidding!!!). For the students here, words are a succession of letters but not of syllables. So when they see a new word, they will spell all the letters one by one ‘a- b- s-o-l-u-t-e-l-y’ but can not figure out that it gives ‘ab –so –lu –te- ly’. And the same when they copy from the white board. In my class, it’s a steady murmur of letters (not a single student is able to write without spelling aloud each letter!!!), but I’m sure they rarely form words in their minds and so the students have not a clue about the meaning of the sentences that they copy. So I suggested the teacher to teach them syllables. The second problem is that he leaves out the students who are not a priori interested, but one of the goals of school is to make them interested!!! And I’m sure they could get involved if the class was a bit more engaging. But unfortunately, one month is definitely not enough for me to make big changes, although I can notice, for instance, that by teaching teenagers to recognise syllables for a few classes, they’ve already improved their reading significantly.
Well, enough for this morning, I need to go to Jibjibe ... Oh by the way, the number of my students in the morning class is back to 20 ? Apparently, many of them had to work in the fields in the last few days.
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