ELT for prisoners: A case study of an innovative six-week Spoken English and Personality Development Programme for the inmates of Burail Jail, Chandigarh based on the Developmental Approach to Language Teaching (DLT)
1.0 Introduction
This paper explores a unique six-week long English Language Teaching (ELT) Programme custom-made for some 20 inmates of Burail Jail at Chandigarh from 1 February to 5 March 2008 at the request of the jail warden. The jail authorities felt that such a course would be useful for the undertrails imprisoned for criminal activity against society (murder, drugs, female infanticide, dowry-death, killings, etc.). The idea was that after being released the prisoners would be able to utilize their newly gained skills in Spoken English and the insights that they gained into developmental processes in settling back into life, thus helping them in their rehabilitation.
The course was taught and devised by the author, who teaches Linguistics to MA II year students at the DAV College, Chandigarh; and two of his students, who had training in English Language Teaching, and had been introduced to the principles of the Developmental Approach to Language Teaching (DLT).
The DLT approach was founded by the author in 2004 while teaching a similar course at the Panjab University to a wide range of students—employees of the University, research scholars and children of the University employees. A few papers highlighting the features of the DLT approach have already been published nationally and internationally.
2.0 Developmental Approach to Language Teaching
The Developmental Approach to Language Teaching (DLT) consists of a new framework to teach ‘Global English’ (conceptually for us, an evolving, non-imperialistic, and non-cultural variety that contains inputs from various cultures, nations and people) as a universal auxiliary language to the children across the globe. It sets out the parameters required to teach a global language since...