Appendix 3: Feedback to Heads of Schools
Dear friends, Many thanks for agreeing to be part of this small research project to see how the teaching of English grammar in class 8 can be improved. So far I have been allowed to visit and observe the classes. I have had meetings with the teachers and got written suggestions. I have given tests to the students again to discover how well they know grammar. Because of all these observations, tests and conversations, I find the following points. There was no clear consensus among the teachers on how to teach grammar. There was no agreement on the use of Hindi in the English class. In two schools, there was little use of Hindi and maximum use of English. In two schools, there was much more use of Hindi than English. Especially with regard to grammatical structures, there was little reference to the textbook when going through a lesson/story in the textbook. To a certain extent, learning new words was the only connection with the text being taught. Going through the written tests given to the students of the four schools, it was found that the main grammar mistakes made were: use of articles, tense, singular/plural, word order. Also some mistakes seem to have come from translating directly from Hindi to English e.g. ‘The school are many classrooms’ instead of: ‘The school has many classrooms’. On the basis of what has been done so far, I propose the following measures as part of the research to see if these will improve the teaching of grammar: Much more use of English by all the students in every class by pair work/group work. Make sure that all instructions are given in English. More flexibility in the use of the textbook. As this is part of a research project and as there is no academic council final exam in class 8, there is no need to finish all the chapters in the textbook. Chapters should be chosen that are according to the standard of the students. Moreover in every lesson of the textbook some grammatical structure should be noted and practised. Regarding common mistakes, it may be best to concentrate on the main tenses: simple present, present continuous, simple past, past continuous, simple future. I wish to give another short test concerned with tense, article and word order. Many thanks Robert Slattery, 13.09.2014.
Issue 4: Understanding learners – exploring and applying theories of learning
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