Asian Scholar Program

Arifa Rahman, Asian Scholar for JALT2007, is Professor, English Language & Teacher Education, at Dhaka University, Bangladesh. She has more than 25 years’ experience in teaching, administration, and research, and is interested in teacher development, materials writing, and classroom-based research. She has a PhD from the Institute of Education, University of London, and is currently the President of BELTA (Bangladesh English Teaching Association).

Training of teachers in rural Bangladesh schools

Friday, 5:55 pm - 6:20 pm, Room 417

Arifa Rahman will investigate the impact of an extended training program for English language teachers at rural high schools in Bangladesh. The relevance of this training and the challenges will be examined in terms of three essential concepts in the discourse of teacher development: cognition, context, and educational culture. It will be argued that understanding and working with these concepts is crucial in enabling educators to formulate a principled approach to EFL teacher development.

Workshop: Discovering grammar

Saturday, 9:50 am - 10:50 am, Room 512

Using a theoretical framework based on insights from education and cognitive psychology, this workshop will highlight the assumption that input does not necessarily lead to output unless there is intake. It will be argued that to facilitate intake, it is necessary to activate the learning process through consciousness-raising tasks. Participants will be drawn into activities to discover the formal properties of language. Finally, they will estimate the usefulness of such discovery activities in their own classrooms.