Recently, in the spate of three weeks, three seminars were held on Active Learning at the Department of English and Humanities of the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh by three respective faculty members of the Department. A brief coverage of the seminars follows:

Tahmina Zaman's seminar held on March 19:
The first seminar of spring 2009 of the Department of English and Humanities (DEH), University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, was held on Thursday, March 19, 2009 in R 401 of ULAB in which Tahmina Zaman, a lecturer of the department, explained how she conducted her course ENG 101 through Active Learning approach. The objective of the course was to undo the common mistakes/errors in English and make them learn the right use and usages.

She engaged the students in activities like interview & role playing, language games, talking about a person followed by writing practice, reciting poems to create awareness on pronunciation, translation from Bangla into English to encourage them to compare and contrast and learn the structure of sentences, dialogue making from a given situation to communicate and to anticipate about persons involved in it, and so on. She also allowed students to write stories from a given setting after discussion to ensure that they did not copy from each others’ scripts. The talk was followed by a lively question and answer session participated in by students and faculty. Professor Mohit Ul Alam, the Head of the Department said that ‘active learning’ is an umbrella term where any method or approach could be used if it led to a sustainable education.

Abdullah Al Mamun's Seminar held on April 2, 2009:
In the second seminar held on April 2, 2009, Abdullah Al Mamun, a lecturer of the same Department said Active Learning implies learning in a learner-centred activity based, participatory environment in which learners would feel greatly motivated to get into problem solving in their own interest. The traditional way of teaching grammatical rules to students is mechanical in which learners are static recipients of class lectures rather than active and dynamic participants of problem solving activities in a collaborative way.

Mr Mamun took care of the following provisions: Seating arrangement/Teaching grammatical rules with pictures/ Practicing work sheets and exercises in groups and pairs/ Cross checking and peer reviewing/ solving problems of language collaboratively/ Playing games/ Presentations/ Grammar and translation.

S.M. Ariful Islam's seminar held on 9th April 2009:
In the third seminar, S. M. Ariful Islam, another lecturer of the Department spoke on "L1 Influence on Learning Spoken English of Bangla Speakers." He said that being very distantly related to each other, Bangla language actually does not facilitate learning English. Students continue making mistakes even after attending three semesters of intensive courses in English at the university level. Though they completed twelve years of education before coming to university, all their efforts result in using spoken English with many unforced errors.

The central theme of Arif's seminar was to explain the reason/s behind the growth of this error-ridden spoken English. Bangla happens to be the only language that can help Bangladeshi EFL learners when they are in linguistic need to express themselves in English. Since Bangla is not similar to English in any linguistic aspects (semantic & morphology, syntax, phonetics and phonology), the knowledge of the native language, that is Bangla knowledge (influence) actually results in certain silly but common errors in the areas of subject-verb agreement and other structural combinations. L1 influence also causes wrong pronunciation of certain sounds.