Teaching-Learning methods of the English Component in IGNOU’s Postgraduate Certificate in the Professional Development of Teachers

Abstract

The policies of schools in India lay emphasis on a one year pre-service programme e.g. (B.Ed) as the only training programme that is made mandatory for teachers that is believed to fully equip them with knowledge and skill that they have to apply in their entire teaching career. // Other subject-based intervention programmes that are conducted by the government and private institutions are of short duration (one day to one month). In the case of English they concentrate on monolingual Anglo centric assumptions and does not provide an indigenous model that would truly integrate it with plurilingual and pluricultural community in which it would function. // Most teacher-training programmes do not include learner factors in second language acquisition in India. There is a well researched area (see Agnihotri etal. 1998 for State of Art in this area) where it says that affective factors such as motivation, intelligence, aptitude as well as sociolinguistic factors such as parental background, medium of instruction in schools, gender and age help a learner acquire second language. The major pitfalls of teacher training programmes is that they do not have any research based understanding of the learner. The grammar taught to learners is sentence based without including the discourse perspective. // Paper ID 346