In the context of teaching English communicatively, it is supposed that the all-necessary linguistic support comes from the course books. The pupils interact with them, internalize the items of language so that they can use language for the purposes of everyday communication. The teacher is only a facilitator. Despite these good intentions, the realities of the classroom are often different. The paper discusses that teachers will have to employ a variety of techniques to enable students become functionally OK in English in any EFL situation.
(Paper presented by David L. Nandigam at the Senior Teachers & Inspectors’ Conference (SETIC 2000), Ministry of Education, Oman 6 – 8 November 2000)

This paper describes how the concepts pf skills cycle embedded in OWTE philosophy ( materials currently used in the Ministry of Education schools) promotes higher order learning skills such as study skills, which are necessary for pupils to pursue English for Academic Purposes for their studies at tertiary levels. Then, secondly, it describes the challenges teachers face in the EFL situation such as in Oman with respect to teaching at secondary level and concludes some proposals to remedy them.
(Paper presented by David L. Nandigam at the First Annual national Conference, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman 21 – 22 March 2001)

The paper begins discussing the theoretical aspects of continuous assessment to present its strengths in reshaping not only the cognitive outcomes of the pupils, but their affective and behavioral outcomes as well. Then it unpacks certain elements of OWTE in order to investigate the propensity of task-based syllabuses such as OWTE for continuous classroom assessment.
(Paper presented by David L. Nandigam at the English Teachers & Inspectors’ Conference (ETIC 2002), Ministry of Education, Oman 11 – 13 February 2002)

Information Technology has come to stay and has implications in the language classroom. The focus of this paper is on the preparation of learners to be effective users of this emerging technologies. Thus, this paper suggest sensitive integration of appropriate information processing skills into curriculum, and examines the propensity of task-based materials for such an integration. Then it reports a web-page building project at Al Mutanabbi Secondary School, Ibra to demonstrate how such skills can promote learners to take on the responsibility of self-learning.
(Paper presented by David L. Nandigam at the Second Annual National Conference, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman 27 – 28 March 2002)

In Communicative syllabuses such as OWTE where meaning has primacy over form, a successful derivation of meaning is elusive without proper development of learners’ knowledge of lexical chains. Thus, this paper, first of all, attempts to provide a rationale and design for lexically based language teaching; and then discusses appropriate instructional methodology that puts particular emphasis on language use.

Ownership is what makes one involve in his/her workmanship. The purpose of involving pupils in web-projects is to enable them develop independent theme-based web pages in English where they publish what they gather about a given/chosen topic.

Click the link below to access some of the articles of  "Rustaq Review"  contributed by Mr.T.Elia, Senior Inspector of English (1984-2002), Batinah South Region: