Teachers' Perceptions and Experience on Activity- Based Teaching: A Narrative Inquiry

Abstract

The education systems of Nepal still remain predominantly traditional, teacher centered and textbook-dependent, limiting student engagement despite policy approvals of student-centered practices. I address this gap by investigating Secondary Level language teachers' lived experiences and perceptions with ABT, with the goal of determining its potential for improving communicative competence in the face of cultural, linguistic and geographical diversity in Nepal. This dissertation is purely a comprehensive study to find how teachers perceive and practice and face the challenges in their language classrooms. The participants were seven teachers from Galkot Municipality, Baglung. This research applied Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory as a conceptual framework, which maintains that cognitive development occurs and develops as a result of social interaction and collaboration within socio-cultural contexts and is closely associated with the term “Zone of Proximal Development”. Similarly, I also used Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory, which emphasizes the role of self-efficacy, human behavior, culture, environmental influences. Furthermore, I used narrative inquiry as a research design to address and identify the experiences, perspectives and live stories of secondary level English language teachers. This method aims to investigate the narrative experiences of the teachers. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in this study to collect data from the participants. The study has identified key findings. The findings reveal that teachers perceive activity-based teaching (ABT) is a transformative, modern, experiential and student-centered teaching method that enhances students' active participation, motivation, effective and meaningful learning in English language classrooms. It also promotes critical thinking skills, analytical skills, capacity building and problem solving skills. However, the participants have to face a lot of challenges and hindrances while implementing activity-based teaching approach in their language classrooms along with insufficient training, limited infrastructure, rigid urban-centric curricula that ignore diversities of Nepal, heavy courses, and time constraints due to immense workloads are among the major issues. Despite obstacles and challenges, teachers use materials to students' requirements, thereby improving communicative skills, however institutional restrictions prevent complete implementation. The study has also shown implications on policy and practice. It reveals that policy and practice in Nepal regarding education needs to prioritize curriculum reform, improved teacher training, the provision of necessary resources, ICT support, and formative assessment to help in the proper implementation of activity-based teaching. The qualitative study applies in-depth exploration of actual teachers' live stories, experiences, feelings and challenges and suggests context-specific changes, rather than generalization of numerical data. ABT reveals potential for inclusive and effective English learning in Nepal, but it needed reformation and revisions in curriculum. This study also suggests that policymakers, curriculum designers, and educators should include and provide relevant and situational teacher training as well as they should also design culturally and geographically relevant curricula. They need to improve their resources and evaluations system. This approach will promote equality in teaching and minimize policy and practice gap for effective results among students.