Centre for Learning Resources

The Context

In India, the medium of instruction in the majority of rural and urban schools is the regional language. English is now introduced as a second or third language at the primary level in almost all these schools. However, even after many years of its compulsory study, vast numbers of high school students are unable to speak, read or write simple English phrases and sentences. Consequently, for most of these students, access to higher education and employment and the entire spectrum of technical knowledge, and the world of computers and the Internet, will also be limited.

The principal cause for their learning deficiencies is that teachers themselves have a very limited knowledge of English, and consequently, little English is spoken in the classroom. Moreover neither their pre-service training, nor the limited opportunities for inservice training, has equipped teachers to teach English as a second language.

Issues / Needs we address

Our goal is to empower socially and economically disadvantaged students studying in mainstream regional medium elementary schools with a basic proficiency in English. This requires addressing the following needs of both teachers and students :

Significantly enhancing the teachers' limited knowledge of the English language.
Providing teachers with practical and effective methods of teaching English to students, whose background and exposure to English is very limited.
Giving opportunities for students to listen to spoken English, and to be able to respond in English, as well as acquire basic reading and writing skills.
Providing instructional and supplementary learning materials in English, which are relevant to the Indian context, and appropriate to the backgrounds and interests of mainstream elementary middle school students.

CLR ACTIVITIES IN TEACHING OF ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

To improve the teaching and learning of English as a second language in our regional medium elementary schools, the CLR has undertaken activities in the following areas :

Interactive Radio Instruction (IRI) - developing and broadcasting interactive radio courses for teaching English to elementary school students.
Improving English Skills of Teachers - developing capacity building programmes for trainers and teachers, including developing of training materials.
Bilingual Learning Materials - designing and publishing bilingual supplementary materials for students.

Interactive Radio Instruction (IRI) - CLR Interactive Radio Course For Teaching Spoken English Skills To Rural And Urban Regional Medium Government Schools

To improve the spoken English skills of large numbers of students, the CLR has developed two bilingual interactive radio courses :

“Aamhi Ingraji Shikto / We Learn English” for Marathi speaking listeners.
“Aao Angrezi Sikhe / We Learn English” for Hindi speaking listeners.

For Classes 5, 6 and 7 or Classes 4, 5 and 6, a total of 245 radio lessons have been developed - approximately 80 radio lessons, each of 15-minutes duration, for each class. Using All India Radio (AIR) facilities, this bilingual and interactive radio course has been broadcast to lakhs of students in Maharashtra, and 5 Northern Indian states.

Why Radio

Given the erratic electric supply in urban and rural India, radio is the cheapest, most widely available and reliable distance education technology, since it can also function on batteries.

The Instructional Process

We are using an innovative, interactive pedagogy known as Interactive Radio Instruction, which is being used for the first time in India. This allows listeners to not only hear English being spoken, but gives them opportunities during the radio lesson itself to speak in English.
This pedagogy we are using, known as Interactive Radio Instruction, has been very successfully used to teach English, other school subjects and educational programmes for adults in a number of other countries.
Our radio lessons contain a variety of child-friendly formats - drama, songs, language games, in both Marathi-English and Hindi-English, which hold the interest of upper primary school children.
Along with the focus on teaching spoken English, our radio lessons promote appropriate attitudes related to democracy, secularism, gender, health, small family norm, etc.

For more details on the pedagogy and the content of our radio lessons, click here.

The Pune District Action Research Radio Project For Teaching Spoken English Skills, 2001-2004

Between 2001-2004, the first three years of the project for Classes 5, 6 and 7 were completed. Approximately 80 radio lessons, each of 15-minutes duration, were broadcast for each class. Lessons were broadcast thrice a week during the school academic year, using All India Radio (AIR) facilities. All urban and rural schools in Pune District were covered by these broadcasts.

Impact on spoken English skills of students

We tested the spoken English skills of large numbers of students from Classes 5, 6, 7 and 9 randomly selected from both urban and rural government schools in Pune District. The testing indicated that :

Rural and urban students in Class 5, who had just begun to learn English and listened to the 90 radio lessons scheduled for Class 5, spoke far more English than Class 7 students from the same schools, who had not been exposed to the radio programme.
After 3 years of radio lessons, rural students in Class 7 not only spoke far more English, but were also able to write better than rural Class 9 students not exposed to the radio programme.
Teachers were extremely appreciative that the radio lessons helped them to teach spoken English, and that the lessons fulfilled a real need to improve the confidence and abilities of their students to speak English.

For more details on the content, monitoring and impact of the radio programme, click here

Expanding The Radio Course To Delhi, Jharkhand, Mumbai, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh, 2002-

Based on the impact of the first year of the radio course in Pune District, the Municipal Corporations of Mumbai and Delhi entered into a collaboration with the CLR to implement the course in their schools.

For the Northern States, we scripted and produced a Hindi-English version of the original Marathi-English radio course. These lessons were being broadcast for Classes 4, 5 and 6.

Between 2002-2006, this course for spoken English was broadcast in Delhi, various districts of Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand. In these states, the course was sometimes restricted to Classes 4 and 5 of the elementary schools.

In 2008-09, the first year of the project was implemented in Lucknow district by District Institute of Education and Training (DIET), Lucknow.

Both the Marathi and Hindi versions of this radio course for teaching spoken English can be made available for broadcast. For more details, email us at clr@vsnl.com

The Radio Audience

All the radio lessons were not only listened to by elementary school students, but by many others, young and old, from every walk of life.

The AIR Listenership Survey in 2002 estimated that about 200,000 urban and rural people, outside the formal school system, were listening to the CLR radio lessons in Pune District alone, making it one of the most popular radio programmes in Pune District.

We estimate that many more school students have benefitted from the broadcasts in Pune District and the various states.

Interactive Radio Instruction (IRI) - 3-year Interactive Radio Pilot Project For Teaching Integrated English Skills - Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing - To Students In Classes 5, 6 And 7 In Pune District (2005-2008)

During the implementation of the spoken English radio course, teachers had expressed an interest in improving reading and writing skills in English.

In July 2005, we launched an integrated course of 150 radio lessons of 15-minutes duration, - 60 radio lessons for teaching reading and writing, and 90 lessons for spoken English. This course was broadcast 5 days during the week on Vividh Bharati, Pune, from Monday to Friday at 11:00 to 11:15 a.m.

In all 3 years of the radio course, the reading and writing broadcasts were supported by a reader-cum-activity book that was provided to students studying in Std. 5, 6 and 7 in Marathi medium government schools in Pune District.

Impact on English skills of students

Testing of large numbers of randomly selected students indicated that the CLR radio course had a statistically significant impact on all four skills of students - listening, speaking, reading and writing.

This testing corroborated the conclusions drawn from our intensive classroom monitoring, which indicated that children were both enjoying and benefitting from the radio lessons.

For more details on the content, monitoring and impact of the radio programme, click here

Improving English Skills of Teachers - Developing an English course, “Enhance Your English” for Teachers to Improve their Knowledge of English

Rationale

Given the increasing importance of English, improving the standards of English has been recognized by many as a key area of reform in the qualitative improvement of regional medium schools in India. In this connection, it is generally acknowledged that after many years of studying English in schools, many students complete high school with extremely limited English skills. This is primarily due to the fact that the vast majority of teachers themselves have a very limited command of English, highlighted in this excerpt from the 2007 Position Paper of the Consortium For English Language Teaching In India:

The biggest constraint is the low English proficiency of teachers at the primary stage…. At the primary stage, especially in rural areas, primary school teachers cannot speak English, even if they can read it with hesitation. This is a bigger problem in North and Eastern India. The situation is slightly better in the southern states. Lacking in the ability to speak good English, teachers all over the country prefer to get children to copy alphabets and words from the textbook and start reading instruction from Class 1 itself.

It is pertinent to note that in the 2005 National Curriculum Framework, a principal recommendation of the Focus Group on Teaching of English was that, “All teachers who teach should have basic proficiency in English”.

Course Objectives

The CLR course "Enhance Your English" has been developed keeping in mind that teachers in these schools often have an extensive passive knowledge of English, but find it difficult to transact English lessons effectively because they do not speak the language with confidence, being neither native English speakers, nor having much opportunity to use English in their daily lives. Specifically, this course has been designed to help teachers to :

Improve their listening and speaking skills in English in both familiar and unfamiliar situations.
Increase their reading comprehension and basic writing skills
Enhance their confidence to speak in English, both within and outside the classroom.

Course Content

"Enhance Your English" consists of 23 theme-based modules and a final proficiency test. It includes an instructor’s manual, a learner’s workbook, a grammar activity book, audio-visual materials and materials for the formative and summative evaluation of the progress of learners. An interactive, learner-centred and bilingual pedagogy has been adopted in order to make this course easy to comprehend and to be effective. It is planned to be offered as an intensive 24-day course (1 month duration, 6 days a week).

The themes chosen are such that they can be easily related to by the target learners, enabling these learners to contribute to the discussions (whether in L1 or English) that accompany most of the activities. The themes have also been chosen keeping in mind that the course aims at teaching functional English – that is, broadly context-specific language that the learners will actually hear and speak in the course of their daily lives.

"Enhance Your English" has been developed over a number of years of interaction with students and teachers in regional medium schools, as well as research and consultation with experts.This course is a part of the CLRs on-going effort to improve the teaching and learning of English in regional medium schools.

Although the course has been developed primarily for teachers, it has been structured in such a way that other adult learners, who also want to achieve greater proficiency in spoken English, can use it effectively.

Bilingual Learning Materials - Designing and Publishing Bilingual supplementary Materials for Students

The CLR has developed a range of graded, bilingual reading materials for young children, based on the globally researched understanding that a known language can fruitfully be used to learn a new one.

		My World~My Words A picture word book in full colour, designed for Indian children to learn English and the regional language. This book, with colourful pictures, features about 1000 words based on the world of Indian children, relevant for students in regional medium and English medium schools. Serves as a resource book for parents and teachers. (English - Marathi : Rs.175.00, all other editions : Rs.160.00). Please enquire about substantial price reduction for bulk orders. Presently available in : English-Marathi, English-Hindi, English-Oriya, English-Kannada, English-Malayalam, English-Gujarati, English-Punjabi, English-Tamil, English-Telugu, English - Assamese, English - Bengali, English-Urdu. Other language versions can be commissioned on request.

		Bilingual Story Books When children are learning to read in a new language, they are usually exposed only to sentences or small instructional texts. But being able to read a whole book in a new language is a special kind of thrill. To spark this excitement, the Centre for Learning Resources has developed a range of bilingual story books.

		The Princess Who Never Smiled A charming tale that relates who will make Princess Jayanti smile and how it will happen. (Click on image to preview) (Rs.75.00) Available in English-Marathi, English-Hindi and English-Urdu

		The Lion And The Mouse A traditional tale about the brave mouse who rescues an angry but helpless lion. (Click on image to preview) (Rs.75.00) Available in English-Marathi, English-Hindi and English-Urdu

		Cock-a-doodle-doo! Children find out thorugh this story why the cock crows every morning, just before sunrise. (Click on image to preview) (Rs.75.00) Available in English-Marathi, English-Hindi and English-Urdu

		Chintu’s Cap A Maharashtrian folk tale that recounts how a mouse is afraid of nobody - not even the king. (Click on image to preview) (Rs. 75.00) Available in English-Marathi, English-Hindi, English-Kannada and English-Urdu

		The Little Flute Player The adventures of Ramesh, a talented little flute player, as he travels on a magic mat. (Click on image to preview) (Rs. 75.00) Available in English-Marathi, English-Hindi, English-Kannada and English-Urdu

Bilingual story books in any other languages can be commissioned on request.

		'Chala Vachuya'/Lets Read Series A set of 10 booklets for further supplementary reading at the Class I level. (Rs.150.00) Available in English-Marathi

Other Reading Materials in English

The CLR has developed the Gudbud series of stories in English, and in Hindi and Marathi. The Gudbud series focusses on basic human values that are relevant to the lives of young children.

		Mama Gudbud Takes a Break Children appreciate the needs and desires of a mother as an individual, and the give-and-take that makes for happiness within a family. (Click on image to preview) (Rs.75.00)

		The Gudbuds Get Out of a Mess Children learn about the importance of co-operation within the family, and that a happy family is not one in which each member can only do what he/she wants. (Click on image to preview) (Rs.75.00

		At the Park in Gudbudland Children appreciate individual differences amongst people and experience what it feels like to be left out and to be included. The story helps to inculcate a respect for diversity and reveals the true meaning of friendship. (Click on image to preview) (Rs.75.00)