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FINAL PAPER On History of English Language Teaching Submitted to: *S. M. Ariful* Islam Course Teacher Department of English & Humanities. ID NO: 072013022 Department of English & Humanities. Submission date: 23.12.2009 According to our social context, limitations are always persuading our educational system. Whenever we talk about a rich or appropriate syllabus our teachers will face problem with traditional face. Many of us do not observe English language teaching is an important phenomenon as a developing country to compete with others reasonably. But the problem is that after a certain period we come to realize that English Language is important for going abroad to study purpose or getting a good job. Then many of us take course for learning the same language with a good tuition fee. Thus it becomes a very popular business in our country. Where is our pedagogic language teaching problem' The big question always remains forgettable. It seems that our syllabus designers are very smart making syllabus so called standard, but in our reality they present the teachers or the students or the syllabus as a clown in a circus. The teaching and learning method I observed in a secondary school is that mostly they follow Grammar-Translation Method. The observations could be explained in several points. Such as:- The medium of classroom is Bangla. Teacher also converses with the students in the native language. They follow the text book assigned by the board, where some of them have notebook. The teacher asks a student to read out a passage loudly, so that everyone can listen. Teacher also corrects them if the student mispronounces any word. Teacher also asks the student to mark some of the vocabulary from the passage. After finishing each line the teacher translates the sentence into native language. After finishing the whole passage the teacher asks all the students to solve few questions regarding the passage including question-answer, multiple choice, true false. After checking some of them he starts to write some Bangla sentences on the board and asks the students to translate them into English language. So this stage only few students could able to translate some of them. 10.After that the teacher starts to explain them in a traditional way, where he is again explaining the sentence pattern like…. Subject + Verb + Object (Main Expression) Subject + Verb(present form) + Object (Present Indefinite) Subject + Verb(past form) + Object (Past Indefinite) Subject + shall/will + Verb(present form) + Object (Future Indefinite) Subject +am/is/are( auxiliary) + Verb(present form)+ing Object (Present Continuous) Subject +was/were(auxiliary) + Verb(present form)+ing Object (Past Continuous)………… In the mean time he tells the students to ask some question if they have problems. Some of the students keep their head down in the whole class. Teacher also seems quite indifferent to teach. Some other observations I have found that the teacher and students never counsel if they have problems regarding the language. Rather the students want to go to privately where money is concern. They focus only the reading and writing skills. They always ignore listening and speaking. Phonetics is never taught in any level, even most of them do not aware of this. Their main concern is to get a good mark in the exam. So when the exam appears they just get an outline of writing contents, such as paragraph, essay, letter, application, and even a list of comprehensive passages. So they start memorizing them before the exam, rather than understand it. All the materials are collected from several notebooks or sometimes teacher prepare the content by himself. The students love to memorize them rather than understand as if they believe “Memorizing makes a student perfect”. These are the stories behind the classroom. The pedagogic system of our school is followed by Grammar-Translation method. Grammar is the backbone of their teaching. The teacher passionately teach the structure like –“The patient had died before the doctor came.” Sometimes the teacher only go through the texts as their daily routine. The teachers are not well equipped and mostly they do not have that much efficiency over English language. So they are not able to teach the students according to the highly designed syllabus. Though our syllabus of English text book designed according to communicative method, it seems the syllabus designer do not have that much idea about our resources, teachers, and equipments. It may work in our some of the prominent and highly profile schools. But we have most of the schools beyond of these facilities. So it becomes burden for a large area. So they become largely depend on those very poor note books. Teachers are not also familiar with this communicative syllabus even though the syllabus largely depends on the teachers. So teachers follow their traditional teaching method to teach their students which ultimately type of “Good for nothing”. Finally they have to jump over the notebooks and encourage the students to memorize the contents rather than understand it. So it becomes very hard for the students and teachers to maintain the aims of the course. Day by day it shows the flow over the needs and aims. So we need a syllabus which can work according to our student’s needs and aims. As far I observed that only teaching grammar and translation of sentence cannot give us that much efficiency and this technique works very slowly. The syllabus designer also should have the consideration about our resources, equipment and the quality of teachers, so that they can make a good syllabus, which can be applicable for the entire country. It has to have the key features which are concerned on the student’s needs and aims. It has to be communicative or real life based which can enable the students to use it in our day-to-day life according to their interests. We should have in our mind that English language is not only for region but also for the whole country.