Thursday, July 28, 2011

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

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