Dr. K.N. Anandan

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Recall the beliefs quoted in the previous blog. The global marketing of English depends upon keeping these beliefs alive in the minds of people. When these beliefs are translated into practice, decisions will have to be taken on several matters such as what kind of English is to be taught and learnt, what the content and the nature of materials could be, what methodology is to be used, who should teach the language and so on. In addition to these, propaganda mechanisms and agencies would become necessary to ensure that only those products whether they are the materials, methodology, or human resources, that are in tune with these decisions will get space in the international market. This is how only those products that follow the parameters of what is labelled as Standard English dominate in the market. Consequently, a situation arises where a single global or centralised teaching-learning English package will be projected as what is needed for all learners and teachers across the world. Eventually, market economy will be able to control the academic domain. It is never critically examined whether these products will suffice to meet the actual needs of the learners.

So long as English is conceived as a finished product the core issues involved in learning the language will never be discerned. They will be detected only if the language is perceived as a political and historical phenomenon. Unfortunately, the global packages of the so-called Standard English marketed as quality products do not approach the language as a political and historical phenomenon. Nor do they approach language holistically as an innate system. Instead they hold and propagate a dubious claim namely, English can be mastered through practising LSRW by virtue of treating language as discrete elements such as grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, etc.

Consider for example, Case 1. The British Council has undertaken a massive project of training 750,000 master trainers in English across the country by the year 2014, a project that was conceived by Gordon Brown, the British prime minister in 2008. What message does the world get when the State or central governments entrust the British council to train English teachers? The British Council has a very clearly defined agenda; it is the agency designated to materialize the colonial agenda of establishing its academic control over the world population through the spreading of English. This is done by virtue of a simple mechanism. The training of select master trainers is directly done by the British council which  is cascaded down the line with the help of these master trainers. The expenses for all the training programmes is to be met by the concerned state government but the modules for  the training will be developed by the British council. The packages insist that all users of English irrespective of their country should be using English according to the parameters of Standard English as propagated by the BC. This insistence leads into a linguistic divide within English in the sense that a particular variety of English gets upper hand as Standard English whereas the other varieties of English are marginalised under the label of non-Standard English. This in fact results in the demolishing of the linguistic and cultural identity of the native speakers of the non-Standard varieties of English. The problem will be much more intense in the case of the native speakers of other languages who are compelled to learn the nuances of Standard English. This in true sense is nothing but linguistic imperialism which at any cost needs to be resisted. 

(to be continued)

 Dr. K.N.  Anandan

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Let me reiterate the point I was trying to make in the previous post: If at all we are serious about empowering English teachers  we have to resist the spread of linguistic imperialism in our country. I would like to illustrate the point with the help of a few cases:

Case 1

Several states in the country have entrusted the British Council (BC) to train teachers in English. To begin with, a team of master trainers will be trained by the BC who in turn will be cascading the training down the line to the practising teachers. The module for these trainings is developed by the BC.

Case 2

In Kerala, six native speakers of English were deployed as special English teachers at the Government Vocational Higher Secondary School at Nilambur, under ‘Sadgamaya’, a project jointly implemented by the Department of Education and the Nilambur municipal body, with UNICEF association. The authorities placed an advertisement in a leading travel magazine in the UK to get English teachers from Britain who could teach a correct and uniform accent. They avoided applications from German and French citizens living in the UK. The six teachers were selected after interviewing 10 shortlisted applicants. Seeing the level of interest from both sides, officials have planned to implement the project in 70-odd schools in the region next. 

Case 3

The Government of AP have decided to open 355 model schools in the State with classes 6 to 12 in conformity with the KV template where the medium of English will be English. In the first year of their launching the model schools will have classes 6, 7, 8 and 11 will be subsequently up-scaled to classes 9 and 12. These schools are located in villages and the learners who are going to be enrolled in these schools will be from the primary schools in the locality. Since the learners will be hailing from households around the school they will be residing at their own homes. However, hostel facilities will be provided to girls. These learners will have undergone lower primary education at the schools in the locality where the medium of instruction is Telugu. 

Case 4

I found the following advertisement (it is one, isn’t it?) painted on the compound wall of a Government Lower Primary school which has been serving the society for more than five decades.

Quality Education to All
GLP School,@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
English Medium divisions in Class 1 in June 2010
Admission started
Classes taken by expert teachers

Case 5

Short term courses conducted by state level and national level institutions and agencies for the development of proficiency in English happen to be within the framework of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) which target a certain variety of English designated as Standard English.

Case 6

The media report that across the country there has been a consistent increase in the flow of students from the government schools where the medium of instruction is English to English medium schools in the private sector.

These are apparently independent cases but they are in fact the reflections of certain common belief systems that have been got deeply instilled in the minds of people through several decades. The opening of parallel English medium divisions in government schools, the mushrooming of English medium schools in the private sector and the opening of English medium schools in the government sector, introducing English from class 1 onwards, entrusting the British council for training teachers of English in the country, deploying native speakers of English in schools to teach English, the clamour for correct pronunciation and the fragmentary and skill-based approach to the teaching of English as is followed in teacher  training programmes are all in fact reflections of certain belief systems which have been deeply instilled in the minds of the people. These belief systems constitute what Phillipson has formulated as linguistic imperialism which has five unmistakably identifiable tenets namely,

1.  English is best taught monolingually.
2. The ideal teacher of English is  a native speaker.
3. The earlier English is taught, the better the results.
4. The more English is taught, the better the results.
5.  If other languages are used much, standards of English will drop.

(Phillipson, R. (2009) Linguistic Imperialism Continues; Orient BlaskSwan; pp 12)

(to be continued)

Empowering Teachers in English: Issues and Challenges in the Context of Resisting Linguistic Imperialism

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                                                   Dr. K.N. Anandan

Empowering teachers in English has always been a challenge to English Language Teaching (ELT) centres and teacher training institutions and the various state level and national level agencies such as Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA). Every year our country witnesses seminars on various aspects of ELT organised by state level or national level agencies and institutions where deliberations after deliberations take place all focusing on the multifaceted issues related to the teaching of English in the country. Notions such as activity based learning, experiential learning, child centred classrooms have gained much currency in our own times and course books and method books in English that are supposedly in tune with these have proliferated during the past two decades.  This is all good. Nevertheless, issues remain the same which obviously is an unhappy state of affairs. Why is it that most of our teachers who stand at the cutting edge of the ELT methodology and the classroom practices continue to do what they have been doing for ages? Is it because the academic standards that have been conceived for teaching and learning English are inaccessible for the majority of teachers and learners? Have the curriculum designers have gone wrong in setting the standards?  Are teachers entrusted with a mission impossible? Is it because what the ELT schools have been giving them as tools for  teaching English have not been fine tuned enough to suit to their local needs? 

In the forthcoming posts I will argue that a major reason for the deplorable state of affairs prevailing in the English classrooms of our country is a natural consequence of certain belief systems created and sustained by institutions, agencies and individuals through the intentional or sometimes unintentional propagation of linguistic imperialism. Unless this is prevented no matter whatever efforts we take to empower teachers in English will have practically no effect at all.

State students lack spoken english skills......

Please Comment......

KOCHI: Though English is taught from Class I, students of state board schools lack communication skills in the universal language. Realizing this, the state, has now decided to hone spoken English skills of pupils. Chief minister Oommen Chandy called a meeting of education department officials this month, to work out methods to enhance the English speaking skills of students.

"Our students are good in written English but they are poor in spoken English. Improving the skill of teachers will change this situation," said director of public instruction A Shahjahan.

State government has sought the help of British Council to improve the spoken English of school teachers in Thalassery and Kannur. The pilot project will be extended to other areas later.

Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) and State Council for Educational Research and Training (SCERT) authorities are in the process of developing programs to improve teachers spoken English.

"English is treated only as subject to be taught in classroom and not as communication tool by teachers. With the medium of instruction in state syllabus schools being Malayalam, students have little exposure to spoken English," said SCERT director K A Hashim.

To change this, SCERT has now brought out an interactive DVD to enhance communicative skills of primary school teachers. The Dvd emphasizes on pronunciation, sentence construction, vowels and consonants.

"We have identified the core problem areas. Presently, teachers are concentrating on pedagogy and not vocabulary. English listening situations in school is limited as communication is in Malayalam. Also there is no comprehensive emphasis on developing the reading and speaking skills of the students," said SSA state consultant for English KR Gopinathan.
 Preetu Venugopalan Nair,TOI, July 30, 2012

Teacher Talk -5

Dr.K.N. Anandan

How do we make teacher talk comprehensible?
This is a billion dollar question. What the teacher says must be comprehensible to the learners. There is no point in repeating something again and again with the pretension that repetition will enhance comprehension. How do we ensure comprehension?
The following strategies may be useful:
1. Break longer expressions into smaller ones
Consider the following story:
A Dog, crossing a bridge over a stream with a piece of flesh in his mouth, saw his own shadow in the water and took it for that of another Dog, with a piece of meat double his own in size. He immediately let go of his own, and fiercely attacked the other Dog to get his larger piece from him. He thus lost both: that which he grasped at in the water, because it was a shadow; and his own, because the stream swept it away.
There are several sentences in the story which contain more than one idea. The first sentence, for example, contains ideas such as the following:
• There is a dog.
• It holds a piece of flesh in his mouth.
• There is a bridge.
• There is a stream flowing under the bridge.
• The dog is crossing the bridge.
• It sees its own shadow in the water
• The dog thinks that there is another dog with a piece of flesh double in size
It will be better to split the longer sentence into its component sentences.
2. Include images in the story
It is not enough that we are split the long sentence into small ones. We have to ensure that we can instil images in the listener’s mind.
3. Use familiar words wherever possible
There are several English words (the so-called ‘loan words’) in the children’s repertoire of words. They may be using these words in their day to day communication without realizing that they are English words.
In lower classes the teacher can work out a concept mapping activity to get an idea about the words that children know. How do we do this? The following process may be followed.
• List down as many themes such as school, class, kitchen, road, vehicles, etc. in negotiation with the whole class
• Ask children to write in mother tongue as many words they know related to each of these so that they get a word web or spider gram of each theme.
• The teacher can contribute to the word webs by writing each word in English
• Each of these word webs can be consolidated and displayed before the whole class
• If the children cannot write themselves, they can say the ideas and the teacher can develop the word web for the whole class
• Activate these words by using them both as nouns and verbs
Teachers may have learnt about parts of speech in English. This learning may have led some of them to believe that the classification of words as nouns, verbs and so on is a foolproof one. They may not know that almost all nouns can be used as verbs or verbs as nouns. They may not realize that it is the context which decides whether a particular word in a noun or a verb.
With this understanding teachers can use these words freely in their interaction with the learners.
4. Use proper voice modulation
Articulatory features such as pause, stress, pitch and tone contribute to effective oral communication. Spoken language will be comprehended in a better way if makes use of appropriate articulatory features
5. Use optimum gestures
This is also an important component that contributes to better comprehension. While presenting the narratives the teacher has to use appropriate gestures. At the same time she should take care that she is not over-acting. Gestures are to be optimized I terms of eye-hand coordination, postures and facial expressions.