Making sense of English

Colin Keaveney meets the educators who think a dose of civics helps the language medicine go down
English teaching professionals recently participated in a three- day seminar aimed at combining the latest research in language learning with a civics-focused curriculum.
According to one of the seminar organisers, professor Laila Galal Rizq of Ain Shams University, the idea was for teachers, university professors and teaching trainers to return to their governorates and promote the activities and methods showcased.
The seminar, titled "Global Education and Communication: Promoting Democratic Participation and Life Skills," was the third in a series organised under the joint aegis of the Regional English Language Office of the American Embassy, the Ministry of Education and Ain Shams University.
Tangible results of previous seminars, held in 1998 and 1999, were in evidence in the shape of student projects. Students from Al-Attar Secondary School in Shubra were invited to present their project, "Man Is Master of the Environment." Their teacher, Hanan Fathi Yassa, displayed a record of the project from the planning and proposal stage through to its realisation. Before-and-after photographs showed the transformation of a scruffy somber room into a bright and clean classroom.
Another class, from the Kafr Al-Sheikh Language School, undertook a project that involved visiting and interviewing tradesmen, including a shoemaker and a makwagi (professional ironer), to understand better what they did for a living.
From a language learning viewpoint, the purpose of such projects is to make classroom content relevant to students' lives. One of the seminar organisers, Christopher Renner, of the Kansas State Department of Education, contrasts this communicative and relevant approach with other methodologies: "More than just learning a series of words," he explains, this method brings pertinent themes "into the context of what you are doing in the classroom, so that students have meaningful experiences and they do something -- they engage in activities."
From a more general educational perspective, the seminar was conceived to extend the inculcation of values such as equality, tolerance and respect for the environment into the language classroom.
According to Mona Mahmoud Saleh, undersecretary to the director of the speaker's office of information at the People's Assembly, such civic instruction has been conducted in other areas of the curriculum since the 1950s. In her view, this focus on the language learning classroom is merely an extension of existing civic instruction programmes designed to prepare children for participation in a fully democratic system.
Some of the civic themes dealt with in the seminar are already included to some degree in the "Hello" series of English teaching manuals used by the Ministry of Education, pointed out Rizq. "One of the purposes of the training here is to encourage teachers to highlight these concepts; to capitalise on these concepts," she added.
Professor Inas Barsoum of Ain Shams University, another organiser, also emphasised the practical aspects of the activities the seminar is designed to promote. As an example, she cited the Model Arab League, where each student chooses an Arab country and represents it in a forum. Other activities have included "The Class Adopts a Right," where students research and report on one human right.
Professor Nadia Touba, who also participated in the seminar, traces these recent developments to a "global education" emphasis in English-language learning. "When we first started, it was just awareness-raising campaigns among teachers, but now we are on to training teachers." At the pre-service or teacher-training level, civics curricula are already in place, she says. For teachers already in the field, the approach is different and utilises media such as video-conferencing and occasional seminars to reach thousands of educators across the country.
The seminar was as much about pedagogy as content. "When we are talking about civic issues," says Touba, "we require that they use certain teaching techniques, like collaborative activities, group work, etc. So we have to train them to use these techniques."
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