Open University expertise is revolutionising English language teaching in Bangladesh, using low-cost mobile phones.
The OU is a major partner in the English in Action teacher training programme, which has boosted students’ English language competence scores by 15 percent, according to independent evaluation.
Set to reach more than 76,000 school teachers and 10.5 million students by 2017, the programme has just won one of the British Council’s ELTons awards, known informally as the ‘Oscars of English language teaching’.
Communicative approach
Tom Power, OU Senior Lecturer in Education, says the programme’s success is down to introducing a communicative approach to language teaching into Bangladeshi classrooms, through the innovative use of mobile technology.
“Over the last decade, the mobile phone has become almost ubiquitous in the developing world. Most people in Bangladesh now own a mobile phone,” he says.
“We wanted to use widespread available technology to get high-quality audio and video learning materials to teachers, even in remote rural areas, but without depending on costly, unreliable mobile internet access or intermittent electricity supplies.”
Instead, the training materials, developed by the OU and local partners in Bangladesh, are stored on tiny SD (secure digital) memory cards, supplied to the teachers pre-loaded on mobile phones.
'The trainer in your pocket'
Dubbed “the trainer in your pocket”, the phone gives teachers instant access to several gigabytes worth of audio and video materials, for teacher professional development and for classroom use. A low-cost portable rechargeable speaker is provided which plugs into the phone, bringing English listening materials to classes of as many as 100 students. Such resources support teachers introducing new learning activities into their classrooms.
Research at the start of the English in Action project showed that most English lessons in Bangladeshi primary and secondary schools focused heavily on teaching correct grammar, and very little English was spoken by either teachers or students.
One teacher who taught both English and the national language, Bangla, told researchers: “If you had come into my lessons before English in Action, you would not have been able to tell which of those languages I was teaching, because we were speaking only in Bangla in both lessons.”
'not only did students’ performance improve by 15 per cent, but teachers’ English was better'
English in Action demonstrates – through videos of actual Bangladeshi teachers, with their own classrooms and students – techniques which get pupils using English to communicate. There is now a ‘strong consensus’ among language teaching experts that this communicative approach is the most effective way to teach languages, says Tom Power.
“There have been previous large-scale projects in Bangladesh which have succeeded in teaching teachers about the communicative approach, but not developed a sufficient understanding of how to put this into practice.
“We have been able to help teachers understand how. The starting point of their training is trying out the new classroom activities, with the help of the video guide.”
Focus on impact not output
English in Action also has an exceptional focus on measuring its impact, he says. “Typically many international development programmes report on their output, effectively saying ‘we were going to train X number of teachers, and we did’. But they don't tell you what difference it has made to teaching or learning.
“We have a really comprehensive research programme which asks how did the programme change what happens to teachers and students, and ultimately, did it make a difference to the learning outcomes for English language?”
Independent observers were sent to around 500 Bangladeshi classrooms, and discovered that far more English was being spoken in lessons after English in Action was implemented.
A final evaluation of English language competence was made by independent international assessors from Trinity College London, who tested more than one thousand students and teachers in primary and secondary schools, in the first phase of the programme.
They found that not only did students’ performance in English tests improve by 15 per cent, but the teachers’ English was also better.
English in Action was developed at the request of the Bangladeshi Government, and funded by the UK government Department for International Development’s UK Aid programme. It is delivered in partnership with development consultants BMB Mott McDonald.
Building on far-sighted research
It began in 2008, but builds on a small but far-sighted OU research project called DEEP, which spotted the potential of mobile devices to enhance teaching in developing countries as far back as 2001.
Tom Power adds: “Projects in developing nations which are trying to teach things at large scale and low cost have tended to use the cascade system – they train a small group of people who then go on to train another group of people, and so on, so the learning is cascaded down.
“But, as you go further down the chain, the learning gets more and more diluted. As a teacher in Kenya said ‘The trouble with cascades is that those at the bottom either don’t get wet – or they get wet with dirty water'.
“By using technology, we don’t need to cascade. The expertise comes directly to each teacher via the ‘trainer in your pocket’.”
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