3. ELT issues worth pondering on

The following are notes prepared during the  Fifth International and Forty-first Annual ELT@I  Conference, organized by the Department of English, Anna Adarsh College for Women, Anna Nagar, Chennai from 5^th to 7^th August 2010.

* It is worth recalling what Chinua Achebe said : Why should the African child learn about the Daffodils?... Why not study local culture?

* A wide range of  enrichment programmes are available  for the learner of English particularly in the Engineering colleges. They include Music, Dance, Drama and training in  Life Skills. All these may involve both language and non-language skills. But we seldom exploit it.

* Cultural globalization poses distinct challenges and opportunities  for language learning /teaching because language is the place where we construct our sense of  self amid the  centrifugal and centripetal pulls of globalization.

 * With the slow rise of India as a global economic power, there  was a felt need to minimize  the importance of literature and shift the attention to capacity building  in the stakeholders of the developing  knowledge economy and in this English was important.

* The much popular Communicative English programme is now facing what Swan called the ‘New Toy Effect”: “ …a limited but vulnerable insight has been over generalized, and is presented as if it applied to the whole of language and all of language teaching…The ‘new toy’ effect is leading us to look at everything in functional terms”(1985)

Well, would you like to offer your comments on any of the above? Please do…