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