Teachers' Perception on New Direction: Reading, Writing, and Critical Thinking

Abstract

This research work entitled "Teachers' Perception on New Direction: Reading, Writing and Critical Thinking" was an attempt to find out the natural understanding of B.Ed. level English teachers on ‘New Direction: Reading, Writing and Critical Thinking’. The main aims of this research is to analyze the textbook on the basis of its difficulty level, vocabulary selection and language skills, need and interest of the students, teachability and their strengths and weaknesses as point out by the teachers. For the sake of this, I purposively selected 30 teachers having at least one year teaching experience at the bachelor level from different campuses of Tanahun and Kathmandu districts by using non-random judgemental sampling procedure. I have prepared two types of questions i.e. open ended and close ended to find out the teachers' views on the different aspects of the textbook. What I find through this research is that the majority of the teachers drop their positive responses and I feel the same too. Interdisciplinary activities having newly emerging issues included in the textbook drive the students towards the critical thinking process. The subject matter of the text book contains wide range of reading texts which provide much more information to the students and leave plentiful opportunities for them to develop critical thinking ability. The thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter deals with the general background, importance of ELT, teaching of the English language, teaching as a profession, review of the related literature, objectives and significance of the study. The second chapter consists of the methodology which consists of the sources of data, sampling procedure, tools for data collection, process of data collection and limitations of the study. The third chapter comprises the analysis and interpretation of the textbook 'New Direction: Reading, Writing, and Critical Thinking’ in terms of its academic aspects. This is the main chapter of thesis writing. Here, the data/responses taken from the teachers are presented in an analytical way. The fourth chapter contains the findings and recommendations made upon the analysis and interpretation of the data. Finally, references and appendices are presented after the last chapter closed.