The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : The creative route to learning spoken Tamil

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Dec 09, 2007
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

The creative route to learning spoken Tamil

J. Malarvizhi

Teachers from Singapore impressed by activity-based learning method in Indian schools

— Photo: M. Vedhan

Cheerful learners: Singapore Tamil Teachers’ Union president S. Samikannu interacts with teachers from Singapore, who are in the city for workshops on teaching of Tamil language, on Friday.

CHENNAI: A group of Tamil teachers from Singapore have been in the city over the past week to learn creative ways of teaching spoken Tamil.

“As the language environment at home also becomes overwhelmingly English, the classroom is the only space where children speak Tamil,” said S. Samikannu, president, Singapore Tamil Teachers Union. The teachers have visited Corporation and private schools in the city and observed classes in progress.

Several teachers have been especially impressed by the Activity Based Learning methodology. S. Jegathesan said he was initially sceptical about the process. “Having children of different skill levels learn together at the same pace with senior students mentoring the younger ones and the teacher functioning as a facilitator had created a class full of confident, motivated and self-disciplined students,” he said. He hopes to reproduce some of the energy that he found in the classrooms here in his own classes.

Mr. Samikannu also praised the ‘eagerness to learn’ among students here. “Classes with nearly 50 to 60 children were perfectly quiet with children sitting still and eager to answer questions. Students in Singapore are far more boisterous,” he said.

The Singapore Tamil Teachers Union, Malaysian Secretariat for World Tamil Teachers’ Conference and the All India Primary Teachers’ Federation were involved in organising the workshops on teaching of Tamil language and Teacher Work Attachment (TWA) programme.

The workshops are organised in the years between the biannual conferences of the World Tamil Teachers Organisation as a follow-up to discussions that take place at the conference, he said.

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