Report on Academic
Specialist Visit to Egypt: November 27 to December 11, 1998
By Dr.
David E. Eskey,
University of Southern California
(with Dr. Eleanor Black)
About the Specialist
Dr. David E. Eskey is Professor of Education
and Director of the American Language Institute at the University
of Southern California. He earned his Ph.D. in English and MA in Linguistics
at the University of Pittsburgh, his MA in English at Columbia University,
and his BA in English at Pennsylvania State University. In the US
he has taught at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of
Pittsburgh; he has also taught extensively abroad at the American
Institute of Languages in Baghdad, Iraq, the American University of
Beirut in Lebanon, and Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand.
He has served as a consultant to Educational Testing Service (ETS),
USIA, USAID, ARAMCO, the Hariri Foundation, the Asia Foundation, and
as a national consultant to the National Association for Foreign Student
Affairs (NAFSA). He is both coeditor and co-author of Teaching
Second Language Reading for Academic Purposes (Addison-Wesley,
1986) and Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading (Cambridge,
1988).
Areas of Specialization
Second-language literacy; program and
course design; the administration of ESL programs; ESL teacher education.
Trip Report
My partner, Dr. Eleanor Black, and I
delivered five workshops on the teaching of second-language reading
in Heliopolis, Suez, Assiut, Minya, and Alexandria to mixed groups
of teachers, administrators, and university students. We offered a
choice--teaching literary texts or expository texts--to each site:
some chose the former, some the latter. We also distributed a substantial
packet of materials to each group, including materials for teaching
both kinds of texts. As a practitioner with extensive public school
experience, Dr. Black provided invaluable expertise in the hands-on
portion of the workshops. At the AUC conference, I delivered a plenary
address on syllabus design and participated in various supplementary
presentations and discussions. During all of these activities, we
were accompanied by RELO Richard Boyum and FSN/ESL Senior Specialist
Margo Abdel-Aziz (sometimes in tandem, sometimes singly) who provided
us with outstanding services, support, and advice.
Although most of the sites we visited
(mainly university campuses) were in reasonably good shape, English
teaching in Egypt, like other kinds of education, clearly suffers
from the usual list of third-world woes--overcrowded classrooms, inadequate
resources, and underpaid teachers. English is nevertheless well established
as the primary foreign language, and most people want to learn it
and work hard at doing so. At every site we visited, there was great
enthusiasm for improving their programs in the teaching of English
by means of better teacher training and the development of better
methods and materials for teachers to work with.
Despite the nation's strong commitment
to English, however, the area in which Eleanor and I were working--reading
(and, by extension, literacy)--constitutes a major problem for Egyptian
teachers of English. Like most of the cultures of the Middle East,
Egypt is primarily an oral culture in which people do not read extensively
even in their native languages, let alone a foreign language like
English. Having little access to native speakers of English, most
Egyptian learners are thus deprived of the major source available
to them-- written texts in English--of the input that they need to
develop higher levels of proficiency in the language.
A second problem is pedagogical tradition.
Most education in Egypt is based on a direct teaching model in which
students spend large amounts of time in formal classes but little
time in learning on their own. Since reading cannot really be taught
in a classroom but requires many hours of solitary practice, most
students simply do not read enough to become more proficient readers
of English and therefore never learn to take advantage of the major
language-learning opportunities that reading in a foreign language
provides.
Given the current situation, I would
therefore recommend that all of those involved in assisting English
teaching in Egypt devote significant time and resources to improving
the teaching of reading in that country. This would be time and money
well spent if our ultimate goal is to raise the standard of proficiency
among the millions of English language learners in Egypt.
Suggested Bibliography
The following might prove especially
helpful to current and prospective teachers of ESL reading in Egypt:
