There
are people in tribal regions of Pakistan who don't have facility to get
educated so they continue doing what their forefathers do. And due to war in
Afghanistan and terrorist activities in Pakistan the young minds don't have a
way to get educated in schools anymore. As schools are also targeted.
While
there are many courses and skills taught online, but due to language barrier,
they are deprived from getting benefit from those online courses as well, such
as MITx and others.
I've
taught in school and university here in Balochistan and have seen that language
is not taught in a natural way. Traditional institutes still believe that
they've to start with memorizing the grammatical rules, which doesn't work. One
of the many reasons is rules keep on changing and there are exceptional cases.
For example, with conditional sentences “were” is used with pronoun “I”, such
as, “If I were…” So it’s insane to keep on memorizing the grammatical
rules. This even happened when I was in Kinnaird College for Women, Lahore to
do MA in Applied Linguistics and one of the courses was Exploring French.
Instead of “exploring” French we were made to memorize the rules with no
background in French and no knowledge of French alphabets. When a child learns
language, child observes and listens and then starts speaking…writing and
reading come later. However in developing countries, it’s the opposite. This is
why it’s difficult for nonnative speakers of English to converse in English
because they translate in their mind and then speak and while doing that they
think of grammatical rules they have memorized. It’s way too much!
That
issue isn’t limited to those who haven’t been to school but also who did go to
school but they were taught in traditional way!
But –
there’s a cure to EVERY disease! Of course, I don’t expect the government to
change their policies, I don’t even have the power to do that. I do have
control over what I do. I’m Pashtun and know my native language and also speak
English as a second language and have been teaching it online to native
speakers of Pashto. I experimented with blended learning on my own when I was
teaching to university students in 2017, August – December. I used
canvas.instructure and it did work out as I had thought even though users
were not familiar with the site before.
Using
21st Century skill to teach English online to native speakers of Pashto helps
Pashtuns across the globe not to wait for schools but acquire the skill of
language & get started with ANY online course of their interest at
coursera, for example. Not only that but also learners who fail interview
because they don't know how to use speak, even though they know how to
read & write.
Knowing
my target audience and what issues they have and how to resolve that using
technology has changed the lives of disadvantaged communities in developing
world, such as Pakistan's tribal region Pashtuns.
