Need for qualified English teachers

An academic has called for schools to ensure that English teachers are skilled and qualified before employing them.
Senior lecturer of the Communication and Development Studies Department at the Papua New Guinea University of Technology, Dr Rachael Aisoli-Orake, said unqualified English teachers were a factor in the students’ poor levels of English.
Aisoli-Orake said a person who was not a trained English teacher would provide only poor teaching and learning outcomes in all four strands of English – speaking, listening, reading and writing – of a student.
“An unqualified English teacher lacks the content-knowledge of English grammar and usage, therefore, pedagogically will not be able to teach the English subject effectively,” she said.
She said schools should have teaching and learning resources for English teachers to be able to teach English effectively.
English should also be enforced as the language of communication in schools, she said.
Aisoli-Orake said English was a foreign language to 95 per cent of Papua New Guineans who lived mostly in rural areas and often spoke their indigenous languages
She said the only time a Papua New Guinean child formally spoke English was in a school setting because it was the medium of instruction.
She said English could be a third or fourth language that was first learnt, therefore, during the years of personal development, English grammar and usage had to be learnt formally in school.
“If more than 50 per cent of PNG’s population is illiterate, then illiterate parents are not able to support their children’s literacy skills in education, such as spelling, reading and writing,” she said.
Aisoli-Orake revealed this during a weekly research seminar titled The English for academic purposes programme at PNGUoT – its role, challenges and the way forward.
She recommended that the university create an academic resource centre in collaboration with its Matheson Library to assist students in research and enrichment programmes.
Aisoli-Orake said more resource centres were needed in both rural and urban areas to support students and their parents acquire knowledge and also enrich them to use the English language appropriately.
She said new intakes at universities and colleges were usually poor in their English usage.