AN INNOVATIVE WAY OF TEACHING ENGLISH: AN EXPERIMENT FROM THE TRIBAL ZONES OF INDIA (Pages 49-60) by S. M. John Kennedy* and Dr. K. Anbazhagan** in THE INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH SPECIALIST / ISSN: 2350-1499 (Online); 2350-0751 (Print)

Jesuit Madurai Province has been running nine Tamil medium schools in Tamil Nadu, India. A special IELT (Integrated English Language Teaching) programme to promote the communicative competence of the students of VI, VII and VIII standards in English is being implemented since 2007 in all these nine Jesuit schools. The pitiable factor is that though Tamil medium students study and learn English from the first standard onwards up to twelfth standard, they find it extremely difficult to speak and write in English even after completing their twelfth standard. This interesting and interactive; creative and communicative, participative and practical means and methods of teaching and learning of English through motivational clippings, activities, role-plays, language games, songs, videos, audios, stories, kinesthetic, project works, pictures etc have remarkably enhanced the communicative capacity of our target students. Thus it is a successful IELT story which could be emulated in other schools too in Tamil Nadu. This, IELT venture includes the following five elements: Motivation sessions, language games/activities, rhymes, stories and case studies. The scholar conducted this programme as ten days package in 14 places among mostly tribal students in the middle zones of India. This paper presents the details of the IELT programme and its impact among the tribal students in the middle zones of India. Key Words: communicative competence, IELT (Integrated English Language Teaching), tribal students etc.