Building language proficiency [Archives:2006/933/Education]

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March 30 2006

Mahmood Akhter
[email protected]
Department of English
Women's College
University of Science and Technology, Sana'a

Building proficiency in any language is a question of creating a continuous, sequential, cumulative, and standard based language program. Here, the key elements are usually inspiring and empowering your students, collaborating with teachers, setting and achieving goals, evaluating your students and program, and outlining the curriculum, units, and lessons. One of the major challenges faced by any language instructor while carrying out above pursuits is inspiring the students to love the process of learning the target language. It's also a Herculean task to empower the learners with confidence in their ability to communicate in the target language. A major drawback also crops up here in the form of the amount of time spent in working with the target language. How can we expect to achieve any sort of proficiency unless and until enough contact hours are produced? Here I do not mean to say that increasing your contact period with the target language by various means is leaving one's own language, heritage, and culture. Here locally or culturally relevant content based teaching program is likely to play a vital role in striking the balance and motivating the students for language learning.

We keep on crying foul about not achieving the expected results and blame it on any factor we find convenient. This leads us to nowhere and we seriously need to look into the factors which can facilitate the process of second/foreign/other language learning in a real sense.
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