The Practices and Challenges of Teaching English in Oromia Police College: Focus on Degree Program

Abstract

This study aimed at describing the practices and challenges of teaching English in Oromia Police College: Degree trainees in focus to achieve the objective of the study 122 degree police trainees were selected using comprehensive sampling technique as the participants of the research. The purpose of the study was to explore the teaching learning practices of teachers and police trainees, classroom activities often used by the teacher, the roles of teachers and students in teaching and learning ESP, the factors that cause challenges in teaching English. Descriptive case study with mixed methods research was employed to guide the research. Three instruments were used in order to gather sufficient and reliable data. These are: questionnaire for student, interview for teachers and classroom observation. The data obtained through the questionnaire and semi-structured interview were organized under similar category and analyzed quantitatively by using frequency and percentage then followed by qualitative description. The findings of the study demonstrated that teachers were not employing appropriate English teaching to police trainees according to the profession approaches rather they were using the customary general English teaching method and the police trainees were not happy with the methodology their teachers employed. There was no good culture of using more recent language teaching techniques such as pair work, small group work and sometimes individual work, information gap and problem solving that could promote active learning in language lessons. As Oromia Police College is military oriented college, all the English Language teaching and learning needs to employ ESP approach and trainees should equip with their professional vocabularies. On the other hand, students were mostly interested to practice police and military oriented passage, audios, grammar and written texts, role play, group and pair works, word games, incident reports, videos, conversational drills, problem solving activities, information gap activities. Furthermore, the teachers didn’t allocate ample time so that students could complete different tasks in the class. The mechanism of feedback provision for students was also not encouraging. Though teachers were doing their best according to the classroom observation and teachers interview, the data drown from the entire dat