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