ISLAMABAD, Jan 9: The English language teachers of Pakistan should go on making innovating experiments while teaching the language to their students to help them get ahead in life.

This was the crux of the seminar arranged by Islamabad chapter of the Society of Pakistan English Language Teachers (SPELT) at Rawalpindi Askariya College of Management and Information Technology here on Thursday.

Professor Shahid Siddiqui, head of English department at the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Technology, NWFP, conducted the seminar.

Dr. Siddiqui came up with a convincing reason for undertaking research while teaching the language. He said the research would aid better understanding of the language in our milieu, which is faced with falling standards.

The kind of research would differ according to the need of each institution and should be inclusive of the teacher’s needs to make himself/herself intelligible and the difficulties, which inhibit the students from understanding the lesson.

Two other speakers, Dr. Samina Amin Qadir, associate professor at Fatima Jinnah University, and Umar Farooq, lecturer at the Allama Iqbal Open University, focussed on the problems of research in English language teaching in the classroom and also presented their point of view.

Dr Samina Amin was also of the view that the English language must be correlated with the teaching of the Urdu language and argued for developing a complete philosophy for teaching Urdu. Such a philosophy has yet to be developed, she remarked.

Mr. Umar spoke up for action research in the classroom. “What do I know about the English language, have students benefited from the lesson, and what change is required in my teaching methods,” were some of questions he suggested a teacher must ask himself everyday.

In the seminar Dr. Sitwat of Rawalpindi Grammar school spoke of syllabi, which remain unfinished towards the end of the year. Provoked by her remarks, another teacher said the number of lessons must be curtailed. Dr. Sitwat replied that this would not be proper since a better comprehension of the text was expected from the students in the next higher class. Instead, she asked the SPELT to produce better textbooks, but she was told that the Karachi chapter of the SPELT had undertaken the task and until now it had produced textbooks from class I to class 8.

Shahid Awan told the participants that the US-Aid had gifted about 40,000 English language books to the organisation. The SPELT would also organise a summer school for English language teaching, and the English language university of North America would assist the programme. Ms. Nasim was name the SPELT programme coordination for 1993.— Jonaid Iqbal