Technology Intervention in Teaching English for the Integrated Teacher Education Programme—A Minor Study

Abstract

As per the guidelines of the National Education Policy (NEP)2020, efforts are underway to launch four year Un- der Graduate (UG) programmes replacing the three year UG programme. And recently as per the guidelines of NEP, the four year Integrated Teacher Education Programme (ITEP) is being launched in several institutions. It is common practice in many universities across the country to offer English as a compulsory subject of study dur- ing the first two semesters. Though not completely matching with existing patterns in university departments, the National Council for Teacher Education in the ‘Suggested Curriculum for ITEP’ for the newly launched BScBEd programme, proposed the teaching of the English language during the first semester of the eight semester course.
The investigator was assigned to teach English in the first batch of the ITEP. The newly joined students had cleared a national level test, and were found to be fairly competent in the use of English. So the investigator draw- ing on a decade long experience of Techno-pedagogy, adapted digital tools to create challenging tasks to ensure student attention and participation while transacting the content.
The paper commences with the background of the study, identifies the need for technology intervention and reports on the strategy employed for integrating social media like WhatsApp and email, and the use of digital tools like videos, visuals, infographics and animated gifs for transacting the content of the paper, ‘English for Com- munication’. It is hoped that the study would sensitize participants to the scope and possibilities of technological intervention in the newly launched teacher education programme.