The Yawning Gap
Two
articles of great interest appeared in the 9 December Hindu’s EducationPlus and
the 19 December Hindu’s centre page—English
for Survival by Deeptha Sreedhar and New
ways of learning old rules by Rama Kant Agnihotri. Both relate to teaching
English in colleges and schools. Both raise issues intimately linked to how
English is being taught. In this write-up of mine, I deal with these two issues
from a different angle but an essential one in my opinion and suggest steps:
before
we can expect learners to acquire life skills, to learn grammar
differently, we need
to prepare the teacher with skills to enable learners.
Teachers should first be enabled before they can enable learners
to learn
the things the right way. This is my
thesis.
For
two decades, till 2005, I’d taught Technical English to first year
undergraduate students of engineering disciplines at Sri Venkateswara College
of Engineering at Sri Perumbudur. At least 10% of my students had studied in
the regional medium and hence found it difficult to follow lectures, understand
textbooks, converse in English with their classmates and teachers. This
percentage increases in colleges located in the districts. Arts and Science
colleges have regional medium students in large numbers.
This
implied that something was seriously wrong with the support lent to students.
Though as a teacher at this level I could get a sizeable number of them to
recover their confidence, some of them weren’t prepared to accept my support
and hence continued to suffer—one or two disappeared, the rest got low grades
and were forced to re-sit several papers every semester.
This
article addresses teachers and syllabus writers at the university level, takes
up the line of thought said earlier further, analyses ground realities, places
the problem in context and suggests steps.
Scenario as it
is
Several
interested parties—teachers and experts—speak and write about how best to teach
and learn English as a communicating tool or soft/life skill. Mostly, the talks
and/ or write-ups deal with how to improve teaching
English at tertiary level and beyond through quality training of teachers and
learning English at these levels through a provision of quality syllabuses—in engineering colleges in
particular. Business English is taught to commerce undergraduates and Technical
English, to engineering undergraduates.
But
hardly attention has been paid to where
it is needed most—the learning
syllabuses of current and future English teachers teaching in schools and
colleges.
Yes,
today better syllabuses are got ready, better course books are prepared and
used in schools run by the government or private Trusts. Yes, graduates and
post-graduates with English literature as their major are being appointed as
teachers. Yes, B.Ed. or MPhil courses are offered to improve teacher
performance and made mandatory for teaching English. Yes, teachers are provided
in-service training, yes, they attend and participate in workshops, yes, they
listen to ELT experts in order that they may keep improving their performance.
And curriculum and syllabus writers and teacher trainers seem to beam with
satisfaction.
Scenario as it
ought to be
Yet
students at tertiary (Plus One and Plus Two at school) level and at
undergraduate level (UG students in both Arts and Science Colleges and
engineering colleges) find it difficult to adjust themselves to the needs and
expectations of the workplaces. This is because
teachers who teach them English at school and tertiary levels have remained ill-quipped. This is because nobody at the helm of
affairs ever thought about teacher
preparation but concentrated only on teacher training and improving
teaching syllabuses. A news item in the 3 December 1996 issue of The Hindu
relates to a document prepared by the National Council for Teacher Education.
This organization feels ‘all is not well’ with the whole process of preparing
teachers for the school systems. Such awareness is welcome but... It is
believed that the solution lies in improving the teacher education curriculum
(by which they meant ‘teacher training’).
But
I believe the real solution lies elsewhere. Teaching teachers how to teach
better (with better methodologies and techniques) will not solve the problem. If teachers are not able to perform well it
is because there is a yawning gap between what they learn as students and what they teach
as teachers.
Let
us see how well prepared English teachers (having B.A. and M.A. English
literature as the major discipline) in schools and colleges are. This preparation
consists of two realities.
Reality (B.A. /
M.A.)
What
did the present crop of English teachers
learn as students in their undergraduate
course?
Syllabuses
of most Indian universities heavily lean on learning literary pieces of various
ages in English literature from Chaucer to twentieth century—prose, poetry,
drama, criticism, of course with a course on one or two of these: linguistics,
grammar, journalism, mass communication, translation.
What
did the present crop of English teachers
learn as students in their post-graduate
course?
Syllabuses
of most Indian universities lean heavily on English, American, Canadian,
Australian, European literatures with a few variations like
copy writing, creative writing, English through
media and mass media (Madurai Kamaraj)
copy writing, copy editing, and technical writing
(Madras)
Linguistics,
stylistics, translation, journalism (Goa)
Dalit
literature, film studies (Nagpur)
Aspects
of language (IGNOU)
Such
three-year and two-year learning doesn’t help the learners who are now teachers
teach English as a language (with its
four listening, speaking, reading, writing skills and their sub-skills) and as a medium of communication, as
revealed by a similar analysis of the English syllabuses of classes 7-12 that
cover the whole gamut of language skills—listening, speaking, reading and writing (generally known as
‘lsrw’) with their sub-skills:
A.
Vocabulary Competencies
B.
Grammatical Competencies
C.
Listening Competencies
D. Speaking
Competencies
E. Reading
Competencies
F. Writing
Competencies
G. Learning
Competencies (Study skills)
H.
Occupational Competencies
I.
Strategic Competencies
J. Creative
Competencies
K. Interpersonal / Social Skills
Thus
there is a total mismatch between what today’ teachers learnt (or
tomorrow’s are learning) and what today’s teachers teach (or what tomorrow’s
teachers will).
Reality (B.Ed.)
Teachers
from both these groups should qualify with a B.Ed. What does such a syllabus
contain to equip these teachers to teach English to their school and high
school learners?
Of
course, as several B.Ed. courses in India reveal, both B.A.s and M.A.s are
prepared to teach English as a language with specialised courses. These courses
concentrate on education and psychology for a major portion of course duration
and offer just one course or two on the teaching of English for a very brief
period, which is very insignificant in terms of what they are expected to
achieve as teachers of English.
Of
course, I’m not suggesting even for a moment that the teacher training courses
are the problem for B.Ed. is a degree in education.
Reality
(M.Phil.)
Teachers
wishing to teach English to UG students should equip themselves with an M.Phil.
This is a research-oriented course, and almost all qualifiers take up topics in
literature. Therefore, this course doesn’t really help teachers teach English
as a language.
Suggested Steps
The
onus then is on universities in Thamizhnadu and elsewhere to make drastic changes in their English B.A.
and M.A. syllabuses in order to enable future school teachers to get their
students ready to face challenges in higher education where English is the
medium of instruction and also to successfully tackle communication situations
in their place of work.
The syllabus
I
can provide here only a content outline of what the learning syllabuses for
B.A. and M.A. should consist of:
BA
degree in English language should be a four
year programme while MA degree, a three
year programme.
I For future teachers of English
A.
1.
what learners should become
The first three years should be spent on
developing learners as prospective teachers into
active and empathetic listeners, able
speakers (fluent with tolerably good pronunciation),
good interpreters of reading material and
capable writers.
2.
what they should be learning
• listening—learn
to
• be unprejudiced, open-minded,
empathetic, critical,
• provide cues (verbal and non-verbal)
• take
notes as preparation for post-speech participation
with single sentences,
short conversations, paragraphs, lectures as source
• speaking—learn
to
• be
unprejudiced, open-minded, empathetic, critical
• speak
to an audience with the required skills like being audible, eye
contact
• be
active in group discussions, brainstorming, debates—listening
and
speaking, participating, encouraging, congratulating
• converse
on several topics of interest informally and formally
• reading—learn to
• comprehend
dictionary meanings, implied meanings (inferences),
• understand
paragraph structure—topic sentence, supporting sentences
• skim,
scan, study a paragraph
• understand
composition of test items—for vocabulary,
comprehension
• grasp the use of
graphics as part of reading material
• writing—learn to
• form
sentences—patterns and types
• use
linking devices—for sentences and paragraphs
• write
letters (formal and informal), reports, presentations, memos,
minutes of
meetings, notices,
• write
summaries, précis, analytical pieces (critiquing)
• take
notes (emphasize for personal use)
• express
themselves through poems, short stories, plays
• grammar—• interactive
roles of and relationship between sentence parts
• role
of sentence patterns—SVOO/C/adverbial in conveying messages and
meaning
• role
of sentence types—simple, complex, compound, compound-complex in
conveying messages and meaning
• voice—role
and significance of the passive (not a mere conversion structure)
• reported
speech—its intricacies in conveying meaning
• role
of ‘it’ and ‘there’ sentences
• punctuation
• pronunciation of vowels—monophthongs,
diphthongs, difficult consonants, aspirated
consonants
• English literature (poems, prose,
drama, fiction, nonfiction with emphasis on writers of
the past century) including poems, prose,
fiction, drama by Indians for the past two
decades without having to learn about
history of English literature, social history of
England
• Learning
ELT theories, criticism, sociolinguistics, pragmatics
B.
The fourth year should be spent on teaching methods [live teaching sessions
with video
viewing], setting test items and preparing
marking schemes.
B.
The third year should be spent on perfecting teaching methods [live teaching
sessions with
video viewing], setting test items and
marking schemes.
While
the learner-to-be teachers need to go through a BEd degree, they need not be tested in ELT skills, as this
can be taken care of as part of evaluation process of the two degree
acquisitions.
II For current teachers who are already
teaching classes 7—12
• Arrange for talks by senior / retired
classroom teachers/ retired teachers from The English
and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad
(I take the liberty of suggesting names:
Dr T Sriraman, Prof. Jacob Tharu, Dr Lakshmi
Chandra) to
• instill
self-belief in them
• improve their
confidence level in listening, speaking, reading and writing
• acquaint
them with the beauty of grammar teaching, test items writing
• Arrange
for group discussions among them to learn about their difficulties in teaching
existing syllabuses—their insufficient knowledge, inadequate
readily-available sources as
reference material in school libraries
• encourage
them to read present day fiction—English and Indian writers
• Arrange
speeches on topics of their interest, video them, guide them with a frank
discussion, enabling them to learn critiquing as well
• apprise
them of the sub-skills in each major language skill and arrange for activities
to
familiarise them with the use of these sub-skills
• stress
the need to be extensive readers and listeners—newspapers, English TV channels—
BBC,
CNN and Indian—NDTV, CNN IBN etc.
• get them
to enumerate the benefits of being humane, the absence of prejudices
Of
course I know how difficult it is to adjust to such thinking and write new
syllabuses but there is really no choice,
is there?
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