Channelling Administrative Issues Towards Humanistic Language Learning - Teaching Africa in the EFL Context

Ezana Habte-Gabr, Ethiopia

Ezana Habte-Gabr is a teacher from Ethiopia. He is based at Universidad de La Sabana in Colombia. His name comes from the founder of the Christian empire in the Fourth Century. Last year he presented a paper titled "Teaching Geography Electives in English to Native Spanish Speakers" at the Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education in Holland (ICLHE 2006). E-mail: ezana.habte@unisabana.edu.co

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Introduction
Background
Implications
Discussion
Conclusion<

Introduction

Increasingly, school and university teachers seem to find themselves saturated with administrative work such as keeping records for reports and meetings. As an English Content Based Instructor who teaches and coordinates, I have realized that administrative work such as roll calling and keeping attendance records could actually be geared towards teaching foreign culture and concepts of other languages to students in courses in social science courses. This involves changing the order names according to other languages, such as Geèz Script in the case of my course on Africa, resulting in students learning about other languages and regions. Furthermore, students are forced to consider and appreciate the fact that ordering and categorizing information is linguistically numerically driven and they could even question some philosophical underpinnings of their own world which are largely based on ordering and categorizing.

Background

Attendance taking enables the teacher to get to know the students and associate their faces with a name. There is always a sense of closeness generated when one is addressed in a conversation by their name, resulting in a socio-affective context conducive to learning and teaching. In courses were language and content are simultaneously evaluated, close record keeping is important, particularly when it comes to charting classroom participation. I have found that by the second class, role calling becomes so monotonous that students at times can not even hear their name as they do not pay attention or are conversing. Students whose last names are lower down the list tend to talk to those whose are higher up the list, making the whole procedure unpleasant for all. I found that reversing the order, by randomly calling roll makes the job easier as no one knows when they would be called. Moreover, those whose names have already been called seem to take an interest in the order and hence derive some interest from this activity. Eventually, I began to realize that this mundane activity began to pave the way to teaching students about non Latin alphabet as I began to organize their names in Geez alphabetical order. Geez alphabet is that which belongs to Amharic and Tigrinia, languages in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Through the Geez alphabetic order, are normally in the middle of the list, found them being called first. Subsequently, students become interested in syllabic structure of the language as they like to see their names written in Geez. For example a student whose last name is Lamus would be the second to be called as opposed to the sixteenth given that the letter "la" is one of the first letters in the Geez alphabet. Perez, for example would be called at the end as the "pe" letter is at the bottom of the alphabet.

Implications

1. Students are instantly immersed in a learning activity and actually through roll and seem to learn a lot more about other languages than alphabet were presented through a lecture.
2. Critical thinking skills are stimulated in that students begin to look at ordering from other perspectives. I would often ask them "Why call roll in order of the class list? This leads to discussion on geographical world views which in turn stimulate students think about how the world is viewed from different cultures. Students begin to see how much the Cartesian system of ordering and classification heavily installs a concept of the world as opposed to others
3. Socio-affective relations are enhanced as students who are used to be called at the end are called earlier on. They become aware that the instructor makes an effort to respect everyone as the order is continuously altered.

Discussion

Teaching in a foreign language is strenuous and tends to have a high "burnout rates" as instructors grapple with teaching loads, changing methodologies and a youthful generation which tends requires being entertained in order to learn. Procedural or administrative tasks come across as an attempt to impose a teacher centred control system as opposed to one that benefits the students. A multilingual approach to attendance taking, permits has to deliver both content and raise sociolinguistic consciousness.

Conclusion

This paper reports just how one administrative task could be integrated into learning and teaching a social science course. While I landed upon this strategy inductively as opposed to a deductively structured study, it is important for instructors to seriously consider implementing procedures which permit teaching with efficiency.

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