2nd HELE [History of English Language Education] India Conference

Here's a brief report on the 2nd_HELE [History of English Language Education] India conference(12th-13th December 2023), Hyderabad.

Following on from the 1st HELE India conference, in Delhi in December last year, the conference was held in the calm and green environment of the University of Hyderabad campus. Organized, as last year, jointly with the AINET Association of English Teachers, the conference was also supported by the A.S. Hornby Educational Trust and the university's Institute of Eminence. Professors Sunita Mishra of CELS, University of Hyderabad, and Amol Padwad of AINET and Ambedkar University Delhi were the conference co-convenors.

Professor Sunita Mishra opening the conference (photo by Santosh Mahapatra)

As can be seen from the ffull conference_programme here, there were four plenary papers, by Professors Richard Smith (University of Warwick), Parimala Rao (Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi), M. Sridhar (retd., University of Hyderabad) and Shreesh Chaudhary (retd., IIT Madras). These addressed the overall conference theme of 'History of English Language Education: Theory and Practices' from different angles, involving perspectives from history of ELT (Smith), history of education (Rao), translation studies (Sridhar) and sociolinguistics (Chaudhary). There was also a panel discussion on 'Promoting HELE in academia', chaired by Prof. Sunita Mishra with panelists P. Sailaja, Parimala Rao, Richard Smith, Atanu Bhattacharya and Santosh Mahapatra.

More than 20 separate paper presentations in two parallel strands dealt with topics in 19th–20th-century English teaching and learning in India ranging from national policies and their impact or otherwise in the various (pre-Independence) Presidencies and (post-Independence) States of India to specific institutions, textbooks and local practices. The role of Indian languages other than English was not neglected, and a rich picture of the complexities of English learning and teaching in India emerged overall.

The future for research into English language education in India looks bright, with a HELE Studies Society being constituted at the conference and several PhD scholars having presented on papers with historical themes. An emerging challenge is how to attract PhD students at the outset of their research, to ensure a further expansion of good-quality historical research in the Indian context.

Prof. Amol Padwad announces formation of the HELE Studies Society (photo by Richard Smith)

At the Warwick ELT Archive we are supporting ELE researchers in India where we can and have accessed materials in the British Library to assist with their research, as well as uploading various relevant materials held in our collection. We are now contributing to the development of a shared resource of digitized primary and secondary source material to facilitate further research. Building on a previous research project, Richard Smith has been exploring the post-war involvement of the British Council in Indian ELE, while he and Jason Anderson are also making a special study of N.S. Prabhu's Communicational Teaching Project in Bangalore. Ashish Joe Sathyadas Sheela Saroj, a University of Hyderabad PhD student currently with us on a one-year Commonwealth scholaship, has been pursuing his studies of 19th-century English education in South Travancore, while Shambhavi Singh and Aichee Bhattacharya, two new PhD students from India, have recently joined our HoLLT Research Circle. Going forward, we also hope to link up more closely with the archive / historical collection of textbooks which has been developed at the University of Hyderabad by Professors P. Sailaja and Sunita Mishra at the same time as liaising with a team involving Amol Padwad, Krishna Dixit, Atana Bhattacharya and Vennela R., whose research is being supported by the Hornby Trust.

Richard Smith : 23 Dec 2023 14:23 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem