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.

Teacher Talk - 4

Dr.K.N. Anandan






Q: What are the various levels of teacher talk?

We have seen that each instance of teacher talk serves a specific purpose. For example one of the specific objectives of the teacher talk related to the trigger is to elicit the learner’s perception of what she has seen. This holds good for all levels of learners.
Now consider the following expressions:
1. What do you think the picture / clipping / photograph is about?
2. What ideas do you get from watching this picture /clipping / photograph?
3. You have watched the clipping. You must have thought about some ideas. Why don’t you share them with your friends?
4. What does the picture tell you?
5. The picture tells us something, doesn’t it? What is that?
6. I was wondering whether someone could tell the whole class what the picture is about.
All the expressions given above are suitable for interacting with the learners based on the trigger. But are all of them these expressions at the same linguistic level?
Of course we cannot ask these questions as formulated here in classes 1 and 2. At the same time children in these classes will have their own perceptions about the picture and we must know what these are.
One way to tide over the problem is to establish the details of the picture by eliciting them one after the other using very simple expressions. This can be followed by a question that elicits what they think about the picture. Another way is to ask questions using the code-switching strategy. Alternatively, the whole question can be formulated in mother tongue.
What really matters is whether we are able to address the perception of the individual learners by evoking higher order thinking skills.

Teacher Talk -3

Dr. K.N. Anandan




Q: How to make teacher talk a rich listening input for the learners?

Authentic and comprehensible listening input is a pre-requisite for the learner for acquiring language. This is why we use narratives in primary classes. The narrative is an effective pedagogic tool for providing quality listening input to the learners. The interaction of the teacher with the learners at various points of classroom transaction is another rich input source for the learners. Let us address ourselves to a few questions in this context.
1. What are the common objectives of Interaction at these slots?
2. Are there any specific objectives for each instance of interaction?
If so, what are they?
3. How can we improve the quality of interaction?
Obviously, the teacher cannot use the same kind of questions for each of these interactions. They depend crucially upon the purpose for which the interaction is carried out. It is fairly easy to see that each of these instances of interaction has some specific objectives. At the same time, all of them have some common objectives. Let us see what these are:
Common Objectives of Interaction
• Sharing of ideas.
• Giving rich, authentic listening input
• Embedding functional aspects of language in authentic context
• Maintaining rapport with the learners
• For Dialoguing with the learners.
Specific Objectives:
Interaction related to trigger.
• Taking out the learners’ assumptions on the theme at hand.
• Taking out learner’s perceptions on what has been watched
• Leading the learners to the theme /issue
Interactions at narrative gaps
• Triggering divergent thinking
• Eliciting learners perceptions on the theme
• Making predictions on what might follow.
• Taking out learners’ reflections on what he/she has listened to.
• Checking whether the characters have been emotionally registered
• Analyzing the situation critically.
Interaction leading to individual reading
• Instilling in learners an urge to read.
• Helping learners make prediction on what they are going to read.
Interaction during collaborative reading
• Ensuring that ideas are shared as per the instructions given to the learners
• Assessing the progress of group work.
• Extending optimal support to those who need it.
• Ensuring cooperation in team work.
• Addressing learning issues of children progressing at a slower pace.
Interactions related to scaffolded reading (posing analytical questions)
• Registering multiple perspectives on the theme.
• Identifying a point of view of the writer as well as the learners.
• Instilling value systems.
• Building up tolerance.
Interaction related to Editing
• Sensitizing the learners on various kinds of errors.
• Checking the learner’s intuitions on grammaticality.
• Building up confidence in using language.
Interaction related to forming big books.
• Addressing heterogeneity of the class.
• Providing slot for creativity of children
• Checking the learner’s affinity to the target language
What the teacher has to do is to build up a dialogue with the learners. This can be done with the help of strategies such as the following:
 Using tags (positive, negative, same way)
 Reporting
 Using discourse markers (for expressing attitude, politeness etc).
 Agreeing or disagreeing with the speaker
 Seeking agreement or disagreement
 Stating one’s own opinion
 Using short responses
 Building up on a certain response.
Most importantly, the classroom language the teacher may have to use for interacting with the learners will have to be suitable for the level of learners.

Teacher Talk -2

Dr.K.N. Anandan

Q2: What are the features of teacher talk?

Teacher talk includes the questions that teacher poses in the classroom, the discussion that is initiated on specific social issues / theme and also the instructions she gives to the learners at various points. The teacher should clearly know the objectives of each instance of interaction. She should also take care of the level of learners while interacting with the learners. For instance, in classes 1 and 2 she may have to make use of code-switching. In higher classes she may be using slightly complex structures too.
The general features of teacher talk are:
• The language is error free with well-formed constructions
• It is comprehensible to all learners
• It is audible to the whole class
• It is dynamic, positive, pleasant and learner friendly
• It is free from expressions finding fault with the learners
• The speed of articulation is to be reduced
• The articulatory features (such as pause, stress, tone, and tempo) are maintained
• It is not one-sided talk from the part of the teacher but a dialogue between the teacher and the learners
• It contains various discourse markers (such as well, precisely, as a matter of fact, etc.) wherever these elements are apt contextually
• It contains linguistic elements such as tags, short responses, etc
• It addresses higher order thinking skills