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