Coinciding with the 125th birth anniversary of first Union Minister for Education in Independent India Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and the National Education Day celebrated on his birthday on November 11, the School of English Language Education, English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU) organised a colloquium covering various aspects of English language teaching.
Papers
The idea of the colloquium was conceived, planned and executed by Mohanraj, Professor in the Department of Training and Development, with the scholars from the ELE Research Forum. The forum invited papers for presentation on its website and senior scholars from the school contributed fourteen papers based on classroom research. Each of these papers was blind reviewed by a pair of fresh scholars and a member of the faculty. At the colloquium the reviewers and the chairperson presented a critique of the paper and posited a few questions for the author to defend.
Discussion
The discussion which began thus was later picked up by other scholars in the audience. The novel way was greatly appreciated by the faculty and the research scholars. The scholars felt that this was an opportunity given to many of them to read in areas that they were not familiar with and cope with problems of research in a novel way. Broadly the papers presented covered themes like Second Language acquisition, Materials Production, Feedback Strategies, Innovative strategies, Use of ICT and a set of theoretical issues. Paul Gunashekar, Dean, School of ELE and G. Rajagopal, the first Dean of the School contributed to the discussions.