Maulana Muhammad Ali - A Strategic Point in Indo-Muslim Politics (Comment)

‘A great man’, says Justice Oliver Wendell, Jr, ‘represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in being there’. (italic ours). And Maulana Muhammad Ali was one such nerve-centre in Indo-Muslim society during the second and third decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, he was one such strategic point in the onward march of Indo-Muslim politics that eventually found culmination and crystallization in the emergence of Pakistan. Actually no one else represented the tone, tenor and temper of the romanticist, Khilafatist era (in the 1910s and 1920s) as he did in his hectic life, his revolutionary activities his numerous discomfitures, and in his tragic death. Whether he led a hectic life, whether he took recourse to a revolutionary path, or whether he goaded himself to die a tragic death outside the frontiers of his motherland cataclysmically, in whatever he did, he, consciously or unconsciously, carried forward the campaign of Indo-Muslim history: the redemption of Islam in India and abroad. In other words, he stood, above all, for an honourable existence for Muslims in India and in the rest of the troubled Muslim world in the existential crisis that convulsed Muslim India and that world.

Using Technology for Language Teaching in Pakistan: A Case Study of Computer Assisted Language Learning

Using Technology for Language Teaching in Pakistan: A Case Study of Computer Assisted Language Learning Use of computers technology has been in vogue for several decades now. In Pakistan it is relatively new but it is soon going to complete a decade of its realization and integration in language teaching at national level. This research seeks an investigation into the issue of using technology in English language teaching in Pakistan. In order to meet the challenges of the rapid developments in the field of education throughout the world and to keep pace with technological innovations in an EFL/ESL classroom, the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan launched an exclusive project named ELTR in 2004. What lead to the launch of this project at higher education level was National Committee on English which had been set up in 2003. The committee reviewed the current trends and practices for teaching English language in Pakistani higher education institutions and proposed suggestions which became the foundation for ELTR project. During the first and the ongoing second phase of this project, HEC imparted CALL training.to English language teachers working in public sector colleges and universities. The study aims at evaluating the impact of these training courses in actual teaching practice as well as teachers' perceptions about the use and effectiveness of CALL in EFL classrooms. To assess the worth of CALL training courses, this research draws upon the responses of those who participated in these courses and those who planned or conducted them. Moreover, an official report submitted to HEC about the work done in the filed of CALL in Pakistan under ELTR project over 2005-07 is also a part of this research. The contents of the report are analysed and discussed to reach a plausible conclusion of what has been achieved and what needs to be done further in order to incorporate technology in English language teaching in Pakistan in a positive direction.