Teaching, learning and evaluation are the three important activities of educational system and they are independent as well as interdependent activities. For the system to be more effective, all the activities should be given equal importance. The ineffectiveness of any one of these will affect the system inexplicably. But the first two are, to a greater extent, emphasized in the educational system. Evaluation, as such, is not cared enough not only in language education but in other studies also. In fact, the process and product are very much important as far as evaluation is concerned. Apart from these two factors, namely, process and product, the ultimate objective of language education is to scientifically and systematically evaluate the competence and performance of the learners.
The National Testing Service-India established in the Central Institute of Indian Languages to cater to the successful pedagogical needs of scientific and systematic teaching, learning and evaluation in different levels of language education has three primary objectives, namely, (i) creation of nationwide consensus and awareness about concrete methods and purposes of evaluation, (ii) production of basic reference materials and (iii) development of training human resources in this area. The NTS-India has been conducting orientation programmes for the teachers for successful implementation of the stimulating research findings on the concept based continuum of graded syllabi containing separate dimensions for language and literature.
The General Frame of Reference was first prepared in English by the Centre for Testing and Evaluation of the institute to assess the level of mastery in language and literature and the consequential growth of learner's personality.
NTS-I has brought out two books one each for language & literature explaining the terms found in the GFR so as to facilitate the classroom teachers to understand these concepts and write appropriate items to assess the different components of language & literature.
In continuation of the efforts made in this direction, NTS-1 now bringing out a book on ‘Teaching and Evaluation of Tamil Epics’. Epics, being a major component of the poetry section of the Tamil textbooks across the curriculum, a detailed discussion on the different aspects of this literary genreanalyzing the different methods of teaching & evaluating epics will be of great help to the classroom teachers as well as the test developers & item writers.
The present volume contains 25 papers written by experienced teachers and young scholars as well, each one taking up the different aspects of Tamil epics. This is the anthology of the papers presented in the seminar conference held at Thiruvalluvar University, Vellore between 06/03/2014 and 07/03/2014. Hope this material fulfills the requirements of the stakeholders in the field of teaching, learning & evaluating Tamil.
Dr. M. Balakumar, officer In charge, NTS-1 and his team members deserve high appreciation for taking up this task of focusing on a particular literary genre and discussing meticulously the different issues involved in teaching and evaluating of epics. I wish and hope Dr. M. Balakumar and his team brings out more and more such volumes to help those involved in teaching and evaluating Indian languages.
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