EXPLORING ENGLISH TEACHING IN THE CLASSROOMS OF SECONDARY LEVEL IN BANGLADESH

The study is conducted to explore teaching methods, materials, classroom activities and interaction between teacher and learners in secondary level of education in Bangladesh. English language teaching must aim at all four skills i. e. speaking, listening, reading, and writing. A teacher can only transform these four skills to students when the teacher is using interactive teaching approach/method. To support the teaching approach innovative classroom activities must be ensured along with appropriate teaching materials. In the class there must be enough teacher student interactions as well. But most often an inefficient teaching system is in practice in which learning English is viewed as memorizing a list of words and a set of grammatical rules. Furthermore, when the class is not interactive students do not feel at all being involved in the lesson. The study has been conducted by collecting data from seven secondary schools. It has been found that most of the teachers are using Grammar-Translation method and in most cases communicative English language teaching is missing. In classrooms, teachers hardly use group work, pair work, and dialogue activities to teach. Teachers do not generally have any own made teaching aids because they are busy all day with different classes. Even the study has found the interaction between teachers and students is not quite satisfactory. Teachers are helpful and students are not afraid of asking questions related to their study. The study depicts a typical picture of secondary level English classroom of Bangladesh.