Iatefl

In the April 2015 IATEFL column, I talked about the increasing emphasis IATEFL is placing on its development work and, in the July issue of ELTJ, Marjorie Rosenberg mentioned the fundraising activity that we are trying to promote that helps to underpin IATEFL’s charitable activities. The charity bike ride mentioned in her piece raised a lot of money for our work on IATEFL Projects and we are very happy about this. We are planning more of this type of activity; see the ‘plugs’ at the end of this piece. Let me give you an illustration of why this kind of activity is important. The funding raised this year is going to the Cameroon English Language and Literature Teachers’ Association (CAMELTA, see http://camelta-cameroon.weebly.com). If you want to get a full insight into the particular circumstances of Cameroon, you can see Harry Kuchah’s plenary online (available at https://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/ 2015/session/plenary-harry-kuchah). However, I am going to pick up on a few key points here and connect these to a talk I went to recently about schools in Manchester in the UK. The plenary’s title was ‘ELT in difficult circumstances’ and Harry Kuchah highlighted large and multi-grade classrooms, lack of materials, the influence of French medium teaching (much of Cameroon is French-speaking), and very high temperatures. He also highlighted the negative impact that many of the outside interventions that are imported from the Global North have. These are delivered directly into the schools and often many such initiatives arrive at the same time (see also Kuchah and Smith 2011).