Teaching English in the Gulf region is challenging as well as exciting. All institutions pay a lot of attention in improving the knowledge of English. Any ESL teacher faces the tough problem of teaching the language in a creative and innovative method. Though many students are able to understand the language, most of the students face the problem of communicating their ideas effectively. The hitch is the lack of vocabulary. Writing is the biggest challenge for many learners. Hence the responsibility of the English faculty is tremendous.

Traditional methodologies will not help a lot. Unless the teacher is able to create an interest in the minds of the learners, he can’t expect the desired results. A good teacher teaches, a better teacher explains and the best teacher inspires. If a teacher keeps on teaching, the classroom activities become passive and monotonous. So the teacher should try to float above the traditional methods of teaching and break the ice. The students here have the tendency to express their happiness or disappointment openly. Sometimes a teacher might get disappointed over the poor feedback he/ she receives from the learners.

I have seen teachers who feel helpless as they get poor results and responses. The main drawback is the lack of creativity. Creativity is not an object that can be bought. Creativity is the result of an individual’s hard work and enthusiasm to prove oneself. Internet is the unlimited resource for any ESL teacher. Add some of your own creativity in the teaching methodology. Creativity doesn’t know any limits. You will find the students responding to your calls positively.

For example, the students should be taught new vocabulary. If you just ask them to read newspapers daily, few will respond to the suggestion. So the teacher must bring newspapers to the classroom and make the students sit in pairs. Each pair should go through a news item, which they find to be interesting. Ask them to go through the news item and discuss with the partner. They can refer the dictionary to find the meaning for new words. After sometime, you can invite them to come forward and present the news item to the class. One can share the news with the class and the other can explain the meaning of new words with the usage. The teacher can help the class understand the usage of words better. This practice helps the students speak and learn new words.

It is the teacher’s responsibility to remind the students of the new words they have learnt every day. To reinstate the learning, tests are to be conducted, as the students will be motivated to learn new words for the sake of marks. It is always not a bad idea to prepare a circular about the toppers of the class and put it up in the notice board.

Role of grammar in ELT – (Arab students)

By: Clement

Many people say that grammar is not at all important for learning English. It may be partially true but not exactly.

The Arab students struggle to cope with the language because their foundation of English seems fragile. Even after the graduation, the students struggle to speak and write English. A common and serious problem the Arab students encounter is the use of past form of verbs. It is not uncommon to hear from the learners that they never knew that the past form of ‘write’ is ‘wrote’ or ‘swim’ is ‘swam’. This ignorance forces them to use present forms of verbs to describe a past event, which could be quite confusing to a foreigner. This present verb usage has gone so deep into the minds of most Arab students. As an English teacher, I keep correcting their wrong usage quite often as I converse with them. As Arabic language doesn’t have the past form, the English learners in this region find themselves trapped in the snare.

To make you understand the seriousness of the challenge in ELT, I give you some ‘reasons for leave’ written by some of our students who have finished their graduation.

The bus is coming late and there is damage and the road is crawded.

Because my grandfather is die.

The accident is happen and the road is stop and I am came from ………

I was go to the hospital.

I go to the hospital. (Instead of ‘went’)

I have a strong stomach (ache)

My friend is on the hospital.

I hope that you can understand the challenges the teachers face. The traditional methodologies don’t help. Your suggestions are welcome in dealing with this problem.

I want you to notice that the learners were graduates and diploma holders who had one-year intensive English course in the first year of their college study. I found out that the many teachers in college were more interested in completing the syllabus than making the students understand the right use of the language. I don’t try to find fault with the teachers. Because most institutions are worried about just completing the recommended syllabus. It may be relevant to other main courses of study. But language learning is entirely different. Being the universal language, English breaks the cultural barriers and unite people. It is the medium of communication. The objective of teaching English is enhancement of communication. If the learner emerges without any change at the end of every class hour, the methodology is not up to the mark.

In a particular teachers’ forum, a teacher came out with the complaint that the recommended English books or materials were not good. She was not happy because the students did not respond positively. The prominent point is that it is not what kind of books you recommend but the kind of methodology you apply in teaching English. The teacher plays a vital role inside the class not the books. A creative teacher creates creative students.

In the beginning, I spoke to the students about these past forms of verbs and asked them to be conscious when they spoke English. It didn’t work out much. I prepared the list of V1, V2, V3 and distributed to the students. Students were asked to repeat as the teacher read it aloud. The rhyming of the three forms like ‘sing –sang- sung’ created some interest. But the expected change was not found. It still remained a challenge.

To deal with this problem, the teaching of tenses is indispensable. A thorough and meticulous drilling is inevitable. The miracle happened one fine day. I taught them ‘Direct and Indirect speech’. The students learnt this with amazing interest. As they started learning to report a speech, their use of past forms improved a lot. They were given a lot of sentences to transform from direct and indirect and vice-versa. Then they were asked to report the conversations they had with the friends or family members. It performed the miracle I was longing for. The students were able to report well using the past forms of verbs. I strongly recommend this grammar for the Arab learners of English. It helps them a lot to change their language. Students can be encouraged to change conversations into indirect speech. It is a time-consuming exercise but surely the best one for Arab students.

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