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Linking Young Minds Together
     Volume 2 Issue 115 | April 19, 2009|


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Feature

Active Learning seminars at ULAB

RECENTLY, three respective faculty members of the Department of English and Humanities of the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB) held three seminars on Active Learning .

The first seminar was held on March 19 in which Tahmina Zaman, a lecturer of the department, explained how she conducted her course ENG 101 through the Active Learning approach. She engaged the students in activities like interviews and role playing, language games, talking about a person followed by writing practice, reciting poems to create awareness on pronunciation, translation from Bangla into English to encourage them to compare and contrast and learn the structure of sentences, dialogue making from a given situation to communicate and to anticipate about persons involved in it, and so on. She also allowed students to write stories from a given setting after discussion to ensure that they did not copy from each others' scripts. The talk was followed by a lively question and answer session.

In the second seminar held on April 2, Abdullah Al Mamun, a lecturer of the same department said Active Learning implies learning in a learner-centered activity based, participatory environment in which learners would feel greatly motivated to get into problem solving in their own interest. The traditional way of teaching grammatical rules to students is mechanical in which learners are static recipients of class lectures rather than active and dynamic participants of problem solving activities in a collaborative way.

Mamun covered the following areas- seating arrangement, teaching grammatical rules with pictures, practicing work sheets and exercises in groups and pairs, cross checking and peer reviewing, solving problems of language collaboratively, playing games, presentation skills, grammar and translation.

In the third seminar, S. M. Ariful Islam, another lecturer of the department spoke on ‘L1 Influence on Learning Spoken English of Bangla Speakers’. He said that being very distantly related to each other, Bangla language actually does not facilitate learning English. Students continue making mistakes even after attending three semesters of intensive courses in English at the university level. Though they completed twelve years of education before coming to university, all their efforts result in using spoken English with many unforced errors. The central theme of Arif's seminar was to explain the reasons behind the growth of this error-ridden spoken English. Bangla happens to be the only language that can help Bangladeshi EFL learners when they are in linguistic need to express themselves in English. Since Bangla is not similar to English in any linguistic aspects (semantic and morphology, syntax, phonetics and phonology), the knowledge of the native language, that is Bangla knowledge actually results in certain silly but common errors in the areas of subject-verb agreement and other structural combinations. L1 influence also causes wrong pronunciation of certain sounds.


Woman divorces husband for cleaning too much

A German woman has divorced her husband because she was fed up with him cleaning all the time.

German media reported the wife got through 15 years of marriage putting up with the man's penchant for doing household chores, tidying up and rearranging the furniture.

But she ran out of patience when he knocked down and rebuilt a wall at their home when it got dirty, Christian Kropp, court judge in the central town of Sondershausen, said on Thursday.

"I'd never had anyone seek a divorce for this," he said.

Source: Reuters

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