Goodbye to English?
The Textbook, namely English For Today, meant for the HSC students contains 24 units. Each unit contains several lessons. At the end of each lesson there are some questions which require the students to work in'' pairs'' and ''groups''. In fact communicative method of language teaching requires the students and teachers to take part in such activities.
We wonder if the authors of the said textbook are alive to the real life classroom situation of our colleges. Whereas the language experts assert that an ideal classroom consists of some 50 students, a classroom of our college may accommodate four times of the said figure or even more. So here the perennial gap between theory and practice is evident as in many other fields.
As the contents of the textbooks do not correspond to the question papers of the respective boards, the students and even teachers are using guidebooks. These guidebooks are full of typos, faulty sentences and shoddy pieces of compositions and very few students even carry the textbooks to the classroom. In the name of communicative English, we have said a hasty goodbye to English!
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