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