BBC Janala media products – use and reach

Over 44 million people are aware of at least one EIA media (BBC Janala) product, and 28 million people have watched or used one. Over 10.25 million people are regular users of EIA media (BBC Janala) products - this compares to 7.5 million in 2011.

• • English language learning drama show Bishaash was seen by 20.3 million viewers.
• • The first series of Mojay Mojay Shekha attracted 18.1 million viewers.
• • The second series was watched by 14.2 million during the first  month.
• • Youth-based edutainment show BBC Buzz reached 4.8 million viewers.
• • Almost 3.4 million have read the English learning lessons published in the newspaper Prothom Alo. The number of 
•   weekly  lesson readers is high, at almost 1.2 million.
• • The web-based Amar Engreji course launched in March 2012. Since then, almost 204,000 have registered for it.
• • To August 2012, the website was visited by over 1.7 million users; an average 2500 visits per day.
• •  From its launch in 2009 to November 2014, the BBC Janala mobile service has received almost 25 million calls
• •  50,000 BBC Janala English learning CDs have been sold.

Attitudes/perceptions

3 years after the launch of the BBC Janala platform: Increased motivation

• • 8.8 million people felt they had learnt English from BBC Janala media products
• • 7.7 million said they used the English learnt from BBC Janala.
• • 6 million could provide a specific example of the English learnt
• • 68% who felt they learnt something from BBC Janala, could recall words or phrases learnt in English.
• • Mobile phone users who were tracked over a year had increased motivation and confidence to use English.
• • A four-year cohort panel study showed that website usage increased significantly from 5% to 35%.
• • Five-moth drama panel research showed that panellists who watched Bishaash and Mojay Mojay Shekha regularly  
•   were motivated to use other BBC Janala products, including BBC Janala Mobile and Prothom Alo lessons.

Reducing Barriers

• •    Fewer people (22%) think English is “difficult to learn” than the baseline study (44%).
• •    Fewer people (38%) think English is “expensive to learn” compared to the baseline (27%).
• •    Over a third of TV viewers (38%) from the lowest socioeconomic class are using BBC Janala.
• •    BBC Janala is attracting a strong female audience - 44% of users are female.

Developing an ELT - supportive media environment

• •    A national newspaper launched English lessons using a cartoon character similar to BBC Janala’s Rinku.
• •    With help from a private university, a national English daily launched an English learning course for
•       secondary school children.

 Two media training courses took place in 2012 with ELT professionals. Media practitioners working to produce EIA products learn new skills, knowledge and working practices, which they can apply to the Bangladesh media sector.

The EIA programme includes a comprehensive research, monitoring and evaluation (RME) component which runs across the project’s activities. It plays a vital role in enabling EIA school component to measure the effectiveness and impact of the intervention.

Research results shows

Classroom practice of English teachers improved after 4 months and this was sustained a year later.

Key changes
•    Substantial and sustained increase in teachers’ spoken English:
•    71% of primary teachers’ classroom talk was in English (72% after 12 months).
•    86% of secondary teachers’ classroom talk was in English (79% after 16 months).
•    Substantial and sustained increase in student talk
•    Primary students were talking for 27% of the lesson; teachers were talking for a third.
•    Secondary students were talking for 23% of the lesson; teachers were talking for a third.

After 12 months of EIA, there were improvements in English language competency for students and teachers. In particular:

Students
•    50% of primary students achieved Grade 1 or above, compared to 35% before EIA.
•    90% of secondary students achieved Grade 1 or above, compared to 75% before EIA.

Teachers
•    Shift to scoring higher grades (3-7) (from lower grades (0-2) before EIA.

Attitudes/perceptions

After 4-6 months of EIA:

Teachers
•    Teachers were positive about EIA activities and learning English.
•    Over 80% said they mostly used English in the classroom.
•    Over 90% said they designed activities to enable interaction and students liked these.
•    Almost all reported that EIA had helped improve their own English.

Students
•    There had been success in creating positive student views to EIA activities.
•    They liked the activities which promoted opportunities for them to talk and listen to audio.
•    They expressed positive views to all EIA methods and materials used by teachers.

Over 80% said that speaking English is essential to learn English.

Classroom changes matter

Teachers matter! International research shows teachers to be the linchpin of quality improvement and the entry point for changes in learning. How a teacher teaches in the classroom makes a huge difference to children’s learning. EIA therefore puts classrooms at the centre of teachers’ professional development.

Talking matters! To learn a new language well, students need to actively participate in their learning and have many opportunities to speak, communicate and use the new language. EIA teacher development activities are therefore all about more communicative ways of teaching.

 Inside EIA classrooms
Through the EIA teacher development intervention, classes are substantially more communicative than before, and students are now enjoying many more opportunities to speak and communicate in English.

Research by the Institute of Education and Research, Dhaka University shows that teachers are talking half as much as they did before; instead, they are using different activities that engage students very actively in their lessons. In EIA classrooms, students now talk for about one fourth of the total class time. In a 40-minute class students are speaking for 10 minutes, which is in line with international best practice, and nine minutes of that talk is in English. Teachers are also using more English than Bangla, with over 70% of their talk in English. In one District, EIA is now known as the “silence-breaking” programme!

As well as speaking skills, students’ other language skills (reading, writing and listening) are developing in a noticeable way. For example, Government Education Officers have observed that, in almost all (more than 85%) of classes seen, teachers are using group and pair work with their students in a wide range of learning activities.

School-based approach; magnified uptake

These changes in the classrooms are being driven by EIA’s innovative teacher development approaches and digital materials. EIA teachers report that using EIA activities in their classrooms, using teacher development videos and classroom audios, and support from their head teachers are very important for their professional development. Teachers also highly value regular local meetings with teachers from neighbouring schools.

Three quarters of primary teachers and two thirds of secondary teachers report that they use the videos at least once a week for their professional development. Almost all primary teachers and three quarters of secondary teachers report that they carry out EIA classroom activities every week.


Positive change
EIA approaches have brought a positive response from both teachers and students towards English teaching and learning. Nine out of ten teachers report that EIA helps them to improve their own English, and has an impact on the way they teach.

Nearly all (95%) students say that English is important for their life whereas, five years ago, half of them thought that it was not, and two-thirds now say that English is easy and fun to learn.

English in Action (EIA) is a nine-year programme which will provide professional development to 51,000 teachers by 2017. This massive undertaking was not conceived as a programme with a fixed end date; rather, the idea or ethos behind it is to provide a vehicle for on-going self-supported learning after the programme officially ends. To this end, the idea of the ‘trainer in the hand’ emerged as a viable way to provide teachers with the professional development required to meet EIA’s goal after 2017.

The ‘trainer in the hand’ is a mobile device (iPod in the programme’s pilot phase; currently a low-cost mobile phone) which is used not as a phone or for accessing the internet, but as a device for hosting a range of teacher professional development materials (video and audio) which can be easily accessed by teachers anywhere and at any time.  

In a pilot study (2009-2010), carried out to test the viability of the ‘trainer in your hand’ idea, EIA provided teacher professional development resources (audio and video) pre-loaded on to the Apple iPod Nano (primary) and Touch (secondary). In addition to teacher professional development materials, these devices included a suite of audio resources for teachers to use in the classroom to support the national course textbook. Teachers were also supplied with a portable, rechargeable speaker. The ‘trainer in your hand’ set of professional development resources to support primary teachers’ own learning included 18 video clips and 4 audio recordings that exemplified a range of correct and incorrect English communicative language teaching (CLT) classroom practices. It is intended for teachers to use on their own. Figure 1 shows one of the ICT-enhanced teacher professional development videos, entitled ‘Doing pair-work’, on the mobile device; the red cross and green tick (lower right-hand corner) indicate the correct and incorrect ways to introduce and implement pair work in an English CLT classroom. The secondary teachers were supplied with an iPod Touch with 46 audio files dedicated to teacher professional development.

Following this, in the EIA programme’s pilot phase, 475 primary teachers were given an iPod Nano and 225 secondary teachers were given the iPod Touch. The secondary teachers’ iPod Touch was preloaded with audio podcasts, enhanced with synchronized text and images which provided the core of their ICT-enhanced professional development materials. They also received a print-based teacher professional development package entitled English for Today in Action, which presented 12 CLT modules (active listening, predictive listening, using visual aids, creative writing, and so on) that could be adapted and used to teach communicative English.

In 2011, we finished field-testing the same audio and video resources on a much cheaper mobile phone-based kit using the Nokia C1-01. This phone sells for £38 and supports up to a 32 gigabyte secure digital (SD) card which holds all of EIA’s materials. EIA materials were also field-tested on micro SD cards, which were supplied to the teachers for use with their own mobile phones.

Our research on the pilot phase teachers showed that the support provided through the materials is seen as both relevant and effective; in particular, the digital content on the media players is highly valued. Using audio and video has proved to be tremendously helpful in realising the current classroom-based changes. As using audio and video for increased teacher support, and the use of audio in particular, is such a critical success factor, it continues to be a core part of our delivery model now and will be in the future. One of the key advantages of the ‘teacher in the hand’ mentioned by the teachers is that professional development is provided through mobile technology which gives them the freedom to learn at their own pace, when and where they want. In addition, the interactive nature of the classroom methods and materials, delivered through audio, has proven to be highly effective in reaching a large number of children and is changing the way in which English is taught and learnt. Teachers find it relatively easy to use the technology and to actively integrate the audio in to their teaching.

But even more significant is the proven technological appropriacy of the ‘trainer in the hand’ – teachers are able to watch demonstrations of classroom practice which reflect their real life professional situations and challenges.  In the latest version of the EIA materials, this has been taken several stages further with all the teachers used being themselves participants in the pilot, and all the filming carried out in their real classroom with their classes.  This sense of authenticity helps the teachers to feel the direct relevance of the programme and shows that their realities have been incorporated into all the materials hosted on the ‘trainer in the hand’.  All this is now mediated via a Bangladeshi narrator who introduces and then comments on each video clip – creating a further sense of ‘presence’.  Early indications of the new materials are that this greatly enhanced sense of authenticity and classroom reality, which provides a backdrop to improving pedagogy, is greatly appreciated by the teachers.