Tahmina Anwar’s seminar on Interactive Teaching: (held in R 401, Campus A)

The second seminar on the same day was presented by Tahmina Anwar, Lecturer of DEH, with a paper interestingly titled as “A journey from Honeymoon to Home,” which initially sounded literary but eventually featured a set of practical problems faced both by the learner and the teacher in a typical tertiary language classroom. She pointed out some of the most common initial cognitive difficulties a language teacher faces in a language classroom and how it becomes for the teacher a continuous struggle to develop a good degree of camaraderie in the classroom to make teaching effective. Metaphorically the phases a teacher undergoes with his/her learners can be equated with a journey from honeymoon to home, to be lukewarm in the beginning, conceding and concessional, but gradually taking up the harder aspects of teaching, but still not making the students feel that they are being purposefully taught. At the end of her presentation Tahmina answered a number of questions put by students and faculty, by which the whole session proved to be very illuminating.