Netra Sharma

Examination malpractices as a phenomenon cross the boundaries set by time and geography and are often an issue in Nepal as well generating a considerable amount of discourse amongst students, teachers, parents and all the concerned. In theory, subjective testing does allow scorers the room for the play of their personal judgement. Nonetheless, a thread of argument prevails in the Nepalese academic circle, the argument attempting to curtail the judgement of scorers stating that scorers are obliged to award scores for what answer sheets contain and that they lack any right to judge whether or not the examinee performances might be the result of one or the other kind of malpractices that are also the product of the dereliction of invigilators and other test administration staff responsible for overseeing the performance of examinees. This paper follows this argument and endeavors to supply evidence for reinforcing the counter-argument that stands equally strong – the argument advocatin...

Communication in business is usually supposed to be precisely and directly targeted at the message. The present study was instigated to answer whether, as generally assumed, communication in business excludes the artistic or poetic use of language meant for entertainment. Using observation, recording and field notes as the study techniques, a corpus of 24000 words was collected in Nepali from the major open market sites and business hubs located within Nepal. The corpus was then translated into English. As a delimitation of the study, the aesthetic aspect of language use and usage was particularly focused and analyzed. The exploration suggests that the users of oral business Nepali (OBN) commonly entertain themselves and others side by side as they speak while conducting business transactions. They commonly achieve this end by creating art and imagination, expressing and creating humor, and making associations. A future direction would be to extend the study in terms of its scope an...

Critics of higher education in Nepal, even the concerned agencies, are much worried about the decreased quality resulting in low employability of higher education. The most common adjectives used by them to describe this state are ‘theoretical’ and/or ‘impractical’. The present case study was instigated when two college students of third year Bachelor’s degree majoring in English, one from Bachelor of Arts (B. A.) and the other from Bachelor of Education (B. Ed.), remarked that the excessive lecture-based classes at college were not worth attending regularly. Stemming from this problem, each of the classes was observed once to see if the students’ remark would be verified. As a triangulation process, the observation was then followed by an informal post-class interaction with the faculties whose classes were observed. This article, thus, basically assesses the efficacy of the excessive lecture (EL) within the limitation of teaching English to adult learners of higher education in Ne...

 In the present study, words and expressions from English used in Nepali while conducting business transactions orally were counted from a corpus comprising approximately 24,000 words using the "Navigation Pane" in the computer. A total of 875 English words including all repetitions were captured. Analyzing the contextual use-and-usage patterns of the English words from the data text, nine tendencies were identified: varying frequencies of the borrowed words; structural patterns of the loanwords; speaker-influence on hearer responses; brevity of the borrowed words/expressions; morphological simplicity; phonological deviation; borrowing as a need; borrowing as an option; and borrowing as a strategy of avoiding L1 vulgarism or indecency. The implication drawn from the study is important for translators and language teachers: there is no point in artificially translating commonly used loanwords borrowed from English to Nepali in the name of preserving the purity of the Nepali...

At present, Tribhuvan University (TU) seems to be in a sort of dilemma as to whether or not the semester system can be implemented in the programmers run by its faculties. Although TU authorities are still in extended discourse with the concerned stakeholders for the expansion of the semester programme, I sense some dilemma in the steps to be taken, the confusion propped by the fact that even the Master’s programmes under the semester system have not been extended horizontally to the campuses other than the Central Departments at Kirtipur and the two other campuses in the valley only in science education. In this context, this article attempts to synthesize the research findings akin to the semester system and, based on the researches reviewed, points out the possible hurdles that need to be taken into consideration in advance and handled with great caution. The article argues that, despite some socioeconomic challenges, the semester system is better than the annual one and that it ...

Although opinions often vary regarding what makes higher education inherently different from lower levels of education, it is generally agreed upon the fact that, among other parameters, the former is virtually characterized by higher levels of cognitive behavior on the part of students. Employing the theoretical framework of Bloom and associates (1956) and the subsequent revisions of the framework, this paper examines four question papers meant for testing the achievements of students in two courses of study taught at the Graduate level in English education. Upon a careful examination of the question from the perspective of Bloom et al.’s taxonomies, the data reveal that the focus of assessment either lacks clarity or basically lies on measuring the lower-order skills, a fact that goes counter to the very general assumption of higher education. Drawing from the findings, it is recommended that the concerned authority should review the extant assessment practices in line with the ad...

Have we transformed ourselves? The question that frequently arises in the discourse pertaining to the reintroduction of the semester system in the different faculties of Tribhuvan University has taken the shape of this paper that attempts to probe into the demeanour of both teachers and students in the English language education classrooms in the Kathmandu valley. The data collected through a brief survey of student opinions and informal discussion with concerned teachers portray the classroom scenarios that are difficult to differentiate from the ones that usually characterize the classrooms in the “annual system” of teaching and testing. This portrayal suggests the future course of action on the part of teachers and students both.

Tribhuvan University (TU), the oldest university in the country, was founded in 1959. It administered the first examinations in 1961. Since then it has come a long way and it has been conducting several examinations under both semester and annual systems. Nevertheless the standards of the examinations have raised questions among the stakeholders. Therefore, this article makes an attempt to find out what students and teachers have to say about the examinations conducted by TU. For this, a questionnaire based on the Likert Scale was used. The tool consisted of altogether 39 statements grouped under ten different constructs related to the standards of TU examinations. The tool was administered to 40 students and 10 teachers selected based on nonrandom sampling from the two campuses of TU located in Kathmandu. On the analysis of the responses, it was found that both students and teachers felt that there were shortcomings in TU examinations and that improvement were required in line with...