Journal of NELTA

Reﬂections on Online EFL Teaching during COVID-19: A Case Study of Yunnan University in China

Wenjun Wang — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The paper is a case study on a whole-term online English teaching practice of non-English major postgraduates from March to July 2020 at Yunnan University in China. By attempting to probe into the strategies employed in the three phases of pre-teaching, while-teaching, and post-teaching respectively, reflections upon the mega-scale online English teaching for 30 classes of approximately 1200 students are analyzed by qualitative research in the forms of online interviews and class video observation. The research aims to summarize useful strategies and key factors teachers need to attach importance to in technology-assisted English language teaching with mixed applications and approaches to meet an urgent need in practical situations. Th e practice can be an example of the effective “localization” of college English teaching in China. It also shows that effectiveness-oriented online teaching can be feasible and useful in shaping and enriching the new normal of foreign language teaching in post COVID-19 era.

Education during Pandemic: Perspectives of Secondary School English Teachers from Malaysia, Nepal, and Bangladesh

Motikala Subba Dewan, Ahmed Bashir, David Tchaikovsky Teh Boon Ern — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most affected sectors during the COVID-19 pandemic was education. Abrupt and sudden changes in teaching and learning practices that teachers and students experienced were unprecedented, and the effect is still felt today. Hence, the study sought to identify the challenges secondary English language teachers in Bangladesh, Malaysia and Nepal faced during the pandemic. Adopting a Comparative Case Study (CCS) research model, this was a transnational effort to explore the experiences of a cross-border ELT professional community teaching under various restrictions and limitations imposed by the governments in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Five key challenges emerged during the findings, namely: (i) teaching and learning dificulties, (ii) unreliable and invalid assessments, (iii) infrastructural hurdles in a home learning environment, (iv) student displacement, and (v) compromised teacher wellbeing. In retrospect, there was a cause for optimism as teachers acquired crucial survival skills, yet most challenges remain valid to this day. So various stakeholders must remain vigilant and devise robust measures in anticipation of future events of this kind and scale.

Coping Strategies of University EFL Teachers for Online Instruction during COVID-19 in Nepal

Prakash Rai — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This paper aims at exploring the perceptions, and practices of University EFL teachers in Nepal, particularly the challenges found and strategies adopted to deal with teaching English through online instruction during the pandemic. The in-depth unstructured interview as a research tool under narrative inquiry has been employed to collect the data while the concept of thematic analysis by Riessman has been exploited to analyze and interpret the collected data. The research ﬁnding reveals that despite technological inefﬁciency, social barriers, and psychological fear teachers underwent through the initial phase, the subsequent online classes with some of the coping strategies such as self-initiation, self-discovery, and cooperative approach have been found profoundly effective and productive both for EFL teachers and students. It also is found that online classes truly materialized the theoretical idea-ELT with ICT into the application to make English language teaching proceed ahead with IT. Such classes in EF during the pandemic lockdown forcefully shifted the paradigm of teaching from chalk-and-talk instructor-centered to a digtal interactive learner-centered.

English Language Teachers’ Experience of Virtual Class during COVID-19 Lockdown in Bhojpur: A Narrative Inquiry

Uttam Sing Rai — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This research aimed at exploring English teachers’ experience of virtual class in the time of COVID-19 lockdown period in Bhojpur, Nepal. Using narrative inquiry as methodological lens, I collected four secondary level English language teachers’ stories during the ﬁrst lockdown phase. In-depth interview was conducted to enable the participants to reveal their individual experiences of virtual teaching. The ﬁ ndings revealed negative experiences such as technology related anxiety and mental stress being the absent of basic mastery of ICT in English teachers. The narrations further showed unstable electricity and low speed internet issue, low rate of students’ absence, unavailability of ICT devices as the obstacles fronted by English teachers in the district. The result also displayed positive experiences such as the increase of knowledge and skills in ICT use, and students’ autonomous and mobile learning.

Mentoring Teachers during Covid-19: A Collaborative Organizational Approach

Krishna Kumari Upadhayaya — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Mentoring is an essential part of teacher development. It is generally acknowledged that a master talent in mentoring is the ability to make resources available to a novice protégé to help them educate successfully. This study illustrates how mentorship technique aided in boosting teacher motivation for online instruction during COVID-19. According to the research, learning is successful when there are close relationships between mentors and mentees, opportunities for growth, and a supportive atmosphere. The investigation took place in a Nepalese school in Kathmandu. Ten English Language (EL) instructors from Nursery - 10 participated in the study. They were mentored by the head of the English Department and a computer assistant for two months. The Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK) model of mentoring was used, which stood on connectivism philosophy. The study employed a narrative methodology. Semi-structured interview and thematic analysis techniques were used to produce and analyse data. Standing on their stories, the teachers were familiarized with the concept of Web-Enhanced Language Learning (WELL), Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL), and Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL). Finally, teachers produced technology enhanced lesson plans fusing the content with technology for the new pedagogy. To assess the results of mentoring during the pre-phase, while-phase, and post-phase, in-depth interviews were carried out. The ﬁndings highlight the difﬁculties mentees faced: a lack of conﬁdence or a sense of inferiority in online teaching environment, as well as how self-sufﬁciency was restored after mentoring. According to the study, effective mentorship can still take place in challenging educational circumstances.

World Englishes, Monolingual Bias, and Standardized Tests in a Multilingual World: Ideologies, Practices, and the Missing Link

Laxmi Prasad Ojha — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As English continues to spread as an international lingua franca, there is a growing diversity in its use around the world. As a result, there are calls for embracing the diversity in the teaching, learning and assessment of the language. At the same time, there is a growing criticism against the widely taken language tests such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and The International English Language Testing System (IELTS) for being guided by the pervasive ideology of monolingual native speakerism and devaluing the multilingual speakers and the multiple varieties of Englishers. Against this backdrop, this conceptual paper focuses on the inﬂuence of the World Englishes movement on these so-called standardized tests and critically examines how the existing assessment practices fail to represent the multilingual repertoires and actual language practices of the diverse range of test-takers around the world. Based on the critical analysis of relevant literature on World Englishes, the paper highlights the progress, challenges and possibilities for incorporation of more diverse models of language tests in a translingual world that we live in today.

Nepali English or Other Varieties of English: Perspectives from English Language Teachers in Nepal

Shankar Dewan — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This qualitative content analysis article aims at exploring the perspectives of English language teachers on Nepali English (NE). I purposively selected six college level English language teachers from Sunsari and Morang districts and collected the required data through a semi-structured interview. The study reveals that NE has emerged in Nepal as a result of mother tongue inﬂuence, nativization of English to local contexts, and exposure from the non-native teachers during the second language acquisition process, and it is practically more appropriate than other varieties of English in Nepal. All the research participants favour NE as it is more intelligible and easier to teach and learn than the other varieties of English, promotes Nepali identity, boosts conﬁdence, reduces anxiety, and helps to resist the hegemony of British English (BE) or American English (AE). They, however, believe that more research and discourse on NE, its codiﬁ cation and standardization, and power (political, economic, and ideological) are necessary for bringing NE into concrete form. These perspectives from the English language teachers on NE pave the ground for appropriating English language policies, English language curriculum, textbooks, and pedagogy in Nepal, and rethinking the traditional treatment of errors.

Development of ELT in Nepal: An Overview

Bishnu Kumar Khadka — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

English language teaching (ELT) journey in Nepal needs to be explored from its historical perspective as there is only few literature available in this area. In this respect, there is a need of analysing historical development of ELT from various dimensions in chronological order. Therefore, this paper aims at presenting an overview of the development in terms of the policies and practices of ELT reviewing and analysing the available literature collected from different sources. After analysing the data, the research claims that English language teaching has been an integral part of education system in Nepal from nursery to tertiary level as a subject and/or medium of instruction throughout the history. Furthermore, the trends of development of ELT in Nepal seem to continue both in its quantity and quality in future due to the increasing use of English in multiple sectors.

EL Teachers’ Induction Phase in Bangladesh: Practices, Challenges, and Expectations

Md. Abdur Rouf — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This study aimed to explore the English language (EL) teachers’ induction phase in Bangladesh, focusing on the usual practices, challenges they face, and their expectations. Teachers’ induction phase is immensely signiﬁcant as they make a transition to the teaching profession. Following the qualitative phenomenological approach, qualitative data were collected from six (6) EL teachers working at the primary, secondary, and higher secondary levels across Bangladesh through interviews. The collected data were analysed using the thematic analysis framework as advocated by Braun and Clarke (2006). The key ﬁndings included a three-segment teacher recruitment mechanism, absence of pre-service teacher preparation and adequate initial training, varied initial experiences of teachers, no mentoring and observation, limited collaboration, and inadequate opportunity for professional development. Moreover, the ﬁndings also revealed that many such teachers are confused regarding their career because of discrepancies between pre-service perceptions and in-service actualities, lack of required support and resources for novice teachers, the signiﬁcance of teachers’ proactive role in induction, and their confusion about career planing.

Fundamentals of Academic Writing: A Literature Review

Padam Chauhan — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In order to write for academic purposes, all novice ESL and EFL writers must be well-informed about the fundamentals of academic writing (AW) in English. Developing academic writing skills for all students is crucial because they must produce good writing skills to meet the standards of college and university course writing assignments. The typical college and university writing assignments include descriptive writing, analytical writing, persuasive writing, critical writing, and inquiry writing. In the meantime, it is also crucial for them to understand that writing is a recursive process involving various stages, such as generating ideas, outlining, planning, drafting, revising, editing, and sharing. During the writing process, the writers should not only consider the elements of AW, comprising content, organization, purpose and audience, critical thinking, word choice, grammar, and mechanics, but also its basic conventions, including objectivity, formality or style, citation style, simplicity, clarity and conciseness, and genre awareness. Against this background, the primary purpose of this paper is to review the fundamentals of academic writing. The paper ﬁ rst deﬁnes AW as an art, science, and craft. It then brieﬂy discusses the main types of writing students must produce as a part of their college and university course assignments. Finally, the paper highlights some key features of research-based writing tasks generally assigned to graduate students, such as reading responses or reaction papers, reﬂection papers, research papers, and theses and dissertations.

Demystifying Writing: Strategies for Developing Better Writing

Jagadish Paudel — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Students are often afraid of writing tasks, regardless of whether they are writing in their own native language or are second language writers. I share examples of my own writing experiences and struggles, and then I argue how writing can be demystiﬁ ed, offering some strategies towards advancing one’s writing skills: understanding writing, doing free writing, identifying writing weaknesses, practicing enormously, visualizing purpose and audience, revising writing, articulating writer’s own voice, obtaining feedback, reﬂecting on own writing, and embracing mimesis approach. I discuss the strategies drawing on ideas from renowned writing theorists, including Elbow (1998), Harris (2006), Vilardi and Chang (2009), and Adler-Kassner and Wardle (2016), etc. This paper is particularly relevant to early career ELT teachers to understand and demystify the student writing process; however, it might also be helpful for any academic level of students to advance their writing.

ELT in the Age of Artiﬁcial Intelligence (AI): Working with Machines

Janpha Thadphoothon — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Since 2016, the development of artiﬁcial intelligence (AI) has been strong and pervasive, including its roles in business and education. In ELT, in particular, several machine learning models have been implemented such as speech recognition, grammar correction, chatbots, and translation. ELT is in the middle of a rapid and disruptive change and the magnitude of which is paramount that we have never witnessed before. Under this situation, ELT practitioners may have to acquire additional skills and competencies so as to be relevant and thrive in this rapid change and move the ﬁeld forward to the next level. In this paper, the researcher proposes ELT 3.0, a new vision where working with the machines needs to be incorporated into the existing roles of the ELT teachers.

Editorial

Ram Ashish Giri — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Practical issues for conducting qualitative research

Pushpa Priya — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000