Outcome-based Education is currently of much potential in the global educational landscape. In recent years, implementing outcome-based education and student-centered learning have also been prioritized at the policy level of the Ministry of Higher Education of Afghanistan. Thus, the current study aimed to investigate the attitudes of Afghan lecturers towards the recent paradigm shift in the educational system of Afghanistan. The researcher employed a mixed-method approach to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. The researcher used a questionnaire responded by 120 lecturers and interviewed 7 outcome-based education experts and Afghan lecturers. The quantitative findings reveal that teachers have positive attitudes towards outcome-based education, and they are ready and willing to implement the approach by mentioning some key challenges. However, the results also show that implementing this approach is currently at a low level of practice. The qualitative findings reveal that; content-based curriculum, policies of teaching, learning, and assessment, the lack of basic infrastructure and info-structure, lack of facilities, and teachers' workload are among the key challenges towards implementing this approach. The results will help the Ministry of Higher Education and Higher Education Development Program to develop applicable policies and to emphasize this recent paradigm shift in the future within addressing the key challenges to ensure the efficacy during implementation. It will also help lecturers to have an overall picture of outcome-based education and student-centered learning. Likewise, it will open a window for researchers to investigate this potential topic in more in-depth details in the higher education system of Afghanistan.
<p class="0abstract"><strong>Abstract—</strong>The use of technology has reached its potential stage in teaching and learning. Particularly, ELT teachers and learners are mostly involved in utilizing social media platforms and Wikis in the process of teaching and learning in their classrooms. The current study aims to find out the impact of using social media and Wikis on the writing skills of learners in a number of studies covering the years 2010-2018. Thus, the Google Scholar database was used for finding out relevant literature within the purpose and limit of the current study using the search terms of ‘technology and learning’ in the search button. The methodology used for the present study is PRISMA diagram 2009, which is a systematic way of finding out relevant and available literature. In the final stage, 17 articles were selected for the analysis purposes, and the literature was then classified into different themes to find out the impacts. The results of all 17 articles show that using social media and Wikis played a significant role in improving the writing skills of learners. Thus, it is recommended for both teachers and learners to utilize different social media and Wiki platforms in the process of teaching and learning.</p>
English language is a part of the school's curriculum in all levels in Afghanistan as a foreign language. Despite it being including for decades, very little research has been done in regard to the quality and evaluation of the ELT English textbooks. The current study investigates and evaluates English Language Sub-skills of the secondary school textbook “Grade 9” to evaluate the effectiveness of the materials for the teaching and learning of the subskills. The Eclectic Checklist of Demir & Ertas (2014) has been selected for evaluating the selected English textbook. The findings indicate that the selected textbook lacks contextualized usage of vocabulary, systematic representation and sufficient explanations of grammatical structures, and appropriate usage of pronunciation activities. Furthermore, the findings indicate that the textbook needs improvements in developing and presenting the sub-skills of English language appropriately, particularly grammar and pronunciation. These findings will be helpful to policy makers and ELT textbooks developers of Afghanistan to represent the contextualized and appropriate usage of the English Language sub-skills in upcoming versions of ELT textbooks.
Educators use various active learning strategies over the last decades in different educational contexts globally. The current study aimed to investigate the attitudes of Afghan tertiary level students towards cooperative learning strategies in the Afghan EFL context. The current study used a questionnaire as a primary instrument for collecting the data employing a descriptive survey design for data collection and analysis. The participants were 165 undergraduate students from the Department of English, Languages and Literature Faculty, Kandahar University. The findings revealed that participants have positive attitudes towards cooperative learning strategies, and several reasons were pointed out for positive changes to take place. Cooperative learning strategies have also been considered as useful teaching and learning techniques that increase classroom participation from the perspectives of students. Thus, it is recommended for Afghan teachers to adopt cooperative learning strategies due to the positive effects on students’ attitudes and classroom participation. The findings of the current study will help educators to incorporate cooperative learning in their courses. The result will be a guide for curriculum developers to include cooperative strategies in designing curriculum and textbooks.
Teaching English language started with using the traditional teaching methods in the educational system of Afghanistan. Teachers preferred such kinds of classical methods for teaching grammar as well. To the knowledge of the researchers, there is a lack of research conducted to indicate whether the two common methods for grammar teaching, i.e. inductive or deductive, are more effective within the Afghan teaching and learning context. The current study has been conducted to find out the effectiveness of using inductive and deductive teaching approaches to teaching English grammar in the Afghan context. Using a mixed-method (qualitative and quantitative) approach for data collection as well as analysis, the study conducted a questionnaire survey of 218 students and 13 instructors and semi-structured interviews with 4 language instructors from both English Departments of Education & Literature Faculties at a university in Afghanistan. The findings indicate that there is no significant difference of using one approach over another and Afghan students can learn through both deductive and inductive approaches in teaching grammar. However, from the perspective of the teachers, it was found that the teachers generally prefer the deductive method and rarely use the inductive method as they are trained in the classical method of teaching English. The findings of the study will help English grammar teachers to view the importance of using both of the teaching methods in Afghan context in order to make learning grammatical rules and its structures easy for the students to overcome.
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