Editorial

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And Miles to go before I sleep,

And Miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost (from ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening)

While taking any kind of voyage, it’s amazing that we reach to a novel land, and at times we happen to traverse through some ups and downs, a kind of plain route or convoluted trajectory, be it in the physical world where we happen to reach the plain land and express ‘Wow! This is how the world is structrured’ and in a steep hill through convoluted paths with a lot of bends and happen to express ‘Amazingly steep structure. Wow!’  or in an academic world where we explore new insights with enough analysis and critical reasoning. This time we have reached an experience in our blog journey where every blog entry happens to lure you to think for some time to cry with ‘Yes, this is what I am looking for.’

We never get gratified with the academic journey that we traverse.  Something new, something innovative always gets formulated, and we want to be familiar with them to sustain ourselves in this world. Some people seem to be ever inquisitive who happen to supply some new thoughts as if they are the regular suppliers, and other good chunk of people happen to devise their own with the help of these thoughts and walk together, and there is a good deal of people who consume them and dwell in this academic world.

Indeed as Frost states in his last stanza, we are lured and convinced so much by some writings, and these blog entries are the true examples. But let’s remember these are writer’s hands-on experiences which unleash new techniques, strategies, insights and thoughts that we need to imbibe and implement adapting to our context with the promises before we sleep. We have to walk miles and miles to reach the zenith of our ELT world where we can sense a true pleasure and state ‘Yes I could reach where I wanted to.’ It’s how we sustain ourselves.

Let’s unleash new ideas now with Christine Pearson Casanave in her ‘On Writing Teachers Researcher Narratives’ where she has encouraged us to create our own narratives with meticulous editing. Similarly, Z. N. Patil and Kiran Patil mention some specific roles of context in comprehension and highlight how foreground and background information creates context for us to understand any text. On another blog entry, Charles Jeffrey Danoff talks about Peergogy on Facebook with his own experience. He also mentions how it can be best implemented in ESL classroom. From Nepal the teacher educator, Tirtha Karki comes up with some practical activities of using short stories in EFL classes. He has explained why and how short stories are useful and unfolded the ‘what aspect’ linking many activities to it. Last but not least, Joya Ssenchowa from India comes up with the idea of multi-grade and multi level teaching. Even if it seems archaic in many contexts, she shows how it can be effectively implemented as in many part of the world this is being practiced, her context being an example.

Let’s travel with these scholars and unleash the ELT beauty with new insights. Thanks

Editors

Sagun Shrestha

Miriam Corneli