Feroze Kasi                                                                                              

                                My English learning and teaching experiences                                            

Learning Experience:

             When I started learning English which is my second language, I tried to observe and listen to the sounds, and sometimes copy and repeat many times to master them. After I felt easy with a sound, I tried to figure out its meaning using the context. I went through trail and error phase till I reached at a proper meaning. Whenever the sounds were used in real life context I used to retain the meaning for a longer time. When I used to struggle with meaning of the sounds (words), my English teacher would try to explain it to me by using them in different contexts and relating it to something which I already knew. In this way, I used to build up on my acquired knowledge of a language and learn more sounds, chunks and sentences in different contexts.

            As my knowledge of different subjects increased, I felt I need more advanced language (specialized terms) to express and share. This quest made me learn field appropriate language which further added to my bank of vocabulary and language. Different subjects demanded different structure and construction of the language both at sentence and extend discourse levels, I strived to learn and acquire more complex components of language.

Teaching Experience:

             As a teacher, I learned and acquired more than I did as a student. The various needs of diverse population of students compelled me to get in depth knowledge of a language to meet requirements of the students. I have taught to students of different age and proficiency levels which enriched my teaching experience and increased my proficiency of language. However, after teaching for almost 9 years, I still feel that I need a lot of improvement to teach a language.

              In Pakistan, English language teaching has been under a strong influence of Grammar-translation method and it is still used in most of the public schools and colleges. I was taught through the same method. After being taught for almost 16 years, most of the graduate students at University of Balochistan, Pakistan failed to produce academic English. In April 2000, when I joined the university as an English Lecturer, Grammar-translation method was still used by most of the senior faculty and I also followed them. However, with the passage of time, after attending some workshop and seminar conducted by British Council, Oxford University Press, Higher Education Commission of Pakistan, and some foreign qualified scholars, I got exposure to new approaches and methods and CBI was one of them. CBI is still new for me and I need some more time to master this approach so that I could meet the needs of my multilingual class of graduate students who are enrolled in different disciplines of Science and Arts divisions. I do have used one form of CBI and that is ESP which I found very effective in helping students of specific needs.