Editorial

The recent earthquake had an impact throughout the country. Some of the districts were more directly affected while some other indirectly. The ELT community could not be the exception. The huge damage has been devastating but the hope is still there ‘we are not crushed’. Gradually the things are getting back to normal. All the people are trying to hide their pain and continue their contribution with the motto: ‘together we can’.

The first article of this issue is by Janak Raj Pant.  In his article, he has recognized the needs for psychosocial support needs of the students in directly and indirectly affected areas and the possible activities the teachers might want to implement in their classroom. We hope this article will provide some tips and techniques for re-establishing education after an emergencies and ensure protective environment for children, who are more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. Equally, we hope this will be helpful for basic ways to deal in the classroom which will be beneficial from the post disaster perspective but at the same time also be helpful from the perspective of teaching English.

Laxmi Prasad Ojha in his reflective article ‘Quality Education Through Quality Teachers: How to Bring Intelligent Individuals into the Teaching Profession?’ has accounted for the current trend popular among the students to prefer other disciplines than education as their future career and further discussed how it has affected the ‘supply’ of quality teachers to the job market. Also, the author has attempted to explore the reasons behind this apathy of the intelligent students towards teaching profession.

In his article ‘The Dynamics of Language Proficiency’, Suman Laudari has provided an account for the criteria used in defining language proficiency, measuring against those criteria followed by short description why those criteria in second language research are important with the aims ‘to tease out these nuances that are related to the dynamics of how good someone is in a particular language’ and shed light on ‘how we know whether someone is more or less proficient in a language? What evidences are used to make claims that somebody has native like proficiency or for that matter a low proficiency’.

Mabindra Regmi in Deconstructionist Analysis of Laxmi Prasad Devkota’s “The Lunatic” has presented how this ‘semi-autobiographical work of the poet resists the social injustice advocating an alternative perspective of the world around him’. In this analytical writing, the author has presented deconstructionist analysis of the poem.

In ‘English Grammar and the Views of M.Ed. Students’, Ramesh Prasad Ghimire explores the M.Ed.(Masters in Education) level students’ perception on M.Ed level Nepali English grammar and grammar syllabus. His research also investigates their knowledge of and attitude towards grammar teaching. The researcher used a set of questionnaire as a tool for data collection. The data were collected from a total of one hundred M.Ed. level students who were studying at University Campus, Kirtipur, Kathmandu, and then analyzed quantitatively as well as qualitatively. The overall findings of the survey revealed that M.Ed. level students in Nepal consider grammar as an unavoidable component of M. Ed. course. Majority of them argued in favour of explicit grammatical knowledge, and displayed positive attitude towards grammar teaching. But they are still in confusion regarding the goal of teaching grammar and level of language that needs to be emphasized during grammar instruction. Their pedagogical knowledge in relation to grammar teaching is inadequate.

Finally we expect your critical comments and feedback from our valued readers.

Happy Reading!

Editors

Janak Raj Pant

Sagun Shrestha