Committed to PEOPLE'S RIGHT TO KNOW Vol. 5 Num 6 Wed. June 02, 2004       Letters to Editor Teaching English Ahmad Raiyan, Khilgaon Govt. High School, Dhaka The latest revamp in the English teaching method (for Bengali medium) at the school level was oriented to enhancing the students' 'free-hand' writing skill. The new 'communicative system', introduced to emphasise creativity rather than memorising, isn't being as effective as it was supposed to be. Sixty marks out of 200 are still there in their hands, which they just memorise and scribble down onto the answer script, with their merit completely unused. The schools still provide the students with some ever-trite syllabuses for compositions, paragraphs, letters, applications and so on. So, to get the highest mark in the class, almost everyone memorises those. Memorising is something that silently snatches away creativity . Students with high prolific composition books get better marks than those who try themselves. But often those so called 'good students' are seen sweating when asked to write a single mistake-free sentence in English. Doesn't it look like a memory test? Even though there are no precise English syllabuses for the SSC exams, the students still go on memorising. They memorise a number of those items, wavering between 30 and 40 each year, because the topics covered in the SSC exams are common , almost the same every year and easily predictable. Unless some unknown, unseen and interesting topics replace those known, trite and predictable ones, the students eventually can never improve their English.