4 A beneficial view of learning (There is no lesson that is not
‘beneficial’)
Another frequent word in students’ comments about what they ‘gain’ from the lesson is
‘benefit/beneficial’ ( pronounced as ‘ah-kyo’ in Burmese). Initially, the researcher
treated the word ‘ah-kyo’ as a synonym for (‘useful’) (pronounced as ‘ah-thonewin’
in Burmese) both in her earlier translation of the questionnaire data and in the interviews.
However, the need to treat these words (‘ah-kyo’ and ‘ah-thone-win’) separately
was brought to the researcher’s consciousness while translating a student’s comment in
the questionnaire in which she expressed explicitly that the lesson was ‘beneficial rather
than useful’ (‘ah-kyo’ rather than ‘ah-thone-win’):
This