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Title
Engaging The Learners in Productive Learning : Some Pedagogical Gateways

Presenters
Dr. Vijay Singh Thakur
Dr. Amrendra Kumar Sharma

Ensuring learners' motivation and active participation have always been critical issues in ESL/EFL pedagogy. Our common knowledge as language teachers/educators and evidence from diverse researches in ELT suggest that when English is taught in a mechanical manner using merely the prescribed text books, it becomes monotonous, dull, uninteresting, and boring. But learners seem to be better motivated about language learning when new, unconventional and exciting materials are exploited using imaginative, creative, and innovative teaching techniques. At the same time elements of humour and fun make the classroom atmosphere pleasant, increase interaction among the teacher and students, lower  anxiety level, motivate learners, make learning more enjoyable and meaningful, and most of the time, please the students. These considerations  become all the more desirable in language teaching as the implications of Communicative Approach to Language Teaching  strongly suggest the need of  an environment of trust and mutual confidence in which learners can interact without fear or threat of failure. One of the primary roles/aims of an ESL/EFL teacher, therefore, lies in selecting/designing/adapting stimulating materials and interactive activities which challenge the students to do their best work with a spirit of excellence. This is always needed for cohesive enhancement of language skills and promotion of higher order critical/lateral thinking skills which are so very necessary for a self-sufficient, self-reliant individual to grow and develop in his/her academic pursuit(s) and survive/flourish in today’s world of tough competition.

Against the backdrop of such pedagogical concerns and the practical requirements of the learners, our main aim in this workshop is to highlight the need(s) and mode(s) of fruitfully exploiting supplementary exciting materials and creative teaching techniques for a variety of purposes in ELT and to demonstrate as to how ESL/EFL learners could be creatively engaged in enhancing their language skills in an integrated framework and simultaneously sharpening their higher order thinking skills that are crucial in the activities of producing knowledge rather than reproducing information. This workshop aims at practically showing how better learner motivation and participation can be ensured through the interesting contents and extended contexts of some of the unconventional and exciting materials such as  crisis stories, editorial cartoons, jokes/anecdotes, commercial advertisements, and journalistic news stories. Put simply, the workshop attempts to illustrate how this idea will work in our ESL/EFL classrooms in not just providing fun for the students but, more importantly, in exploiting their creative energy to facilitate linguistic development and promote higher order skills without a conscious analysis or understanding of the learning process while they acquire communicative competence as second/foreign language learners and users.

The audience of the workshop will be involved in brainstorming sessions, doing the tasks in groups and presenting the results/outcome before the class, think and link activities, and question and answer session at the end. The presenters will use overhead projector transparencies and task packs for running the workshop.  

Keywords: better learner motivation and participation, stimulating materials, interactive activities, creative teaching techniques, integrated framework

Biography:
Amrendra K Sharma is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Dhofar University , Salalah , Oman . He did his MA in Linguistics for ELT at Lancaster University after doing MA in English at Patna University . He earned his Ph.D. degree by writing a dissertation in the area of Language Acquisition and Language Testing at Bhagalpur University. He also studied for PGCTE and PGDTE at CIEFL, Hyderabad successfully. He published a book entitled Teaching and Testing Grammar and some articles in the areas of ELT and Linguistics. He has a wide teaching experience of about more than two and a half decades in India and abroad. At present, he has been teaching Linguistics and ELT courses at the bachelor level. He is journal editors for English as an International Language Journal and Chinese EFL Journal.

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