What is meant by “teaching speaking” is to teach EFL learners to:

• Produce the English speech sounds and sound patterns
• Use word and sentence stress, intonation patterns and the rhythm of the foreign language.
• Select appropriate words and sentences according to the proper social setting, audience, situation and subject matter.
• Organize their thoughts in a meaningful and logical sequence.
• Use language as a means of expressing values and judgments.
• Use the language quickly and confidently with few unnatural pauses, which is called as fluency. (Nunan, 2003)

How to Teach Speaking

Now many linguistics and EFL teachers agree on that students learn to speak in the foreign language by “interacting”. Communicative language teaching and collaborative learning serve best for this aim.  Communicative language teaching is based on real-life situations that require communication. By using this method in EFL classes, students will have the opportunity of communicating with each other in the target language.  In brief, EFL teachers should create a classroom environment where students have real-life communication, authentic activities, and meaningful tasks that promote oral language. This can occur when students collaborate in groups to achieve a goal or to complete a task.

Activities to Promote Speaking

Discussions

After a content-based lesson, a discussion can be held for various reasons. The students may aim to arrive at a conclusion, share ideas about an event, or find solutions in their discussion groups. Before the discussion, it is essential that the purpose of the discussion activity is set by the teacher. In this way, the discussion points are relevant to this purpose, so that students do not spend their time chatting with each other about irrelevant things. For example, students can become involved in agree/disagree discussions. In this type of discussions, the teacher can form groups of students, preferably 4 or 5 in each group, and provide controversial sentences like “people learn best when they read vs. people learn best when they travel”. Then each group works on their topic for a given time period, and presents their opinions to the class. It is essential that the speaking should be equally divided among group members. At the end, the class decides on the winning group who defended the idea in the best way. This activity fosters critical thinking and quick decision making, and students learn how to express and justify themselves in polite ways while disagreeing with the others. For efficient group discussions, it is always better not to form large groups, because quiet students may avoid contributing in large groups. The group members can be either assigned by the teacher or the students may determine it by themselves, but groups should be rearranged in every discussion activity so that students can work with various people and learn to be open to different ideas. Lastly, in class or group discussions, whatever the aim is, the students should always be encouraged to ask questions, paraphrase ideas, express support, check for clarification, and so on.

Role Play

One other way of getting students to speak is role-playing. Students pretend they are in various social contexts and have a variety of social roles. In role-play activities, the teacher gives information to the learners such as who they are and what they think or feel. Thus, the teacher can tell the student that “You are David, you go to the doctor and tell him what happened last night, and…” (Harmer, 1984)

Simulations

Simulations are very similar to role-plays but what makes simulations different than role plays is that they are more elaborate. In simulations, students can bring items to the class to create a realistic environment. For instance, if a student is acting as a singer, she brings a microphone to sing and so on. Role plays and simulations have many advantages. First, since they are entertaining, they motivate the students. Second, as Harmer (1984) suggests, they increase the self-confidence of hesitant students, because in role play and simulation activities, they will have a different role and do not have to speak for themselves, which means they do not have to take the same responsibility.

Information Gap

In this activity, students are supposed to be working in pairs. One student will have the information that other partner does not have and the partners will share their information. Information gap activities serve many purposes such as solving a problem or collecting information.  Also, each partner plays an important role because the task cannot be completed if the partners do not provide the information the others need. These activities are effective because everybody has the opportunity to talk extensively in the target language.

Brainstorming

On a given topic, students can produce ideas in a limited time. Depending on the context, either individual or group brainstorming is effective and learners generate ideas quickly and freely. The good characteristics of brainstorming is that the students are not criticized for their ideas so students will be open to sharing new ideas.

Storytelling

Students can briefly summarize a tale or story they heard from somebody beforehand, or they may create their own stories to tell their classmates. Story telling fosters creative thinking. It also helps students express ideas in the format of beginning, development, and ending, including the characters and setting a story has to have. Students also can tell riddles or jokes. For instance, at the very beginning of each class session, the teacher may call a few students to tell short riddles or jokes as an opening. In this way, not only will the teacher address students’ speaking ability, but also get the attention of the class.

Interviews

Students can conduct interviews on selected topics with various people. It is a good idea that the teacher provides a rubric to students so that they know what type of questions they can ask or what path to follow, but students should prepare their own interview questions. Conducting interviews with people gives students a chance to practice their speaking ability not only in class but also outside and helps them becoming socialized. After interviews, each student can present his or her study to the class. Moreover, students can interview each other and “introduce” his or her partner to the class.

Story Completion

This is a very enjoyable, whole-class, free-speaking activities for which students sit in a circle. For this activity, a teacher starts to tell a story, but after a few sentences he or she stops narrating. Then, each student starts to narrate from the point where the previous one stopped. Each student is supposed to add from four to ten sentences. Students can add new characters, events, descriptions and so on.

Reporting

Before coming to class, students are asked to read a newspaper or magazine and, in class, they report to their friends what they find as the most interesting news. Students can also talk about whether they have experienced anything worth telling their friends in their daily lives before class.

Playing Cards

In this game, students should form groups of four. Each suit will represent a topic. For instance:

• Diamonds: Earning money
• Hearts: Love and relationships
• Spades: An unforgettable memory
• Clubs: Best teacher

Each student in a group will choose a card. Then, each student will write 4-5 questions about that topic to ask the other people in the group. For example:

If the topic “Diamonds: Earning Money” is selected, here are some possible questions:

• Is money important in your life? Why?
• What is the easiest way of earning money?
• What do you think about lottery? Etc.

However, the teacher should state at the very beginning of the activity that students are not allowed to prepare yes-no questions, because by saying yes or no students get little practice in spoken language production.  Rather, students ask open-ended questions to each other so that they reply in complete sentences.

Picture Narrating

This activity is based on several sequential pictures. Students are asked to tell the story taking place in the sequential pictures by paying attention to the criteria provided by the teacher as a rubric. Rubrics can include the vocabulary or structures they need to use while narrating.

Picture Describing

Another way to make use of pictures in a speaking activity is to give students just one picture and having them describe what it is in the picture. For this activity students can form groups and each group is given a different picture. Students discuss the picture with their groups, then a spokesperson for each group describes the picture to the whole class. This activity fosters the creativity and imagination of the learners as well as their public speaking skills.

Find the Difference

For this activity students can work in pairs and each couple is given two different pictures, for example, picture of boys playing football and another picture of girls playing tennis. Students in pairs discuss the similarities and/or differences in the pictures.

Suggestions for Teachers in Teaching Speaking

Here are some suggestions for English language teachers while teaching oral language:

• Provide maximum opportunity to students to speak the target language by providing a rich environment that contains collaborative work, authentic materials and tasks, and shared knowledge.
• Try to involve each student in every speaking activity; for this aim, practice different ways of student participation.
• Reduce teacher speaking time in class while increasing student speaking time. Step back and observe students.
• Indicate positive signs when commenting on a student’s response.
• Ask eliciting questions such as “What do you mean? How did you reach that conclusion?” in order to prompt students to speak more.
• Provide written feedback like “Your presentation was really great. It was a good job. I really appreciated your efforts in preparing the materials and efficient use of your voice…”
• Do not correct students’ pronunciation mistakes very often while they are speaking. Correction should not distract student from his or her speech.
• Involve speaking activities not only in class but also out of class; contact parents and other people who can help.
• Circulate around classroom to ensure that students are on the right track and see whether they need your help while they work in groups or pairs.
• Provide the vocabulary beforehand that students need in speaking activities.
• Diagnose problems faced by students who have difficulty in expressing themselves in the target language and provide more opportunities to practice the spoken language.

Conclusion

Speaking is “the process of building and sharing meaning through the use of verbal and non-verbal symbols, in a variety of contexts” (Chaney, 1998, p. 13). Speaking is a crucial part of foreign language learning and teaching. Despite its importance, for many years, teaching speaking has been undervalued and English language teachers have continued to teach speaking just as a repetition of drills or memorization of dialogues. However, today’s world requires that the goal of teaching speaking should improve students’ communicative skills, because, only in that way, students can express themselves and learn how to follow the social and cultural rules appropriate in each communicative circumstance. In order to teach Foreign language learners how to speak in the best way possible, some speaking activities are provided below, that can be applied to EFL and EFL classroom settings, together with suggestions for teachers who teach oral language.

References

• Celce-Murcia. M. 2001. Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language (3rd ed). USA: Heinle&Heinle.
• Chaney, A.L., and T.L. Burk. 1998. Teaching Oral Communication in Grades K-8. Boston: Allyn&Bacon.
• Baruah, T.C. 1991. The English Teacher’s Handbook. Delhi: Sterling Publishing House.
• Brown, G. and G. Yule. 1983. Teaching the Spoken Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Harmer, J. 1984. The Practice of English Language Teaching. London: Longman.
• McDonough, J. and C. Shaw. 2003. Materials and Methods in ELT: a teacher’s  guide. Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell.
• Nunan, D., 2003. Practical English Language Teaching. NY:McGraw-Hill.
• Staab, C. 1992. Oral language for today’s classroom. Markham, ON: Pippin Publishing.

About the Author:

M. Enamul Hoque has been an English language teacher for over 15 years in different Government institutes of Bangladesh. He is an Instructor of ELT in the Education and Training Wing, Ministry of Environment and Forest. He has MA in English from Dhaka University, and M.Phil in Applied Linguistics and ELT from the Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. His Ph.D is in EFL Teaching and Testing. He has published widely on a variety of topics and is particularly interested in English language teaching and applied linguistics

Like many issues in English Language Teaching, there is, of course, no definite answer on this issue. You can make a convincing list of points in favour of a particular technique and one week later make an equally convincing list of points against. Perhaps it is one of the strong points of our profession that we are able constantly to question and evaluate in order to establish better practice.

At the one extreme, learners may well respond extremely negatively to being asked on the first morning of their course “Well, what do you want to do?”

As with many techniques and approaches in ELT, when taken to extremes the negotiated syllabus can arouse strong feelings. At the one extreme, learners may well respond extremely negatively to being asked on the first morning of their course “Well, what do you want to do?” The impression that question can give, particularly before a comfortable rapport has been established within the group, is that the teacher is unprepared and unprofessional. It is also worth remembering that many learners have no experience whatsoever in having a say in the content of their course. Their educational background has simply not provided for such an eventuality.

At the other extreme, the teacher who ploughs on regardless through reams of material that may be irrelevant to the needs and wishes of the learners is soon likely to encounter similar negative reactions. As usual in our profession, the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. By being aware of the possible reaction of some learners to the wholesale application of the negotiated syllabus and by the reaction of others to the imposition of an external syllabus, a successful teacher should generally be able to keep most of the learners happy most of the time – an essential component of any course.

Those teachers who are required for whatever reason to follow a particular coursebook or course programme will probably find it productive to get regular feedback from their learners on what they find interesting and useful in the coursebook and what they find less important to their needs. Teachers who base their courses on more eclectic sources (teachers on short intensive courses, for example) may benefit from the use of a “menu” approach, offering their learners a list of possible areas to cover and inviting them to amend it and add to it. So we end up with the typical ELT balancing act but it just might be preferable to rejecting the approach outright or applying it wholesale without regard to the feelings of the learners.

If you teach EMI (English as a Medium of Instruction), LAC (Language Across the Curriculum), CBI (Content-based Instruction) or CBLT (Content-based Language Teaching; if you work in Bilingual Education; if you’re a subject teacher working through the medium of a foreign language, or a language teacher bringing in content into your English lesson, you work within the area of Content and Language Integrated Learning.

The acronym itself is a good one, because it is largely self-explanatory. Invented back in the mid-1990s, it seems to be passing the test of time. CLIL itself has been around for a long time – and was put into practice by ancient Roman upper-middle classes, who preferred to have their children educated in Greek. However, should you want to find definitions of modern CLIL, it is relatively easy to find them. Just Google the title of this article, on a restricted search, and you’ll find 180 sites to choose from, all of which attempt to answer your question.

However, the problem with definitions, particularly when it comes to educational approaches, is that they tend to remain rather abstract. Let’s take a look at some of the most common definitions on the web. In each definition, there is a part underlined I think is particularly useful. Each of those underlined sections will represent a distinct but significant aspect of CLIL that needs highlighting, at least at this stage of the discussion.

Five basic definitions of CLIL

1. CLIL is a member of the curriculum club.

Here’s the simplest of all, from the European Commission itself:

“Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), in which pupils learn a subject through the medium of a foreign language…”

On this purely descriptive level, this quotation endorses CLIL as a construct – as a member of the curricular club. It seems uncontroversial because we do not know to what extent or to what level pupils ‘learn a subject’ through the foreign language, and we are left unaware of any reasons for doing CLIL.

2. CLIL has a dual focus.

The next one offers a more detailed description:

“CLIL refers to situations where subjects, or parts of subjects, are taught through a foreign language with dual-focused aims, namely the learning of content, and the simultaneous learning of a foreign language”.

(Marsh, D. 2002. Content and Language Integrated Learning: The European Dimension – Actions, Trends and Foresight Potential).

This quote is useful because it highlights some of the educational intention inherent to the CLIL paradigm. Through CLIL-type practice, one learns [subject] content whilst at the same time learning a foreign language. What could be better than this? The ‘dual-focused’ objective would seem to be implying that CLIL kills two birds with one stone.

3. CLIL buys us time.

Indeed, if we return to the European Commission’s quotation, and read a little further, we encounter the following phrase:

“It [CLIL] provides exposure to the language without requiring extra time in the curriculum”.

This would seem a good reason as any to promote an approach with a twin set of objectives. One of these objectives is clearly educational (to learn subject content and a foreign language) and the other is administrative. Since educational and administrative needs often fight for space, this seems a good way to promote peace between them. We were told in the European Council Resolution in 1995 that,

“…all EU citizens, by the time they leave compulsory schooling, should be able to speak two languages other than the mother tongue”.

Curricula attempting to achieve this aim have been getting more and more desperate in their attempts to find timetabling space. What is the possible answer to this problem? Why CLIL, of course. Instead of studying Geography in the majority language, do it in a foreign language. As long as it works, the pupils learn the same subject concepts and skills, but increase contact time with the foreign language – crucial consideration in the improvement of attainment levels.

4.  CLIL causes change – and you don’t need to be a genius to benefit from it.

So far so good. Now let’s look at a different type of observation on CLIL. David Graddol wrote that CLIL is:

“…an approach to bilingual education in which both curriculum content (such as science or geography) and English are taught together. It differs from simple English-medium education in that the learner is not necessarily expected to have the English proficiency required to cope with the subject before beginning study”.

(Graddol D. English Next, British Council Publications, 2006)

This suggests that CLIL is far from the innocent creature that we read about in the first quotation from the European Commission. Graddol suggests that a powerful element of CLIL is its role in the improvement of language skills, and that pupils do not necessarily need a particularly high level of foreign language attainment to do their ‘CLIL-ing’. Now this sounds quite radical. Why?

• Because the teachers would have to adjust their methodology to ensure that the students understood the content.
• Teachers would not be able to simply ‘transmit’ the content, assuming that their audience understood. They would have to think of other means (group work, tasks, etc) which would result in an increase of the skill-based focus of the learning.
• The educational materials (textbooks) would also have to reflect this approach.
• The pupils would be learning language that was more clearly focused on, and related to, the subject matter that they needed to learn.
• CLIL is not confined to higher-achieving students. It is not an approach for the elite. It fits in perfectly with a mixed-ability philosophy.

Without going much further in this introductory article, we might say that the five or six phenomena described in the above bullet-points are all desirable, in educational terms. Ensuring that students understand the content, reducing teacher-talk, increasing the focus on skills, influencing publishers to do likewise and getting students to learn language items that are always contextualized, always functionally necessary in the classroom – sound good at any level of curricular discourse. What is CLIL? Well already it looks as if it is something like ‘good practice’, and if we take Graddol at his word, it can be applied across the ability range.

5. CLIL motivates

Finally, another quote that extends the scope of CLIL still further:

“CLIL is about using languages to learn… It is about installing a ‘hunger to learn’ in the student. It gives opportunity for him/her to think about and develop how s/he communicates in general, even in the first language”.

(Marsh, Marsland & Stenberg, 2001)

We can see from the first part of the underlined sections that CLIL views language as a ‘vehicle’, not simply as an entity in itself. This is a central component of the CLIL package. David Graddol said something similar too in his book English Next, when he talked about the world now viewing English not so much as a language but as a core skill. This is a crucial observation, and it lies at the heart of the educational and social change that has taken place since the development of the Internet and the parallel growth in globalization. As English becomes an essential add-on to any curricular programme around the world, it is moving into a position where it becomes a subject that pupils learn in order to do something else.

CLIL, with its ‘dual-focused’ aims, encapsulates perfectly this post-modern, utilitarian view of the English language. Liberal educationalists may not agree with it, but for the time being it is here to stay.  In its defense, CLIL also seems to contribute to the buzz-concept of our times – namely ‘motivation’.  Teachers’ forums talk about it endlessly, as do the blurbs on the back of scholastic textbooks and the opening lines of ministerial declarations. Does CLIL install a ‘hunger to learn’ as Marsh et al claim? If this is true, then we need to know exactly why. We can examine this in subsequent articles, but for now, why should CLIL motivate more than other conventional approaches? Could it be because?

• It provides reasons for learning and improving the foreign language level, because the understanding of the subject content is compulsory?
• It focuses on and assesses the subject content, so the learner is not being assessed on his/her mastery of the Past Simple (for example) but rather his/her ability to use it in the appropriate places?
• It gives students a feeling of real achievement? They are coping with, and talking and writing about, complex material in the foreign language.
• They are not being asked to discuss ‘vox-pop’ content as in standard language learning textbooks (Pop Stars, Global Warming, My Favourite Auntie) – where the content is used as a slave to illustrate a certain language structure – but because the content is important in itself? In CLIL there is a chance that they are being asked their opinions because the expression of opinions (for example) is a key competence in the syllabus content.

Children Learning English

Author: Jayne Moon

Children Learning English reveals the special features of teaching foreign languages to young learners. It is an inspiring read and a useful practical guide in a single volume.

Learning Teaching

Author: Jim Scrivener

The new, revised and extended edition of the ever-popular 1994 edition addresses the most important, challenging and interesting situations of the English classroom and provides assistance to coping with them.

Sound Foundations

Author: Adrian Underhill

This new and updated edition is a real help for teachers to feel comfortable when speaking and teaching pronunciation. The CD contains demonstrations of the activities with author’s commentaries.

Teaching Practice

Author: Roger Gower, Dianne Phillips and Steve Walters

This indispensable classic helps you cope with different teaching scenarios when you are preparing to become a teacher of English or if you are preparing others to become English teachers.

Uncovering Grammar

Author: Scott Thornbury

How do we learn grammar? This book helps you understand the way grammar functions in language. The task sheets help you and your students understand the processes of grammar in language acquisition.

The use of pair and group work is essential if you are to involve all the members of the class. A fundamental technique here is the use of questionnaires and interviews. By pairing off weaker and stronger students and involving both in the preparation and implementation of the questionnaire you should ensure maximum participation of all the students. You can then get the weaker students to interview the stronger ones and vice-versa. Of course, this may be frustrating for the stronger ones, but if they are able to see their role as that of “helper” or even mentor, it may also have a positive effect.

A second area of activity that can be productive in mixed ability classes is project work. Again, this can work successfully using mixed groups where the stronger help the weaker, but another approach is to form groups that are at approximately the same level and assign different tasks that are appropriate to the level of each group. By adjusting the complexity of the task, you can ensure that each group has a task that it can carry out successfully, thereby providing the correct level of challenge for the higher level students and not demotivating the weaker ones.

A third area is that of homework. If you set the whole class the same homework task irrespective of level, then you will have to expect very mixed results. As with progress tests, the purpose of homework should be to consolidate class work. To this end, giving weaker students less demanding tasks can help both to motivate them and to give them further practice in areas of the language which they have not yet mastered. Assigning more challenging tasks to the stronger students in the group should ensure that they remain motivated and continue to make progress. It is more work for the teacher but, ultimately, it should produce results.

Choral drilling can be an effective way of involving weaker or shy students. If applied judiciously (in other words not all the time), it can give excellent practice in rhythm and intonation, as well as reinforcing word order and grammatical structure.

Finally, be diplomatic in your questioning techniques. Try to avoid putting weaker students “on the spot” by nominating them to be the first to answer a question in open class. Instead, try to encourage a culture of attentive listening in the classroom so that you ask a stronger student first and then ask a weaker student to repeat the answer. It may take time but, once this style of interaction becomes habitual, it can be very productive in terms of class dynamics.

Academic tenure is primarily intended to guarantee the right to academic freedom: it protects teachers and researchers when they dissent from prevailing opinion, openly disagree with authorities of any sort, or spend time on unfashionable topics. Thus academic tenure is similar to the lifetime tenure that protects some judges from external pressure. Without job security, the scholarly community as a whole might favor “safe” lines of inquiry. The intent of tenure is to allow original ideas to be more likely to arise, by giving scholars the intellectual autonomy to investigate the problems and solutions about which they are most passionate, and to report their honest conclusions. In economies where higher education is provided by the private sector, tenure also has the effect of helping to ensure the integrity of the grading system. Absent tenure, professors could be pressured by administrators to issue higher grades for attracting and keeping a greater number of students.

Universities also have economic rationales for adopting tenure systems. First, job security and the accompanying autonomy are significant employee benefits; without them, universities might have to pay higher salaries or take other measures to attract and retain talented or well-known scholars. Second, junior faculty are driven to establish themselves by the high stakes of the tenure decision (i.e., lifetime tenure vs. job loss), arguably helping to create a culture of excellence within the university. Finally, tenured faculty may be more likely to invest time in improving the universities where they expect to remain for life; they may also be more willing to hire, mentor and promote talented junior colleagues who could otherwise threaten their positions. Many of these rationales resemble those for senior partner positions in law and accounting firms.

One cost of a tenure system is that some tenured professors may not use their freedom for the common good. Tenure has been criticized for allowing senior professors to become unproductive, shoddy, or irrelevant. Universities themselves bear this risk: they pay dearly whenever they guarantee lifetime employment to an individual who proves unworthy of it. Universities therefore exercise great care in offering tenured positions, first requiring an intensive formal review of the candidate’s record of research, teaching, and service. This review typically takes several months and includes the solicitation of confidential letters of assessment from highly regarded scholars in the candidate’s research area. Some colleges and universities also solicit letters from students about the candidate’s teaching. A tenured position is offered only if both senior faculty and senior administrators judge that the candidate is likely to remain a productive scholar and teacher for life.

It has also been suggested that tenure may have the effect of diminishing political and academic freedom among those seeking it – that they must appear to conform to the political or academic views of the field or the institution where they seek tenure. For example, in The Trouble with Physics, the theoretical physicist, Lee Smolin says “… it is practically career suicide for young theoretical physicists not to join the field of string theory. …”. It is certainly possible to view the tenure track as a long-term demonstration of the candidate’s political and academic conformity. Patrick J. Michaels, a controversial part-time research professor at the University of Virginia, wrote: “…tenure has had the exact opposite effect as to its stated goal of diversifying free expression. Instead, it stifles free speech in the formative years of a scientist’s academic career, and all but requires a track record in support of paradigms that might have outgrown their usefulness.”

In North American universities and colleges, the tenure track has long been a defining feature of employment. However, it is becoming less than universal. In North American universities, positions that carry tenure, or the opportunity to attain tenure, have grown more slowly than non-tenure-track positions, leading to a large “academic underclass”. For example, most U.S. universities currently supplement the work of tenured professors with the services of non-tenured adjunct professors, academics who teach classes for lower wages and fewer employment benefits under relatively short-term contracts.

For these, and other reasons, academic tenure was officially restructured in public universities in the United Kingdom by the Thatcher government in the 1980s. It is no longer offered in Australia, New Zealand and in most of Europe. Note that most European university systems do not allow any teaching by young researchers, postgraduates, post doctoral fellows, or residents. This is especially the case in Germany, where practice in universities (but not advanced technical colleges) often differs from theory. In principle, teaching duties in German universities are restricted to tenured faculty and a few non-tenured staff members paid for research and teaching. In reality, much teaching is done by non-tenured research students and adjunct faculty. In France, tenure is granted early in academic ranks as well as to CNRS and other researchers. In Italy tenure is granted in early academic ranks as well as to Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche researchers.

Outside the United States and Canada, it is still common to offer a long contract to candidates who pass a less stringent review or confirmation, but with somewhat less job security than in lifetime tenure systems. Moreover, tenure is under attack in state universities in the United States. New Zealand offers “Confirmation” which is similar in effect to tenure, except that all university lecturers in New Zealand have a duty, enshrined in law, to act as a critic and conscience of society, whether their position is permanent or not.

The approach was based on the power of suggestion in learning, the notion being that positive suggestion would make the learner more receptive and, in turn, stimulate learning. Lozanov holds that a relaxed but focused state is the optimum state for learning. In order to create this relaxed state in the learner and to promote positive suggestion, suggestopedia makes use of music, a comfortable and relaxing environment, and a relationship between the teacher and the student that is akin to the parent-child relationship. Music, in particular, is central to the approach. Unlike other methods and approaches, there is no apparent theory of language in suggestopedia and no obvious order in which items of language are presented.

The original form of suggestopedia presented by Lozanov consisted of the use of extended dialogues, often several pages in length, accompanied by vocabulary lists and observations on grammatical points. Typically these dialogues would be read aloud to the students to the accompaniment of music. The most formal of these readings, known as the “concert reading”, would typically employ a memorable piece of classical music such as a Beethoven symphony. This would not be in the form of background music but would be the main focus of the reading, with the teacher’s voice acting as a counterpoint to the music. Thus the “concert reading” could be seen as a kind of pleasurable event, with the learners free to focus on the music, the text or a combination of the two. The rhythm and intonation of the reading would be exaggerated in order to fit in with the rhythm of the music.

A second, less formal reading would employ a lighter, less striking piece of music, such as a piece of Baroque music, and this would take a less prominent role. During both types of reading, the learners would sit in comfortable seats, armchairs rather than classroom chairs, in a suitably stimulating environment in terms of décor and lighting. After the readings of these long dialogues to the accompaniment of music, the teacher would then make use of the dialogues for more conventional language work. In theory at least, large chunks of the dialogues would be internalized by the learners during the readings due both to the relaxed and receptive state of the learners and to the positive suggestion created by the music.

There is, however, little evidence to support the extravagant claims of success. The more obvious criticisms lie in the fact that many people find classical music irritating rather than stimulating (to some cultures Western music may sound discordant), the length of the dialogues and the lack of a coherent theory of language may serve to confuse rather than to motivate, and, for purely logistic reasons, the provision of comfortable armchairs and a relaxing environment will probably be beyond the means of most educational establishments.

In addition the idea of a teacher reading a long (and often clearly inauthentic) dialogue aloud, with exaggerated rhythm and intonation, to the accompaniment of Beethoven or Mozart may well seem ridiculous to many people.

This is not to say, however, that certain elements of the approach cannot be taken and incorporated into the more eclectic approach to language teaching widely in evidence today. The use of music both in the background and as an accompaniment to certain activities can be motivating and relaxing. Attention to factors such as décor, lighting and furniture is surely not a bad thing. Dialogues too have their uses. Perhaps most importantly of all the ideas, creating conditions in which learners are alert and receptive can only have a positive effect on motivation. Whether these conditions are best created by the use of classical music and the reading of dialogues is open to questions but there is no doubt that suggestopedia has raised some interesting questions in the areas of both learning and memory.

A) There is such demand for English teachers that you’ll be able to find a job in many countries with no qualification at all. However, schools that tend to have the better TEFL positions (in terms of hours, support and remuneration) often ask for a TEFL qualification. The course you choose could be purely online, face-to-face, or a combination of both. And of course, if you want to be confident and do a good job, a TEFL course is highly recommended.

There are lots of TEFL courses available, so choose a provider that’s well known, and a course that’s best suited to your needs.

For teaching overseas, even a weekend course will give you a headstart, and 100-120 hours of TEFL study will give you a strong chance of being considered for most TEFL roles if coupled with a suitable CV. Factors to consider with any course include delivery of the online component (is it interactive?), whether you’ll have a tutor, whether there’s an in-class component, and what ongoing support and resource you’ll have access to.

Finding work in an English-speaking country is tougher. You will generally need a degree and a four-week, full-time certificate course like the CELTA or Trinity Cert TESOL. Before starting either of these, you need to be sure they’re right for you, as they not only cost a lot more, but require 100% commitment.

Q) How do I find TEFL jobs?

A)Some courses offer a Job Placement Service, but you can easily find TEFL work yourself online. It’s estimated that twenty thousand tefl jobs are advertised at any one time. Therefore it’s simply a matter of identifying where you want to work, and what remuneration package you’re looking for. A couple of the best websites to find jobs are www.eltworld.net/tefljobs and www.tefl.com.

Q) How do I get a TEFL job?

Once you’ve identified a position that suits you, it’s just a matter of going through the application process like any other job.

Tell the employer what they want to hear – nothing more, nothing less. Keep your application short and sharp. For example, if a school wants a Business English teacher, show them why you will be a good Business English teacher. Don’t tell them all about your fruit picking experience, or that you like music.

Most employers will be able to help with visa information and applications. If you’re unsure about this advice, you should speak to the country’s embassy.

If you’re worried about the history of potential employers or the terms you’ve being offered, join the forums on sites such as www.tefl-chalkboard.com, and ask the question or search past conversations. TEFL teachers never like to see fellow teachers being taken for a ride.

Q) What if I’m nervous being in front of people?

A)It’s the fate of a good teacher to have a few nerves before starting a new class – it means you care about doing a good job! But rest assured, after each lesson you’ll become more and more confident.

One thing to keep in mind is that maximising student practice time is one of the keys to teaching English, so in effect, the less time you’re up the front and under the spotlight, the better. You should get them into pairs and groups practising what they’ve learnt, and you should move around the class helping students as they need it. I hope this fundamental principle takes some of the scary edge off.

Q)What if I don’t know any grammar?

People obsess about grammar. But it’s only one of many things students need to know. Working on pronunciation and vocabulary is likely to be much more useful in increasing your students’ ability to communicate.

And, often, there’s this misconception that students ‘want grammar’, which isn’t the case. But be clear about exactly what help you’re going to provide in a lesson – eg ‘I’m going to help you with your pronunciation today’.

Having said that, you do need to learn about the mechanics of English to help students speak and write with precision. But you can learn this as you go. Don’t feel you have to understand all the intricacies of English before you start. When you plan a lesson just research the little bit of grammar you’re going to teach. Soon you’ll start seeing connections and the big picture will become clear.

About the Author

Bruce Haxton believes that teaching English abroad is the perfect opportunity for any English speaker to explore the world.: as long as you’re a fluent English speaker, a TEFL course is your ticket to the journey of your life.

• that learning is facilitated if the learner discovers rather than remembers or repeats;
• that learning is aided by material objects; and
• that problem-solving is fundamental to learning.

The Silent Way started off in the early 1970s and was the innovation of the late Caleb Gattegno. The use of the word silent is also noteworthy, as the Silent Way is based on the premise that the teacher should be as silent as possible in the classroom in order to motivate the learner to produce as much language as feasibly possible. As far as the presentation of language is concerned, the Silent Way adopts a decidedly structural approach, with language taught through sentences in a progression based highly on grammatical complexity; this is described by some as a building-block approach.

In the Silent Way, the structural patterns of the target language are presented by the teacher and the grammar conventions of the language are learnt inductively by the learners. Tools such as Cuisenaire rods are often used to illustrate meaning (being an example of the material objects mentioned previously). New items are added in moderation by the teacher, with learners taking these as far as they can in their communication until the need for the next new item becomes apparent. The teacher then provides this new item by modeling it very plainly only once. The learners are then left to make use of the new item and to integrate it into their existing stock of language, again taking it as far as they can until the next item is needed and so on.

OK, for example, let’s say that the teacher has introduced the idea of pronouns as in “Give me a green rod”. The class will then use this structure until it is clearly assimilated, using, in addition, all the other colours. One member of the class would now like to ask another to pass a rod to a third student but she does not know the word “her”, only that it cannot be “me”. At this point the teacher would intervene and supply the new item: “Give her the green rod” and the learners will continue until the next new item is needed (probably “him”).

This minimalist role of the teacher has led some critics to describe Silent Way teachers as coming across as aloof and, in reality, this apparently excessive degree of self-restraint can be seen as such. However, the role of the teacher in the Silent Way can be more fairly seen as ‘teach, test, and get out of the way’. The perceptible lack of real communication in the approach has also been criticized, with some arguing that it is easier said than done to take the approach beyond the very basics of the language, with only highly motivated learners being able to produce real communication from the unbending structures illustrated by the rods. The fact that, for logistical reasons, it is limited to relatively small groups of learners is also seen as a key weakness of this approach.

As with other methods and approaches, however, some aspects of the Silent Way can be observed in many lessons in the contemporary classroom. Indeed, in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, for instance, it became trendy in some quarters to argue that excessive teacher talking time was something to be discouraged. Cuisenaire rods are also popular with some teachers and can be used tremendously creatively for a variety of purposes, from teaching pronunciation to story-telling.

The notion of only modeling a new structure or item of vocabulary once may also have some validation because it encourages learners to firstly listen more carefully and then to experiment with their own construction of the statement. Last but not least, this problem-solving trait of Silent Way may well prove to be its most enduring legacy as it has led in a roundabout way both to the inspiration of Task Based Learning and to the prevalent use of problem-solving activities in language classrooms.

Foreign language learning occurs in the formal situation of a classroom, and the learner has hardly any access to the target language beyond the classroom door (Brown 2001). And in this formal situation, he/she receives instruction and practises in the items entirely related to the basic skills of the target language– listening, speaking, reading and writing. That is, the items taught and learned are linguistically related to and considered at different levels– phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. While learning the foreign language, the learner usually encounters varied linguistic problems that evidently handicap and hamper his/her learning and eventually negatively affect his/her general proficiency as well. This phenomenon is also found in the learning of English as a foreign language (EFL) by the Bengali speaking learner.

Both as a learner and a teacher-researcher of EFL, I have had first-hand experience and the opportunity to observe that the Bengali speaking learner confronts difficulty in learning English pronunciation including sounds, stress and intonation related to the phonetic and phonological level. He/she often finds English word formation and sentence construction, respectively concerned with the morphological and syntactic level, quite problematic. Moreover, the learner suffers problems in learning vocabulary items and to convey meanings through and/or receive meanings of words, phrases, clauses, sentences/utterances, discourse, and so forth related to the semantic and pragmatic level. Such problems obviously seriously retard the learning of EFL by the Bengali speaking learner.

Therefore, it seems reasonable to take account of and identify what linguistic problems the Bengali speaking EFL learner encounters and why. The consideration and interpretation of the issue in question are completely based on my practical experience as a learner and on my observation as a teacher-researcher of EFL. Finally, a number of suggestions have been made so as to address and lessen the problems, on the one hand, and ensure the smooth and optimal learning of EFL on the other.

Phonetic and phonological problems

Since English is a non-phonetic language and there is no one-to-one correspondence between the graphemes (the letters of the alphabet) and the sounds actually produced and realized, at the phonetic and phonological level, the Bengali speaking EFL learner usually faces difficulties in, firstly, ‘speech production’ encompassing which articulator(s) to use how to pronounce which speech sound and how to pattern speech sounds to convey meaning and, secondly, in ‘speech perception’ covering how to receive which speech sound(s) to perceive meaning. It is commonly found in the elementary learner that he/she endeavours to learn pronunciations of words by looking at their spellings, and consequently learns mispronunciations of many of them, for example, adjective, adjustment, future, knee, knowledge, lamb, comb, lieutenant, calm, palm, pneumonia, psychology, Wednesday, etc. This mainly happens due to faults in teaching, indifference of the teacher to how the learner learns pronunciations of difficult words/expressions and the teacher’s lack of training. Let us now identify the problems that the Bengali speaking EFL learner confronts at the phonetic and phonological level and explain the causes of the problems under some sub-headings.

Monophthongs and diphthongs

The Bengali speaking EFL learner generally finds the five long monophthongs /¡: u: a: ?: ?/ of the English language seriously problematic since these simple vowels are not available in his/her mother tongue and he/she is not accustomed to differentiating between short and long monophthongs. To emphasize a point or express various emotional effects, Bengali vowels are lengthened to some degree. But vowel length in the Bengali language is phonetic, not phonological. Besides, the Bengali speaker cannot easily and authentically pronounce schwa /?/ since this phoneme is absent from their first language. Moreover, he/she can hardly differentiate between /e/ and /æ/ as in ‘men’ and ‘man’ respectively because this differentiation is not that much exercised in Bengali. In addition, the Bengali speaking learner is used to nasalization of vowels without any nasal consonant in his/her mother tongue, for instance, the first vowel in the word ‘kada’ /k?nð?/(weeping) or the only vowel in the word ‘chad’ /??nd/ (moon) being clearly nasalized. This factor occasionally affects his/her pronunciation of English vowels devoid of nasalization.

The learner also suffers difficulty in pronouncing English diphthongs due to his/her mother tongue interference. The English language has eight diphthongs, each of which is a combination of two monophthongs one gliding into the other and naturally longer than a pure vowel. On the other hand, the Bengali language possesses eighteen regular diphthongs which are characteristically different from and shorter than English ones. As a consequence, the Bengali speaking learner pronounces only the first part of a diphthong and makes it identical with a monophthong, for example, ‘late’ being pronounced like ‘let’. Hasan (2000: 66) rightly holds –

They mispronounce most of the English diphthongs; they fail to give these sounds their due length as they often pronounce only the first element of the sound and pay no heed to the second, thus the English diphthongs cease to be gliding sounds in their pronunciation, e.g. for English /e?/ and /?U/, they generally use the Bangla pure vowels /e/ and /?/ respectively.

This type of replacement of phonemes in the English language certainly results in huge confusion and misunderstanding.

The problems that the Bengali speaking EFL learner confronts in the pronunciation of English monophthongs and diphthongs evidently affect his/her auditory and perceptive ability and hence reduce his/her capability of listening.

Consonant phonemes

As the Bengali speaking learner is naturally trained to articulate Bengali consonants and as there are a lot of differences between Bengali and English consonants, he/she finds the pronunciations of a number of English consonants difficult in both production and perception.

Firstly, while the Bengali language has as many as twenty plosives, the English language possesses six /p b t d k g/. The Bengali speaking learner is used to using both aspirated and unaspirated sounds in his/her mother tongue as it has separate aspirated and unaspirated phonemes producing meaning difference. Unlike Bengali, the English language has no corresponding aspirated plosives, and the voiceless plosives /p t k/are aspirated in the initial position of the stressed syllable but unaspirated in other positions. As a result, the Bengali speaking learner cannot exactly pronounce the aspirated allophones of English voiceless plosives /p t k/.

Secondly, the Bengali speaking EFL learner cannot exactly articulate and even perceive English inter-dental fricatives /? ð/ since there is no inter-dental fricatives in the Bengali language. Rather, he/she uses Bengali dental stops instead of English inter-dental fricatives. Likewise, he/she generally uses Bengali aspirated bilabial stops /ph/ and /bh/ in place of English labio-dental fricatives /f/ and /v/ respectively because the Bengali language lacks labio-dental fricatives.

Thirdly, the learner is usually unable to differentiate between English voiced alveolar fricative /z/, voiced palato-alveolar affricate /d? / and voiced palato-alveolar fricative /? / since these sounds are not available in the Bengali language. Consequently, on the one hand, his/her pronunciation appears to be non-English, and on the other, he/she often fails to understand a speaker producing the sounds correctly.

Fourthly, the Bengali speaking learner is generally found to pronounce Bengali alveolar retroflex stops in place of English alveolar plosives /t /and /d/. This happens owing to the absence of alveolar plosives like English /t /and /d/in his/her first language.

Fifthly, the English approximants /w/ and /j / are problematic to the Bengali speaking EFL learner. He/she cannot correctly articulate them as they are not present in his/her first language.

Thus the English consonants which are absent from the Bengali language are difficult to the Bengali speaking learner and substantially negatively affect his/her pronunciation as well as perception.

Stress and intonation

Stress and intonation are two essential aspects of the pronunciation of English words and utterances. Stress means prominence in pronunciation usually resulting from four factors? loudness, length, pitch and quality operating individually or in combination (Roach 2000). English words in isolation or in connected speech receive stress that results in intonation. Intonation is used to carry information over and above that which is expressed by the words in the utterance. Hence, English is a stress-timed language possessing a speech rhythm in which the stressed syllables recur at equal intervals of time (Richards et al. 1985). On the contrary, the Bengali language is a syllable-timed language having a speech rhythm in which all the syllables recur at equal intervals of time. This difference between the two languages causes many a problem to the Bengali speaking EFL learner.
The Bengali speaking learner faces difficulties in the stress placement in English words because, on the one hand, English stress placement varies according to grammatical categories, for example, ‘abstract, conduct, contract, contrast, import, incline, insult, perfect, present, produce, rebel, etc’ as verbs receiving stress on the second syllables and as nouns on the first, and on the other, he/she is used to assigning stress almost invariably on the first syllable of every word in his/her first language.
Unlike the Bengali language, the English language has strong and weak forms, such as articles, pronouns, auxiliaries, prepositions, etc which are usually unstressed in connected speech. The Bengali speaking learner can hardly use them appropriately because he/she is not accustomed to the practice in his/her mother tongue.

Intonation basically resulting from the rising and falling of the tone accompanied by relatively greater degree of loudness and length plays varied unavoidable functions in the English language, such as attitudinal, accentual, grammatical and discourse functions which have limited importance in the Bengali language. Due to mother tongue interference and inadequate training, the Bengali speaking learner of EFL can hardly master English intonation, and his/her speech therefore sounds unnatural and even unintelligible.

Morphological and syntactic problems

An English word may consist of one or more morphemes, each of which is defined as the smallest, meaningful and indivisible syntactic unit (of a given language) and bears no partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to any other form (Palmer 1983). On the other hand, an English sentence, the basic syntactic unit, is composed of one or more words belonging to different parts of speech, such as nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections, and governed by varied grammatical categories/rules, such as tenses, aspects, persons, numbers, voice, mood, and so on. However, Bengali speaking learners generally face problems with different types of morpheme, especially grammatical morphemes, inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes in forming words to be used as well as with different grammatical categories and rules needed to frame sentences/utterances.

The Bengali speaking EFL learner, particularly one at elementary and intermediate level finds affixation, especially the addition of prefixes and suffixes problematic, and this hampers his/her learning to a considerable extent. Firstly, he/she struggles to learn the use of prefixes which are affixed before stems, for example, whether to affix ‘in’- or ‘un-’ before the stem ‘complete’, ‘in-’, ‘un-’ or ‘im-’ before ‘perfect’ to make adjectives with a negative property. Secondly, the derivational suffixes, such as ‘-ment’, ‘-able’, ‘-less’, ‘-ful’, and so forth that allow further affixation cause a lot of difficulties to the learners. Thirdly, the inflectional suffixes, such as ‘-s’, ‘-es’, ‘-er’, ‘-est’, and others which are terminal and do not allow further affixation are also difficult to the learners. For example, to pluralize nouns, the learner often gets confused about whether to add ‘-s’ or ‘-es’ to the end of nouns. Though the Bengali speaking learner is naturally used to using such morphemes in his/her mother tongue, he/she has to consciously learn the uses of English morphemes in the classroom situation. But inappropriate treatment of and inadequate emphasis on the functions and uses of the morphemes in the teaching result in problems to the learner and thus hinder his/her learning.

Likewise, English syntax causes serious difficulty to the Bengali speaking EFL learner due to two major factors? (a) differences between the L1 and the L2, and (b) problems in teaching material, method and syllabus, and consequently negatively affects his/her learning.

Firstly, while the basic sentence structure in the English language is ‘subject plus verb plus object’ (SVO), for example, ‘I learn English.’, that in the Bengali language is ‘subject plus object plus verb’ (SOV), for example, ‘Aami ingregi shikhi.’. This difference between the basic sentence structures creates problems for the Bengali speaking learner, especially the beginner because of his/her mother tongue interference. That is, the learner often thinks of things and forms ideas in his/her mother tongue, and then translates the ideas into the target language words sometimes arranged according to the structures in his/her first language. Further, literal translations do not always help convey or receive the intended information.

Secondly, the Bengali speaking learner faces difficulty with the forms, functions and uses of different parts of speech and their interchange according to the demand of the sentence, for instance, where to use an adverb or an adjective why in a sentence, how to change a noun into an adjective, and the like. Besides, an English word can function as different parts of speech in different positions in the sentence according to the context. For example, the word ‘round’ functions as five different parts of speech? adjective, adverb, preposition, noun and verb in five environments ( Hornby 2000); the stray word ‘university’ functions as a noun but in the sentence ‘She is a university student.’ as an adjective; the adjective ‘loud’ has two adverbs? ‘loud’ and ‘loudly’, and so on. Moreover, the Bengali speaking learner is used to using normally one word for one meaning, whereas in the English language a word can give more than one meaning, for instance, the word ‘father’ meaning a male parent, a person’s ancestor, the first person to introduce a new way of thinking about/doing something, God to Christians, to become the father of a child by making its mother pregnant, or to create new ideas/ a new way of doing something, the word ‘sun’ meaning the star that shines in the sky during the day and gives the earth heat and light, the light and heat from the sun, any star around which planets move, or to lie or sit in a place where the sun shines, and the like ( Hornby 2000). These problems evidently result from the differences between the L1 and the L2 as well as the syllabus, and the teaching method and material which hardly consider what the learner lacks and needs, how he/she will better receive and/or react to what is taught how, and so forth.

Thirdly, the construction of wh-questions, e.g. ‘Why do you learn English?’ and compound and complex sentences, e. g. ‘He needs to learn English, but does not learn.’ and ‘Though he needs to learn English, he does not learn.’ respectively poses difficulty and retards EFL learning by the Bengali speaking learner because these structures are neither the same in the learner’s mother tongue nor taught in the manner suitable and useful for the learner.

Fourthly, the uses and functions of English determiners, particularly fractions? two-thirds, one-fifth, multipliers? double, two times, articles? a, an the, demonstratives? this, these, that, those, genitives? Rafit’s, girls’ Socrates’, quantifiers? any, some, few, little, either, neither, much, several, and general ordinals? next, further, etc are difficult to the learner and certainly hamper his/her learning since these items are not properly taken into consideration in the appropriate and effective teaching material, method and classroom activity.

Fifthly, the functions and uses of English modals? shall, will, may, might, must, can, could, should, ought to, would, need, dare, have to, be to, etc in different tenses and different situations often pose difficulty to the Bengali speaking EFL learner as the learner’s mother tongue does not possess them and the teaching is not optimally helpful.

Sixthly, different types of verbs, such as transitive, intransitive, causative, linking, dynamic, state, etc as well as the tenses are often problematic to the Bengali speaking learner due to the differences between the L1 and the L2, and the ineffective teaching as well.

Seventhly, the use of prepositions, particularly after nouns, e.g. complaint against, confidence in, interest in, exception to, doubt about, etc, after verbs, e.g. aim at, believe in, arrive at/in, congratulate on, conform to, etc and after adjectives, e.g. angry with/at, afraid of, confident of, proud of, related to, deprived of, dependent on/upon/for, etc is a great problem to the Bengali speaking learner since he/she simply gets them by heart and hardly practises in authentic situations.

Eighthly, the Bengali speaking EFL learner suffers a lot of problems with subject-verb agreement, for example, in ‘Shoilee as well as her parents is/(are) going to London to spend the vacation.’ which receives inadequate treatment in the teaching.
Ninthly, the formation and use of passive sentences, e.g. ‘My pen is lost.’ and reported speeches ‘She said she would learn Bengali’ are difficult to the Bengali speaking learner as he/she is neither adequately and properly exposed to the rules nor offered opportunity of taking practice in some authentic situations.

To be brief, the learner confronts problems with almost all the grammatical categories of the English language since he/she is actually taught about the items, but not the items themselves (Richards and Rodgers 1986) in the way these are used in real life situations. Moreover, the difficulty of English sentence structures to Bengali speaking EFL learners can also considerably be attributed to the differences between the L1 and the L2.

Semantic and pragmatic problems
To perceive meanings of and to produce meanings by using English words/phrases and utterances/sentences in isolation or with reference to the context of situation often pose serious problems to the Bengali speaking EFL learner since he/she has to mostly depend on his/her mechanical memorization of meanings of isolated words as they are mainly non-contextually and unscientifically designed in the lesson and presented by the teacher in the classroom.

In other words, the learner evidently encounters semantic and pragmatic difficulty in learning vocabulary items and using them for effective communication in the real life situation. In the Bangladeshi classroom, the learner is usually instructed to learn English words/phrases including synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, homonyms, etc and their meanings mainly through non-contextualized ways, such as memorizing isolated words/phrases and their meanings, translating from the mother tongue to the target language, and vice versa. As a result, his/her stock of words/phrases is very limited, on the one hand, and on the other, he/she cannot effectively and efficiently use even the limited number of words/phrases that he/she retains in his/her day-to-day life communication.

Moreover, English phrasal verbs being constituted of ‘verb plus particle’, e.g. carryout, get into, lay by, look up, make up with, put up, set forth, take after, etc and idiomatic expressions, e.g. by the by, on the whole, cats and dogs, blue blood, a storm in a tea pot, etc having special meanings and functions often pose serious problems to the learner and substantially hamper his/her learning. In this connection, Roza (2005: 95) maintains -
Words that are different in form and represent meanings that are ‘strange’ to speakers of a particular native language, that is, meanings that represent a different grasp of reality, are classified as difficult. In English, ‘first floor’ is different in form from Bengali ‘prothom tala’ because European houses have an extra floor in the ground.
The difficulty in learning and using these items can be mainly attributed to their characteristic peculiarities as well as the learner’s entire dependence on his/her memorization and the non-contextualized reproduction. Besides, the consideration of literal meanings of these items may cause confusion and misunderstanding. For example, if an office peon is ordered to ‘put up’ (meaning ‘display’) a notice and he/she considers the literal meaning of ‘put and up’, he/she will simply put the notice in a higher position where others cannot easily reach and see the notice.

In short, semantic and pragmatic problems seriously hamper the learning of the target language by Bengali speaking EFL learner since he/she is exposed to a limited number of isolated words/phrases and utterances/sentences and not made accustomed to using them in performing actual speech acts in real life situations.

Conclusions and possible solutions

The foregoing explication, exemplification, analysis and interpretation have made it clear that the Bengali speaking EFL learner encounters phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic problems due to two fundamental causes? one resulting from the differences between the mother tongue and the target language and the other from the teaching process basically constituted of the syllabus, the teacher, the teaching method, material, equipment and testing. To address and lessen the problems, on the one hand, and to ensure the smooth and optimal learning of EFL on the other, proper measures have to be taken to reduce the causes to a substantial extent.

The difficulties created by the differences between the first language and the target language and/or by the mother tongue interference are natural and can be mitigated by only appropriately treating them in the teaching process which explicitly deals with linguistic elements. The learner’s needs and wants therefore have a conspicuously direct relation to syllabus construction, the teacher’s qualification and training, materials development, use of equipment and the testing instrument as Haque and Maniruzzaman (1994: 79) contend –

…the learners’ needs and wants tremendously control the whole package of teaching materials, aids and equipment and the application of teaching techniques and strategies, the employment of classroom activities and most importantly, the method of teaching and the construction of the syllabus.

That is, the teaching process has to take into account of what linguistic items the learner needs to learn when and why, how he/she can easily learn what he/she wants to learn, and how he/she can be used to using what he/she has learned in his/her real life situations.
It is inevitable that the syllabus has to contain the linguistic items the learner lacks and wants in the sequence in which he/she will best learn and internalize them in order to use them correctly, appropriately and spontaneously in his/her real life communication. Corder (1973: 296) postulates –

A finished syllabus is the overall plan for the learning process. It, too, must specify what components, or learning items, must be available, or learned by a certain time; what is the most efficient sequence in which they are learned; what items can be learned “simultaneously”; what items are available from stock, i.e. already known; and the whole process is determined by considerations of how long it takes to produce or learn a component or item. The process is under continual scrutiny by means of stock checks, or tests and examinations.

In other words, the syllabus first specifies the linguistic items according to the learner’s needs and wants. It then orders the items as per their difficulty level and priorities in communication. It is specially recommended that the items which pose serious problems to the learner should be given more emphasis and sufficient treatment in the syllabus.
The learner him/herself cannot automatically take the responsibility of the learning task. The teacher is then the right person to equip the learner with the capability of taking the responsibility of his/her own learning. And to do that, the teacher has to have adequate qualification coupled with proper and perfect training. More specifically, the teacher has to have a thorough knowledge of the linguistic elements and a solid command of all the skills of the target language, on the one hand, and adequate expertise in and experience of contrastive analysis, needs analysis, syllabus design, material construction, adaptation and adoption, teaching methods, use of equipment and testing on the other. To specify the teacher’s competence and role, Maniruzzaman (1998: 98) propounds -

Therefore, the teacher has to be appropriately and adequately trained in psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, pedagogy and the target language in order to meet what the individual learner demands in the classroom.

Thus the teacher has to have sufficient knowledge of his/her area as well as the learner’s psychological, socio-cultural and pragmatic factors and act as a facilitator of learning through his/her skills, methods, instruction, strategies, materials, equipment, and so on.
The materials to be constructed, adapted and/or adopted so as to teach the necessary and problematic aspects of EFL have to conform to the learner’s level, needs and interest. Firstly, they should be relevant and useful, and help the learner to feel at ease and develop confidence. Secondly, they should be friendly and related to the learner’s culture and real life activities. Thirdly, they should achieve impact through novelty of topics, illustrations and activities, variety of activities and sources, attractive presentation and appealing content, and thus have a noticeable effect on the learner (Tomlinson 1998). Fourthly, they should consider the learner’s individual factors, such as age, aptitude, attitude, motivation, personality, learning style, intelligence, and so forth. Fifthly, they should maximize learning potential by encouraging intellectual, aesthetic and emotional involvement that stimulates both right and left brain activities. Sixthly, they should require and facilitate learner self-investment, and provide the learner with opportunities to use the target language to achieve communicative purposes. And the learner should be provided with and exposed to the materials by exploiting attractive and useful means and equipment, such as well-written books, colourful posters, charts and handouts, audio-visual aids, OHP, and the like in a congenial and democratic classroom atmosphere.
The learner should be taught in the manner in which he/she best learns what he/she has to learn. Hence is the importance of choosing and employing the right teaching method encompassing relevant materials, proper teaching techniques and exciting classroom activities. Having come to the realization that each learner has his/her own style, personality, needs, and so forth, it follows that a single teaching method might not be appropriate and adequate for all the learners in the classroom. As a consequence, the recent tendency has been towards eclecticism, choosing materials, techniques and classroom activities from various sources (Maniruzzaman 1998).

With a view to achieving the end, both controlled practice and communicative practice as being complementary (Maniruzzaman 2004) can be exploited in the classroom. To conduct controlled practice in teaching the linguistic elements, such as phonemes, word formation, sentence construction, etc, activities can be organized rulewise and implemented in a process possessing different stages. For example, to teach some particular phonemes, first of all, we have to exhibit the phonemes and explain how are articulated by which speech organs. To give the explanation up to the learner’s satisfaction, we can even judiciously use the learner’s mother tongue (Maniruzzaman 2003) as Tang (2002: 41) puts forward –

… that limited and judicious use of the mother tongue in the English classroom does not reduce students’ exposure to English, but rather can assist in the teaching and learning processes.

Afterwards, interesting and appropriate drills (as in Baker 1981) can be exploited for helping the learner take sufficient practice. However, as controlled practice having mechanical drills may sometimes be boring and as this type of practice cannot ensure the learner’s communicative ability, we should involve the learner in some meaningful, purposive and communicative activities, such as role-play, pair work, group work, etc to make learning interesting and motivating.

Different aspects of the language teaching programme including the learner’s level and progress, the teacher’s efficiency, the effectiveness of the material and method, etc are assessed and determined by employing testing tools possessing reliability, validity and practicality. This is why, the testing instrument has to be constructed and employed in such a way that the learner will neither lose motivation nor suffer any phobia, and the purpose will be served satisfactorily. Before the commencement of the EFL teaching programme, a placement test can be given to sort out and put the learners into some homogeneous groups, or to place them at the stage of the teaching programme most appropriate to their abilities (Hughes 1989). Then achievement tests can be administered to accumulate evidence during, or at the end of, the programme in order to determine whether and where progress has been made in terms of the goals of learning (McNamara 2000). In addition, diagnostic tests can be used during the programme so as to review the progress of learning, efficiency of teaching and effectiveness of the materials and equipment, and hence to identify their strengths and weaknesses and bring modification to them if needed. Finally, a general proficiency test has to be given to ascertain how far the learner is able to use what he/she has learned to communicate in his/her real life situations.

Last but not least, syllabus designers, materials developers and test constructors play a vital role in the successful implementation of a second/foreign language teaching programme. Notwithstanding, to teach EFL especially at the primary, secondary and higher secondary levels in our country, foreign experts are often invited and appointed as syllabus designers, materials developers, and the like, but the outcome is usually disappointing for the policy makers, the teachers, the students and for the nation as a whole. This is because the experts have little experience of the learner’s needs, psychological factors, socio-economic condition and cultural aspects; and, as a result, while designing the syllabus, developing the material or constructing the test, they fail to meet the learner’s needs as well as the national demand. Therefore, it would be better to appoint local experts, members of the learner’s speech community and culture, as syllabus designers, materials developers and test constructors.

Acknowledgements

I am profoundly grateful to Professor Abu Taher Mojumder, my learned colleague and Chairman of the Department of English at BUBT, who gave generously of his time, experience and expertise whenever I needed. He proved again to me how helpful it is for a writer to have friends who listen, read, and give suggestions.

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About the author

Dr. M. Maniruzzaman, MA in English Language and PhD in Applied Linguistics & ELT, is currently Associate Professor in the Department of English, Jahangirnagar University, interested in phonetics, phonology, syntax, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, teaching methodologies, syllabus/materials design, and testing, and published 41 books and papers.