Mr. Kazi Abu Bakar Siddique, Lecturer at BRAC Institute of Languages (BIL), conducted a series of four workshops at the Savar Residential Campus to help develop students’ reading and writing skills. Held in the first two weeks of February 2017, these interactive workshops shed light on students' existing skills on reading and writing and introduced newer approaches to improve their performance.
The first workshop titled Why Reading Matters focused on a brief discussion on the several benefits of reading, common reading skills, analyzing sample extracts from famous books and answering critical questions related to the topic of a text. The workshop also focused on the idea of ‘great books’ and how and when to approach them.
The second workshop, The Illusions of Writing Well, featured an interactive discussion based on ‘How to Write Well’, looking at the basic writing skills. The workshop was followed by a short writing activity and a feedback session.
The third workshop, Impromptu Poetry, a form related to Creative Writing, focused on presentation of instantly composed poetry with particular emphasis on the beauty of language. At the beginning of the session, the idea of impromptu poetry was introduced and a few sample presentations were shown to motivate the students.
The fourth workshop, Creative Non-fiction, introduced the genre with its various forms, discussing some remarkable pieces, and inspired the students with some helpful tips to write creative non-fiction pieces in the session.
The workshops proved to be quite useful as mentioned by the students who attended the sessions. However, like any learning workshop/activity, it had been agreed upon by the majority of the students in the after-workshop discussions that continuous practice needs to be ensured for significant improvement.