Sunday, August 7, 2011

Please Join RIESI Blog - www.riesi.co.in/blog

Dear Followers,

Thank you for all the support...

We are happy to announce that RIESI, Bengaluru has launched its official blog on 04.08.2011.

Kindly join us at www.riesi.co.in/blog

Best Wishes

Friday, August 5, 2011

Welcome to ELE Blog...


Warm greetings from Regional Institute of English, South India, Bengaluru.

This is our first post and we hope that you might find here diverse information and the best collection of links related to teaching and learning of English as a second language (ESL). RIESI in its attempt to have larger reach proposes to create a blog. We would like to start this blog by stating our purpose and intentions.  
     
As we know, English is one of the most important languages to learn. The main goal of www.riesi.co.in/blog is to provide a platform for collaboration among the teachers in South India. It is an interactive platform for teachers, trainers, curriculum planners, experts, material producers and educational administrators for enhancing the quality of English language education.  The blog proposes to gather the best resources on the World Wide Web that will help you learn, think, reflect and offer different ways to acquire English and incidentally get to know the strategies used for teaching English in Second language context. The blog will also include observations, materials and related inputs designed and proposed by experts, practitioners and the faculty of RIESI. This blog plans to have different sections and categories such as videos, articles, activities, podcasts and audio, writing guides, ESP, pronunciation, vocabulary etc. Besides, the blog is created with the intention to have a large body of ESL Data Center to benefit all those who are working for the cause of English language education in South India. As you may be aware, blogs provide a communication space for all those involved in English Language education so as to utilise the same for sharing of information and reflecting on ‘incidents’ in teaching and learning. Now, don’t you think you should be one of those who love to be part of this academic cause? Perhaps you can do that by reading and posting your comments.

Thursday, August 4, 2011

MYTH 5 – Concerning the Teaching of English in India

Myth No. 5: The importance of the Text or Reader

Hills’ Comment:     For most teachers, examiners and educational officials, ‘The Text’ is holy . . . going through to text . . . does not in fact teach English.

CONTD…
S. Velayudhan
Former Director, RIESI, Bengaluru
was Head of the Department of English,
University of Calicut, Kerala

Courtesy: Perspectives on English Language Teaching by J. M. Ure and S. Velayudhan
Collected by: P. K. Jayaraj and R. Gangadhar, RIESI, Bengaluru

English Language Teaching in South India…

VII.        One of the next great enemies of ELT has been the annual new band-wagon, mostly engendered by University lecturers and professors. Every year or so a linguist comes up with a new set of jargon and a new theory (almost always not tried out) giving un-suspecting teachers a new methodology. The new jargon is rapidly learnt, books are written, and the new theory is passed on to the poor school teachers. The author gets a name for the new method and usually produces his own book saying how useful knowledge of his theory will be to practicing teachers. An example, from a book published in 1982. ‘We have also found a growing interest in this kind of work (Discourse Analysis) among teachers of English overseas. We have tried to make the book directly useful in the study and practice of teaching; and the useful crop of delightful new jargon for the teacher to learn – ‘positive polar interrogatives,’ or ‘focus moves in boundary exchanges.’ The worst thing about such books is their claim that they will be useful in teaching English; even worse is that people believe it.

Anyone who has been in ELT for a number of years will remember, either with amusement or fury, the regular advent of such new and useful theories. I shall not list them here, but they have been a very grave bar to good teaching in schools. One of the unfortunate and often recurring maladies which beset writers of theories is that they are not only followed slavishly by their adherents, but very often misrepresented too. Some notable examples of this in the educational field have been Piaget, Bernstein (whose restricted code, it is not suggested, is not only due to dis-privilege but to genetic factors as well), Chomsky (who did after all say that his theories would not help in language teaching) and a number of others.

A typical instance of this latest maltreatment of theory is perhaps to be found in what is called the Communicative Approach, which attempts to teach English solely by problem-solving activities. Here is what one modern linguist says about it: ‘The communicative approach has replaced one perspective orthodoxy for another. It is supposed that since communication is now the creed, pattern practice must be heresy. The tensions between the communicative and the repetitive approaches should be resolved by merging them into a single purposeful to language teaching.’

CONTD.,

David Horsburgh
Former Professor, RIESI, Bangalore
was a Member of the National Teachers' Commission, Government of India
Passed away in August 1984

Courtesy: Perspectives on English Language Teaching by J. M. Ure and S. Velayudhan
Collected by: P. K. Jayaraj and R. Gangadhar, RIESI, Bengaluru

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

MYTH 4 – Concerning the Teaching of English in India…

MYTH NO. 4: The importance of Free Composition
 
Hill’s Comment:         If we give our students free compositions to do before they know enough English to do them properly, we are not only wasting their time and ours (corrections!) we are doing active harm to the students’ English. … What should we then do? We should begin with controlled composition, in which the student practices writing what he has already learnt, until he knows enough to be able to launch forth into free composition.



CONTD…

S. Velayudhan
Former Director, RIESI, Bengaluru
was Head of the Department of English,
University of Calicut, Kerala


Courtesy: Perspectives on English Language Teaching by J. M. Ure and S. Velayudhan
Collected by: P. K. Jayaraj and R. Gangadhar, RIESI, Bengaluru

English Language Teaching in South India…


VI.         The next mistake was in the production of text books. Most of these books were produced, not by authors who could write books for children and make them interesting, lively and enjoyable, but by ELT specialists who were more concerned with lexical counting and structural introduction rather than with enjoyment. Multiple authors became the order of the day and indeed is still so. Here is an example from a mathematics book written by NCERT for Standard III (repeat for Standard III): ‘If we multiply the numerator and the denominator of a fractional number by the same number (other than zero) we get an equivalent fraction’. This book was written by an editor, two assistant editors and eighteen contributors; the first draft was then reviewed by another sixteen specialists (including eleven with Ph.D’s): result, disaster. The same thing has happened with regard to English books, particularly in the state systems, where books are written by retired headmaster, inspectors of schools, friends and relations of people in high places and numerous other people, few of whom are able to write books; the result is almost always disastrous. The average lecturer or administrator, when asked to write a book for children, collects a dozen or so books written for the same Standard, chooses a chapter from each, and then rewrites it, perhaps not so well as in the book it was chosen from at first. It is then vetted by one or two people who probably know less English than the author, and is then unloaded on to many lakhs of children.  



CONTD…
David Horsburgh
Former Professor, RIESI, Bangalore
was a Member of the National Teachers' Commission, Government of India
Passed away in August 1984


Courtesy: Perspectives on English Language Teaching by J. M. Ure and S. Velayudhan
Collected by: P. K. Jayaraj and R. Gangadhar, RIESI, Bengaluru

Thursday, July 28, 2011

MYTH 3 – Concerning the Teaching of English in India

Myth No. 3: The importance of Reading Aloud (often wrongly called ‘loud reading’ in Indian schools)

Hills’ Comment:     … If there is a class of 35 students and if the teacher does not speak at all, each student will spend 34 minutes listening to his fellow students reading with bad stress, bad rhythm and bad intonation… he himself will have one minute’s practice reading aloud (one minute!) … what can we do to give the students more efficient practice in pronunciation … etc? We can do ear and speech training work, which can largely be done chorally, so that all students are practicing simultaneously.

CONTD…
S. Velayudhan
Former Director, RIESI, Bengaluru
was Head of the Department of English,
University of Calicut, Kerala

Courtesy: Perspectives on English Language Teaching by J. M. Ure and S. Velayudhan
Collected by: P. K. Jayaraj and R. Gangadhar, RIESI, Bengaluru

English Language Teaching in South India…

V.     The next great fallacy was the one-book fallacy, a common fallacy in most Indian education. The idea is, for example, that children will learn to read and write their mother-tongue at the VI standard level by learning by heart one book a year. One of the reasons for the high quality of education in the elite schools is that children read a far greater number of books. The ELTIs’ never really pushed the idea that the one-book-a-year  practice was a fallacy and that children would not learn in this way. Occasionally there was a murmur about supplementary readers, but never about how to get children to read widely, say, a dozen books a year. Any educated persons knows that in order to learn a language well it is necessary to read a greater number of books in that language; but this message has never been put across to Government Agencies.


CONTD.,

David Horsburgh
Former Professor, RIESI, Bangalore
was a Member of the National Teachers' Commission, Government of India
Passed away in August 1984

Courtesy: Perspectives on English Language Teaching by J. M. Ure and S. Velayudhan
Collected by: P. K. Jayaraj and R. Gangadhar, RIESI, Bengaluru

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

MYTH 2 – Concerning the Teaching of English in India

Myth No. 2:  That grammatical analysis helps the students to write better English.

Hills’ Comment:     … Students must learn to use the language grammatically, but that is done by guided practice, not by theory and analysis… a lot of what is taught as English grammar in Indian schools is incorrect or obsolete… He is taller than me is not wrong by modern standards; I will does not differ from I shall in contemporary English; a sentence which is good English in the active in a particular context is automatically bad English in the passive in that context, therefore conversation exercises from active to passive are not only useless but actually harmful; and so on.
CONTD…
S. Velayudhan
Former Director, RIESI, Bengaluru
was Head of the Department of English,
University of Calicut, Kerala

Courtesy: Perspectives on English Language Teaching by J. M. Ure and S. Velayudhan
Collected by: P. K. Jayaraj and R. Gangadhar, RIESI, Bengaluru

English Language Teaching in South India…

IV.      The next great mistake in my view was the wrong training given at ELT centers. Because of the insistence of the oral or direct method, ELT specialists felt that it was essential for teachers to know and to speak correct English. For this reason about half the time on a course was spent on ‘improving’ the pronunciation and English usage of the trainees. All the right things were done. Language laboratories were set up, Stannard Allen’s were bought in large numbers, the best trained staff were given the task of this improvement. It had little effect; mainly due to lack of understanding of motivation and adult learning strategies. The language laboratory produced students who could answer correctly since and for exercises 20 times out of 20, but who would happily say in their end of course speech, “We are here since five months”. No one seemed to realize the immense difficulty of changing incorrect speech habits which had been in daily use of 20 years or more.

The situation naturally worsened with this distinction between content and methodology, because after training at Bangor, Leeds or Edinburgh it was much easier to teach content than to teach methodology. The time given to methods of teaching was slowly eroded; lecturers who could not teach were loath to give demonstration lessons apart from the odd set-piece, and that usually with the higher classes. A similar state of affairs exists in Training Schools and Training Colleges throughout India, where demonstration lessons are few and far between because most of the staff are not themselves skilled classroom teachers.

CONTD.,

David Horsburgh
Former Professor, RIESI, Bangalore
was a Member of the National Teachers' Commission, Government of India
Passed away in August 1984

Courtesy: Perspectives on English Language Teaching by J. M. Ure and S. Velayudhan
Collected by: P. K. Jayaraj and R. Gangadhar, RIESI, Bengaluru

Monday, July 25, 2011

Some more MYTHS concerning the Teaching of English in India


About twenty-five years ago, L. A. Hill, who was Chief Education Officer of the British Council in India, wrote an article in which he talked about certain ‘myths’ connected with the teaching of English in India. The article was published in Teaching English, at one time a British Council sponsored journal. It is not likely that many among the present generation of English teachers have been this article which sheds a lot of light on the English language teaching situation in the country. Re-reading Hill’s ELT ‘mythology’ has always been a rewarding experience because of running commeour. Hill lists fourteen myths with a running commentary. Whether he has added some more myths to this list is not known, though anyone who has observed the ELT scene in India can add a few more to Hill’s fourteen. The passage of time and all the new theories, and techniques, syllabuses and textbooks and the changing patterns of education, English language policies and teacher training programmes have not altered the situation to any appreciable degree. Lest we should forget, let me, for the benefit of those who have not read Hill’s ELT mythology list them in the order in which they occur. The myths will be stated in full with extracts from Hill’s comments thereon.

MYTH NO. 1:   That students can learn to appreciate great English literature and derive cultural and spiritual benefit from it by being made to read texts that they cannot understand.
 
Hill’s Comment:          … How can a student feel the beauty of rhythm, the assonance and the other sound effects in a poem; how can he appreciate the felicities in the author’s selection of words, use of inversion, etc., and how can he respond to the other beauties of the author’s style if the text is full of words and grammatical patterns that he cannot make head or tail of?
 
CONTD…
S. Velayudhan
Former Director, RIESI, Bengaluru
was Head of the Department of English,
University of Calicut, Kerala

Courtesy: Perspectives on English Language Teaching by J. M. Ure and S. Velayudhan
Collected by: P. K. Jayaraj and R. Gangadhar, RIESI, Bengaluru

English Language Teaching in South India…


III.            The next mistake stems clearly from II. One of the great motivating factors for teachers is the possibility of upward mobility. No University lecturer willingly turns himself into a school teacher, no high school teacher into a primary school teacher. The result of this was that when ELT staff were sent to England in hordes throughout the sixties and seventies they were not placed for a year in English schools, where they might have learnt methodologies for teaching children; they were sent to Universities, where they spent their time in learning advanced phonetics, linguistics and other interesting University disciplines. Naturally, when they returned to India, the esoteric knowledge of phonetics or T.G. or Halliday had to be passed on to their students, with the awful result that ways of teaching children were entirely overshadowed by more important and intellectual topics. Many hours were spent on persuading teachers to understand disciplines which were of no value at all in their classroom work. Teaching methods, classroom behavior, relationships and motivation, about which so much excellent writing has been produced in the educational world in the last 30 years, were completely ignored, and still are today.



CONTD…
David Horsburgh
Former Professor, RIESI, Bangalore
was a Member of the National Teachers' Commission, Government of India
Passed away in August 1984
 

Courtesy: Perspectives on English Language Teaching by J. M. Ure and S. Velayudhan
Collected by: P. K. Jayaraj and R. Gangadhar, RIESI, Bengaluru

Saturday, July 23, 2011

English Language Teaching in South India

II.               The next great mistake was that ELT in the early days attracted many of the wrong people and few of the right people.

In the fifties, when it was obvious that with the great educational expansion proposed it would be necessary to have a very much larger number of English teachers, no thought was given to importing into the profession those people who were in fact mother-tongue speakers. It would have been easy enough to have attracted Anglo-Indians and Indian Christians, who spoke English and nothing else, into the language teaching scene. It must have been a common situation in a number of ELTI’s to find that the typists and secretaries spoke and wrote much better English than many members of staff did. Most of the teachers who joined the ELT Institutes in the early days were from the Universities and not from schools. They were lecturers rather than teachers and even those who had taught in schools and rarely taught in the primary school. University lecturers usually start in their profession immediately after taking an M.A. in their particular disciplines, and therefore the early ELT staff knew little of classroom management, child psychology, motivation or the normal ways of dealing with young children. And subsequent events usually made it impossible for them to acquire such knowledge and skills.


CONTD.,

 David Horsburgh
Former Professor, RIESI, Bangalore
was a Member of the National Teachers' Commission, Government of India
Passed away in August 1984

Courtesy: Perspectives on English Language Teaching by J. M. Ure and S. Velayudhan
Collected by: P. K. Jayaraj and R. Gangadhar, RIESI, Bengaluru

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

English Language Teaching in South India

In this article I shall try to list some of the mistakes which I think have been made in ELT since Independence. I started teaching English in South India in 1950, and still continue to do so; I have tried to make the article as subjective as possible.

Looking at the present state of education in South India, it is difficult to be complacent. The first thing that strikes the observer is that not much improvement has taken place in the last thirty-five years, particularly in learning achievements in the rural areas and in those urban schools which cater primarily for unprivileged children. Not much good education is going on except in the elite schools and in the Government schools is very great, mainly due to the existence of two quite distinct educational systems. The educational arguments over mother-tongue versus English medium have been resolved in a tragic ways, where we have the unfortunate spectacle of the upper-class and middle-class urban elite, including professional people, Government officers, executives and politicians, sending their children to English-medium schools while vehemently and patriotically persuading other members of society to be educated in the mother-tongue.

However, ELT institutions have rarely been interested in what goes on in English-medium schools. Their work has been concerned with teachers and materials for the Government educational system.

Over the years there has been a proliferation of Institutes and organizations dealing with ELT, and the gap between individual Institutions was slowly widened. Nobody knows what goes on in other Institutions and there is little common involvement in ELT problems. This situation is of course similar to the situation in the educational scene as a whole. We have a vast number of Councils, Commissions, and the like, but they rarely consult each other. What the NCERT does in its in-service training programmes may well be at variance with what is proposed by the NIEPA; the meeting of the Central Education Ministers seems to take little note of the work being done in education at the State level. It is the same with ELT institutions. Few people are able to keep in touch with everything that is being done at Central and State levels, so that a concerted plan of action with regard to the teaching of English is nowadays almost impossible.

The first pertinent question to be asked is why there has been no improvement. Over the years many highly qualified ELT specialists have spent a great deal of time and labour on improving things; numbers of well-qualified staff and well-equipped Institutions of all kinds have been available; time, money, energy and people have been provided. But if you go to a rural High school and see what kind of English the children have acquired at the end of the X standard you will agree that the result has been pitiful.

There was no ELT before Independence. Many schools were English-medium schools and they were mostly run by professional teachers, usually from families of teachers, dedicated and professionally competent. I well remember in 1943 in Chittagaon meeting boys who were in the X standard and happily reading Dickens in the original, a state of affairs which ELT has successfully changed.

I should like this article to examine what I think are the major mistakes that have been made, and at the end to offer some purely personal suggestions regarding possible improvements.

I.                    The first mistake that seems to be perennial in ELT, as in many branches of education, is what one might call pontifications, the regarding as axiomatic that particular theory of language learning which is favour at any particular time. Instances of this kind of thought over the past 35 years are extremely numerous and they still continue. I remember once at a meeting in the fifties seeing two ELT specialists nearly come to blows over whether questions should be begun in the first part of the first year or left until the last part of the first year or the first part of the second year! The trouble was, they both knew quite clearly that they were right! One quoted Professor X, the other Professor Y. Needless to say, neither of them had taught children their first lessons in English for any appreciable time, nor did they have one iota of evidence to support their own particular view; but feathers flew and hot words were exchanged. We have had so many of these pontifical theories that it is impossible to list them all. Older workers in the field may remember that theory put forward by the neuro-physiologist Penfield, who suggested that early language teaching would be more beneficial if started before puberty. This was one of the main reasons for following English language teaching to begin in the III standard; unfortunately, later, it was shown that cortical lateralization probably occurs before the age of five, and had no effect on children’s learning abilities anyway. Contrastive linguistics were the in-thing in the sixties. Without making a comparative study of the structures of Tamil and English, for example, it was thought that it would not be possible to produce a good syllabus or adequate reading materials for Tamil speakers. The Dodson Bilingual method had its vogue. Perhaps the most longstanding was waged over the order of structures, and perhaps, for all I know, I still goes on. Various structural syllabuses were averred to be much better than others. Today we have Discourse Analysis and the Communicative Approach.

The Interesting thing about all pontifications is that, like religious pontifications, they are based on faith and not on logic. Very little research was ever done on any of these aspects, or on many more aspects not mentioned here but which have received wholehearted support from many ELT workers. When research, or so-called research, was carried out, it usually consisted of one or two classes, one called the control group, and the results were decked out in statistical evidence rarely significant and almost always totally inadequate.


CONTD...

David Horsburgh
Former Professor, RIESI, Bangalore
was a Member of the National Teachers' Commission, Government of India
Passed away in August 1984

Courtesy: Perspectives on English Language Teaching by J. M. Ure and S. Velayudhan
Collected by: P. K. Jayaraj and R. Gangadhar, RIESI, Bengaluru

Movie Review: To Sir, With Love (1966)


Columbia Tristar Home Video
Length:        105 mins.
Rated:          Not Rated
Format:       Anamorphic Widescreen · 1.85:1 Fullframe
Languages: English
Subtitles:    English, Spanish
Extras:        Theatrical Trailer


 



Throughout the past we have seen a number of movies that revolve around teacher-student relationships in challenged neighborhoods, but if one of these movies truly stands out, it has to be “To Sir, With Love”. Not only has it become the template for most films of similar nature that followed, it is one of the few ones that really succeed in portraying a realistic relationship with tangible characters that have understandable motivations. Most of it has undoubtedly attributed to Sidney Poitier’s superb and charismatic portrayal of the teacher, but also the script by E.R. Braithwaite and director James Clavell always makes sure to strike the perfect balance between romanticism and realism. The result is a movie that moves, touches and makes you laugh, all at the same time.

Because he is out of work, engineer Mark Thackeray (Sidney Poitier) decides to take on a job as a teacher in London’s rough East End. Mostly teaching the children of lower crust dock workers, the graduation class immediately takes a hostile stance towards the new tutor and is determined to destroy Thackeray. Inexperienced in the job and insecure in his methodologies, Thackeray is nonetheless full of hope that he can successfully teach these teenage problem children with a natural dislike for authority. But slowly the open hostility wears even the soft-mannered Thackeray down, and he realizes that you cannot teach someone, what he doesn’t want to learn. He recognizes that the only way to get these kids’ attention is by getting them interested, hopefully teaching them some valuable lessons for their future lives in the course of it. From one day to the other, Thackeray changes his entire approach, throws out the schoolbooks and starts creating real-life instructions for adults.




Soon, his students begin to appreciate the new treatment as grown-ups and the bond between teacher and students begins to flourish, allowing Thackeray to prepare his pupils for the life that lies ahead of them. But still, underneath the surface boils a sense of mistrust against the teacher that he must overcome, and many other challenges lie ahead of the handsome man who suddenly becomes a favorite among his female students.


While some parts of the movie appear dated, others are just as topical as they were back in 1966 when the film was made. Every class has its undisciplined and rowdy punks, and every generation gets to the point where students begin to wonder whether what they learn will ever be of any use to them or just a sheer waste of their time. “To Sir, With Love” takes this scenario nicely and shows how a little humanity can go a long way and make all the difference. While we see the ossified versions of teachers next to Thackeray’s character, we begin to realize how schools could be put to good use not only to teach children academic skills but also to give them the kind of survival training they need to make it on their own. Superbly acted by Sidney Poitier, this teacher is a one-class act who single-handedly relegates the entire faculty to shame by using his heart and humanity in order to teach common sense to some of the toughest kids in the school.
But not only educational issues are material for this film, it also deals quite interestingly with the subject of racial prejucides and their integration in society. Issues that were as much of importance back in 1966 as they are today.
“To Sir, With Love” is a heart-felt movie that avoids many of the melodramatic pitfalls many other movies on the same subject matter stepped into. It is an honest portrayal of the characters without superficiality, making them understandable and plausible.

Review by:  Guido Henkel
Collected by: P. K. Jayaraj and R. Gangadhar, RIESI, Bengaluru