English Remedial Teaching material: The ‘TSCERT’ has decided to adopt the ‘Bridging The Gap Activity’ across the State to achieve minimum competencies among the children before using their textbooks for all classes.
The majority of the teachers expressed their inability to transact the lessons of low proficiency of English among the children. It is almost like an introductory course in the new pedagogy of learning English.
Most of the teachers felt the need for an experiential mode of training and special strategies for low proficient learners.
This is a special package to equip the children to acquire essential competencies in English so that they can make use of the new textbooks creatively. The National expert Dr. K.N. Anandan has formulated this Bridging The Gap Activity to overcome all the hurdles to carry out this new pedagogy.
This Bridging The GapActivity has been tried out successfully in 42 Government Primary Schools of Narketpally Mandal, Naalgonda District in spite of facing the challenging situations like: – first generation learners – single teacher handling more classes – lack of proper ambience at school – inadequate language apparatus – traditional belief system of teaching and learning English
Objectives of the Bridging The Gap
- Creating an English environment by overcoming inhibitions among children.
- To encourage the children to express their opinions freely in their own English.
- To enable them to achieve minimum Academic Standards as the children develop conversations, descriptions, story/ narrative orally and in written form.
- To develop classroom interaction based on pictures without using a textbook.
- The positive sign of using English freely by the children in the classroom gives encouragement to the teachers to try out this new pedagogy effectively.
Strategies for Bridging The Gap
- Select three (3) different pictures having more scope, interaction for generating description, conversation and narrative/ story both oral and written (picture of different subjects of the same class and other pictures may be considered).
- Use first picture for whole class activity.
- Use second picture for group activity.
- Use third picture for individual activity.
Transaction of Bridging the Gap – Strategies
| Day | Discourse | Strategy/ Activity |
| 1 2 3 4 5 | Description Description Editing the Group Descriptions Description Editing the Individual Descriptions | Whole class activity Group activity Editing Individual activity Editing |
| 6 7 8 9 10 | Conversation Conversation Editing the Group Conversations Conversation Editing the Individual Conversations | Whole class actvity Group activity Editing Individual activity Editing |
| 11 12 13 14 15 | Story writing Story writing Editing the Group Stories/ Narratives Story writing Editing the Individual Stories/ Narratives | Whole class activity Group activity Editing Individual activity Editing |
Expected outcomes: By end of these activities, all children including LPL could produce the basic discourses on their own i.e. description, conversation and narrative or story by using the familiar pictures. During the process of discourse construction, children get inputs in whole class activity. Children respond to teacher questions either in English or mother tongue. By using the children responses, the teacher construct the basic discourses in whole class activity.
This process will strengthen during group construction. Further, children could write their own version during the individual writing. Later, the children are exposed to same pictures for whole class, group and individual activity. This process helps them to get ideas related to words, phrases and sentences. Editing will also helps the children in refining their writings.