Launching into the English Medium through an Integrative Approach

Launching into the English Medium through an Integrative Approach
(First published in The Island/Friday 5th November, 2010)

For Sri Lankans English is mainly important in the three areas of education, employment, and international communication. Here we are concerned with education. In addition to being a lingua franca in the job market and in the field of global communication, it is a subject on the school curriculum and it has great potential as a vehicle of education. In a mother tongue medium class, for part of the time, a particular subject may be taught in English to students who need to learn it as a second language, making English an explicit medium of instruction but an implicit object of study. Though, in such a context, the students’ focus is on understanding the content of the lesson, this indirectly helps their mastery of the language. The students can also use the strategy (of integrating the study of English into subject instruction) for self-access work outside the classroom.
Education is essentially the acquisition of factual knowledge, practical skills, and good moral and ethical standards, all of which are useful for participating in the life of one’s community in such a way that one contributes towards promoting the welfare of everyone, thereby improving the chances for happiness for all. Animals also undergo a process of education that is essential for ensuring their survival; but it is a very rudimentary sort of education, and is governed entirely by instinct. In the case of humans, education is an intellectual process almost entirely mediated by language.
To be described as truly educated or cultured, a person must have passed through three basic phases of intellectual development: learning, knowledge, and wisdom. Among common people though, as is well known, if a person displays one of these, they are held to automatically possess the other two as well; but here I wish to give the following highly generalized definitions of the three words: ‘learning’ means taking in or ‘ingesting’, information; ‘knowledge’ is the result of processing that information, of ‘digesting’ or internalizing it; and ‘wisdom’ is the ability to make sound (that is, both practical and moral) judgements based on one’s knowledge and experience, in problematic situations.
It is perfectly possible for an individual to be most highly educated in Sinhala or Tamil without any knowledge of English. A significant difference between English and our native languages where education is concerned, in my view, is that the first offers more resources for learning, for gathering information, a wider area of reference in any field of study. This makes it possible for a person with a knowledge of English to become a better informed person than one who doesn’t enjoy that benefit. For the development of knowledge and wisdom something more than mere information is necessary, things such as intelligence, imagination, analytical power, creativity, intuition, and a moral sense.
All the thousands of different spoken and written forms of the very complex language capability in humans are equal in their potential as languages. But because of historical, political, economic, social, cultural, and many other varied factors, certain languages possess more advanced or more widely recognized literary traditions, more sophisticated vocabularies, and more extensive user bases, etc. than others. This, however, does not mean any natural superiority or inferiority of one language to another.
In our case, while our indigenous languages are adequate for communication within our borders, and at least in theory, can be modernized to accommodate all the knowledge available in the world through translation from foreign tongues (something prohibitively cumbersome and slow for sure, though), the most convenient way for us to enable our children to acquire a sound enough education is to give them a knowledge of English.
Teaching English, therefore, is not simply a case of teaching a language for a limited purpose, for it goes beyond that. We know that Sri Lankan job-seekers today learn a number of other foreign languages as well, such as Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, German, and Italian. This is a very pragmatic and sensible endeavour. Learning one of these languages with the express purpose of finding employment in a country where it is natively used cannot, however, be compared to learning English as a second language. This is because a knowledge of English, in addition to being a valuable asset to possess in the job market, is indispensable for general education in our particular context.
The usefulness of English as a means of enhancing general education is an added incentive for learners of English. Though English is taught as a separate subject, this activity can be integrated into the teaching of other subjects. Even in a situation where the medium of instruction is not English, the subject teachers, provided they possess the ability, may be asked to teach the students the special technical vocabulary used in their domain, explain or repeat a portion of the lesson in English, and encourage them to draw on English language based resources that are available outside; this would make an English teacher out of every teacher. (This idea occurred to me in association with the ‘Language across the curriculum’ proposal that resulted from the recommendations of a government commission in Britain in the mid-70’s for native-language education in that country in terms of which every teacher was expected to focus on reading and writing in their particular subject areas and thus double as a teacher of English).
Many subject teachers and even their students might not fancy this as feasible, considering it just a waste of time when they should be devoting all their time for covering the syllabuses and doing revision in preparation for the vital business of performing well at the examinations. But such an attitude is due to their failure to understand that they will be able to kill two birds with one stone if they use English as a medium of learning at least for part of the time: for such an exercise would be a case of “using English to learn it”; although the focus is not on language teaching or learning, language development will automatically result; that is, eventually the students will be learning not only a particular subject, but also English. Their enhanced proficiency in English will enable them to draw on outside resources to further enrich their knowledge of the subject as well as that of English, and thus a virtuous circle will be set in motion.
In terms of methodology this can be called a form of Content-Based Instruction (CBI). (To be talking about ‘methods’ and ‘approaches’ may sound a little anachronistic; but it beats me how we can perform a vital activity like language teaching without constantly being on the lookout for new ideas and new theories for increasing our efficiency, and this may include revisiting old practices with fresh insights as well as exploring new possibilities.) CBI consists in teaching subject matter in the language that is being learned with no effort to teach the language by extracting it from the content for separate treatment. It draws on the principles of communicative language teaching, where the focus is on real communication rather than on any other linguistic unit of organization such as grammatical structures, functions, etc. Various models of CBI have been in use since the 1980’s at elementary, secondary, and university levels.
Like CBI, Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) is a communicative approach. In TBLT, however, teaching is organized around the completion of tasks that require the meaningful use of language, e.g. reading a text and labelling a map, completing a passport application form for a person who needs help to do that, phoning, etc. The general English language courses conducted in Sri Lankan schools may be described as based on a broad communicative language teaching approach with elements of CBI and TBLT included, the former predominating. The CBI element is realized in terms of theme-based units such as those under the headings the family, the environment, and wildlife, etc., where language acquisition is achieved through focusing on understanding the content of each unit presented in English.
However, my main focus here is how CBI could be exploited in integrating English language study into mainstream subject areas at the higher education level. This is particularly relevant at a time when many of our students in university education who have not been introduced to the English medium yet are likely to find themselves at the threshold of a critical switchover for which they may be hardly ready. (Though this idea is not new to the initiates it may be useful to the new entrants to the higher education domain.)
The proposed change of medium for all university students should not be a critical issue if English teaching at the school level was a success. For all intents and purposes, a move has been made towards introducing English as the general medium of education for all levels. Some secondary schools offer the students a choice between English and one of the native languages as the medium, but it is not going to be an easy change for obvious reasons such as the lack of teachers competent enough to teach in English, good textbooks, a high enough language proficiency level among the students, etc. In spite of this, my fervent hope is that the apparently mandatory switchover that is to be effected sooner or later will at least be an additional motivating factor for them to learn English with a sense of renewed urgency.
This provides a good context for intensifying the application of CBI approaches in English classrooms. The English courses must have a future orientation; they must involve English language instruction designed to prepare students who are passing the initial stages of their education in their mother tongue for a complete switchover at least at the higher education level. A situation where English and local language mediums co-exist can be utilized to introduce a strategy of ‘mainstreaming’, i.e. mixing second language English learners (that is, those studying in native medium classes) with English medium students of the same grade for English lessons and for some subject lessons as well (delivered in English), where cooperation is encouraged between the two groups: in other words, the English medium students with a better proficiency level in English are made to work with peers who have a lower level of proficiency on collaborative tasks such as pair work, group work, discussions etc. CBI principles and the related mainstreaming strategy referred to above might become even more practical during the preparatory university English language teaching courses.
The cooperation between the English teachers and the subject teachers, if such a partnership is available, can be highly productive in any intensive English teaching context. Working together they can design parallel courses in their respective areas of specialization for the new students undergoing intensive English language training: the subject specialists deliver a course of lectures with a specific content, while the English specialists extract the language elements involved in comprehending that content, and embody these in their course. Students can also draw upon outside sources for self-access work based on activities involving content comprehension and associated language practice exercises; autonomous learning through the extensive use of modern technology is one of the surest ways for students to augment their knowledge of particular subjects and their mastery of the medium simultaneously.

END

Teachers as Nation-builders

Teachers as Nation-builders
(First published in The Island/22nd Friday, October 2010)

A nation comprises the people of a country, not its land, buildings, or natural features, though these may help identify a particular nation as its possessions. Nation building, therefore, means the development of the human factor along with the other resources of the country so that its people are able to enjoy a comfortable, happy, contented life in a free, fair and peaceful land.
The greatest asset that a country has for achieving such a state of existence is its youth. The education of the young is the heaviest responsibility that any nation must shoulder. Since it is teachers who play the central role in educating the children, they may be described as the foremost nation builders.
From time immemorial, Sinhalese folk wisdom has accorded pre-eminence to three occupations: ruling, healing, and teaching. The saying “rajakama neththam vedakama” (If you can’t become a king, the next best thing is to become a physician) shows the high esteem in which healers are held in our society. However, neither rulers nor physicians have ever been assigned any divinity as a tribe, though perhaps our ancient kings might have been formally called “god” or addressed as such. Yet, good teachers are even today honoured with the “god” title: “gurudevi” (teacher god). At school felicitation ceremonies, it is a deeply emotional sight when sometimes senior university professors, administrators, and army generals among others pay obeisance to humble old school teachers who had taught them, guided them, praised them, and even punished them on occasion in their childhood, by falling at their feet.
In moral terms, teaching is arguably the noblest profession in our culture. This is not to belittle the other professions, but to stress the fact that people’s acquisition of knowledge and skills in any field, and the assimilation of sound values and a good moral sense always originate in the formative years of their lives as school children; above all, it is from good teachers that children learn how to educate themselves in later life. No other professions are possible without the profession of teaching.
In our country, it is usual for teachers to enjoy the privilege of having their former ‘golayas’ (pupils) who offer to help them in any government office or other institution they visit. Persons in exalted positions in society often remember their school teachers with more affection and respect than their university professors because of the greater personal influence that the former had on their education and their life in general. A teacher’s work is thus praised, and respected as an act of generosity and service by the beneficiaries of such ‘nobility’, which means the whole society feels grateful to teachers. Such adulation is a recognition of the contribution that teachers make to the personal development of individuals and thereby, of the nation.
This sentiment may sound a little too idealistic under the current circumstances, for like the medical profession, the teaching profession is unfortunately losing its traditional aura of respectability as a result of being highly commercialised, and politicised: business is usurping the space earlier occupied by service, while labour politics is displacing professional ethics.
However, in spite of this, teaching in the formal education system still continues to relate to the life of the individuals, and through them to the life of the society at large, in a vitally important way that no other profession can. A teacher’s work involves providing the learners intellectual guidance for exploring the world of knowledge, and for imbibing the moral values of their society, in a word, educating them. No other professional affects a client’s life so intimately, so profoundly, and so permanently as a teacher does.
While there has been no change in the way teachers influence the life of the individuals and the society, how teachers teach has been subjected to fresh thinking, and improved a great deal. The traditional view of the teacher as the repository of all knowledge whose business is to fill their pupils with learning as if they were empty pitchers became obsolete decades ago, although it is still more or less dominant in our country. The concept of teaching has undergone radical transformation, especially over the past century due to new research findings in educational psychology, teaching methodology, and other allied fields of study, and also due to the phenomenal increase in the number of sources of information resulting from revolutionary innovations in Information and Communications Technology. Whereas in the past the teacher was at the centre of the teaching process, the more modern insights into how learners learn have tended to locate learner initiative at the centre of the educative process. Educationists began to see that learning belongs to the learner, and that a teacher at best could only help a learner to learn; teaching is today considered to be teaching learners how to learn, rather than just dispensing information.
However, the rational idea that learning is the responsibility of the learner was already a couple of thousands of years old when it began to be stressed again in modern education. In a short essay entitled “Teaching” in his book The Prophet (1923) Kahlil Gibran (1883-1933), Lebanese-American philosophical essayist, includes the following aphorism as spoken by the prophet to his audience: “No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.” This actually echoes Socrates (467-399 BCE), the ancient Greek philosopher, who saw teaching, not as a telling, but as a drawing forth. The Socratic method involves developing a latent idea in a pupil’s mind through questioning that guides him or her to think independently. Kahlil Gibran, in the same context, makes his prophet say: “If he (the teacher) is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.”
The traditional model of teaching encouraged rote learning, in which students committed to memory ‘undigested’ bits of information that the teacher presented. Today supplying mere information is the least of a teacher’s responsibilities, because the available sources of information for the learner to tap are many. Instead, a modern teacher needs to provide the environment for the learner to create knowledge in collaboration with other learners.
The principles of constructivist learning are based on the assumption that knowledge is socially constructed through collaborative engagement; it is neither delivered by an all-knowing teacher nor generated by one’s own unaided effort. Constructivist principles are embodied in new models of teaching.
Since the learner has moved to the centre of the teaching-learning arena one might say that education is more a matter of learning than teaching. But this doesn’t mean that the teacher’s role is being written off. In fact, the truth is that the new models of teaching that have been developed based on decades of research make the teacher’s responsibilities even more onerous than before. To be a successful teacher one must be an inspiring and persuasive presenter of information, skills, ways of thinking, ideas and values; a teacher must engage the students in cognitive and social tasks, and teach them how to use them in the future to further their education. Two examples of models of teaching (out of many) are given below:
The first is based on inductive thinking. Inductive thinking is thinking that enables you to draw a general rule to explain a number of specific ideas or observations. Promoting this kind of thinking is one of the many modern models of teaching. Analysing information to create concepts is used not only in the sciences, but in other subject areas as well. Rules of grammar can be worked through inductive reasoning. (Below, I am using an example found in Bruce Joyce and Marsha Weil’s book “Models of Teaching” (5th ed. 1997.)
Children are seated in pairs for the lesson. In front of them is a pile of small objects. Each pair is given a U-shaped magnet. The teacher tells them that the object is called a magnet, and that she wants them to do a bit of exploration using the magnet. The children are asked to sort the small objects according to what happens when they bring the magnet close to or touch them with it. The teacher also takes notes on the categories the children form, and use these categories to begin their study of written vocabulary.
Here is my own second example of a model of teaching: The brief short story “Hills like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway presents, in his characteristic compact style, (probably) the last of many quarrels between a young woman called Jig and an American (who is not named in the story) who are enjoying a tour, visiting many different cities. In the course of this tour, the girl becomes pregnant. The quarrels are over the man’s insistence that the girl agree to a simple operation to end her pregnancy. But the girl apparently wants to have her baby, marry the man, and perpetuate their loving relationship. This story, which I think would be suitable for an English literature lesson with a (preferably) mixed class of our twelfth graders (presumably adult enough for such a story), would invite what is known as “the group investigation model of teaching”. With this model, the teacher has the students read the story, and share their reactions to the plot, characters, setting, action, central theme, etc. of the story and argue out about the moral issues involved, positions they would take, and the values they would adopt. Then, the students are provided with copies of another story by the same author for home study: “A Very Short Story”. They come ready for a discussion comparing the two stories in terms of their themes, issues involved, attitudes expressed, etc. After sharing, the students are asked to write a homework assignment about the two stories compared. (Incidentally, interested readers are invited to visit my literature blog heli29.wordpress.com for the texts and short discussions of these stories, though they may be of little relevance to the subject of this article.)
The two instances given above are just random examples. In this type of teaching, instead of the teacher dishing out some prescribed information, the children engage in active inquiry in a social context, and discover new knowledge with the teacher helping them as a guide and a partner. Such teaching-learning activities are intrinsically interesting, challenging, and rewarding at the same time for both the students and the teacher; the teacher also learns in the sense that s/he gets the opportunity to understand how different pupils respond to challenges, how they cope up, how classroom management may be improved, and also to reflect on his or her own practice. When teaching is managed this way, it helps to inculcate useful attitudes of mind in the children such as independent inquiry, rational thinking, sharing with and caring for others, and collaboration instead of competition.
One of the major tasks we assign to education is citizenship training. Qualities of self-reliance, critical thinking, mutual helpfulness, and broadmindedness are essential for the citizens of a democracy such as ours. We are a diverse society, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically. A normal classroom in Sri Lanka is a microcosm of the society outside, and therefore is a suitable venue for citizenship training. How teachers conduct their teaching has an important impact on students developing the correct perceptions and attitudes that promote harmonious co-existence between diverse racial, religious, and cultural groups, and a sense of common allegiance to the motherland.
An adequate level of literacy and general knowledge is absolutely essential for citizens to take part in a democracy. They must be able to read and write well enough to become aware of, and assert, their democratic rights; they need the same ability to discover and discharge their responsibilities. These things too, people usually learn from teachers at school.
All categories of workers contribute to nation building by performing their specific jobs for the benefit of the people. Of these only two categories of workers have to deal with persons as their direct objects of attention: medical professionals and teachers. But there’s a significant difference between them: doctors and nurses usually work on their patients whereas teachers work with their students; a teacher cannot produce good results by trying to work on their pupils, instead of working with them. That, in essence, is the difference between the traditional approach to teaching and the new models of teaching.
Teachers are the prime nation-builders, not by default, but by the very nature of their profession. To do their job well, they need to be knowledgeable and cultured (that is, educated, in the real sense of the word). There are teachers who deserve to be worshipped as ‘teacher gods’. But obviously, there aren’t enough of them. If there were, repulsive scenes like the recent mayhem that certain university students caused at the Ministry of Higher Education wouldn’t have occurred.

Letting the genie out of the bottle

Letting the Genie out of the Bottle
(First published in The Island/1st October 2010)

Cynics might see some contradiction in the rehabilitation of English as a medium of general education, with prospects of eventually making it the universal medium of teaching in the future, in a country where sixty years of teaching it as a second language must be considered a failure, and where the general educational achievement level even in the mother tongue leaves much to be desired. Barely 40% of students pass in English at the GCE O/L, though success is ensured by compromised standards. However, this low success rate is not uniformly shared across the country; the performance level in the rural areas is usually far below that in urban areas. Students do hardly better in such important subjects as science and maths. And this is also a country where a significant 6% of the children of school-going age do not attend any school at all because of poverty; some families need the money that their children earn to physically survive; the picture would have been even more dismal but for the welfare measures introduced by successive governments such as free textbooks and free school uniforms. And on top of these still unresolved problems is the issue of the likely linguistic, cultural, and sociopolitical impact of English medium education on the island nation.
However, it appears that the current changes are inevitable and are here to stay; English is regaining its pre-eminence in education. As for the swabasha medium, the genie is out of the bottle. I don’t want to be an alarmist or a wet blanket by saying this. My intention is to stress the importance of realistic planning, and determined plan implementation. To avoid the disastrous pitfalls that the changes already initiated are likely to involve, sound forethought is an absolute necessity on the part of planners and policy-makers. At this juncture, we need to manage the changes in such a way that the future generations will remember us with gratitude for daring to take a step backward in order to go forward in earnest.
The most important reason behind the rather hurried reinstatement of the English medium is the need to participate in the global “information economy” that the former US President Bill Clinton talked about at the dawn of the new millennium; in our circumstances, English is perceived to be the key to this resource, and thus, it figures prominently in our education and employment domains. The Sri Lankan government declared 2009 the Year of English and IT. There is a conscientious effort being made by the authorities to normalize a healthy level of proficiency in these two interrelated areas among the youth of the country. An English medium education is believed to immensely facilitate this.
The success of the change will depend, among other things, on the students’ acceptance of this reason. The general failure of the school English teaching programme to date has been mainly due to their non-perception of an actual need to learn the language. If the powers that be are able to convince them now that they must go beyond learning English as a second language and adopt it as the medium of instruction in view of the vital educational goal which they cannot reach through their own mother tongue, they will be totally amenable to such a switchover.
Unfortunately, however, while English is being boosted, it looks as if Sinhalese and Tamil are taken for granted. The deleterious effects, if any, of the medium substitution could be more pronounced on the former than the latter, for Sinhalese enjoys little geographical space beyond Sri Lanka for its survival. What is going to happen to these indigenous languages vis-à-vis English in the longer run is hard to predict, though a tentative prognosis may be hazarded: In a situation where English gradually expands its dominance in the mind of the language user pushing the indigenous language into relative unimportance, processes that languages in contact normally undergo may be expected to operate. One such process is known as cross-linguistic influence in which linguistic elements from the sociopolitically more dominant language percolate into the I-language system of the less dominant one. { ‘I-language’ is Chomsky’s coinage for the idea of language as an internal (and also individual) phenomenon; it refers to a person’s unconscious knowledge of the rules underlying their language, which, in linguistics, is also called their declarative knowledge or competence.} Cross-linguistic influence is inherent in all language contact situations such as the emergence of pidgins (When speakers of two mutually unintelligible languages try to communicate with one another using a mixture of those languages, a pidgin develops; a pidgin has only a reduced grammatical structure, and is never any community’s native tongue), the development of creoles (pidgins that have acquired a grammatical structure, and become the mother tongue of a particular language community), and even the process by which a language eventually ‘dies’; the reverse phenomenon takes place when a foreign language is learned through classroom instruction or individual study: elements from the learner’s native language appear in the new language. When the learner’s proficiency increases, the two languages begin to coexist in the mind of the learner without any further traffic either way. But in an authentic language community such as that which may emerge when English is made the exclusive medium of education, it could even displace the indigenous language altogether resulting in a language shift. Such an eventuality would of course be an unprecedented catastrophe as far as Sinhalese is concerned.
But considering the fact that we have preserved our essential linguistic and cultural identity over the millennia despite unrelenting foreign pressure, any possibility of the Sinhalese language being soon counted among the world’s dead languages should probably be ruled out. Sri Lankans are not an uprooted or transposed slave population without a definable history on whom a foreign language can be imposed to indulge somebody’s whim. However, planners and policy-makers should be mindful of their responsibility to do everything possible to preserve our ancient language.
It is assumed that we are moving towards a form of bilingualism, or even trilingualism. My personal opinion is that while universal bilingualism (in English and Sinhala/Tamil) is a feasible objective about the necessity of achieving which there’s no question, universal trilingual proficiency seems a bit over the top unless it is adequately justified, for how can one hope to persuade all Sinhalese and Tamil students to learn each other’s language when there’s no apparent reason for doing so in a context where English serves them as a link language? Some might say, “Let those Tamils who have a good reason to learn Sinhalese do so; let the same apply to the Sinhalese with regard to Tamil”. This, in fact, is what is happening in informal and formal situations even now.
However, by making proficiency in both Sinhala and Tamil compulsory for all its employees, the government is providing a meaningful reason for people to learn both languages; this is not like asking them to learn both languages for the sake of communal harmony, and national unity, which would be unconvincing (because it is common interests more than common languages that unite different communities). If properly implemented this requirement will serve as a good motive for prospective government employees to learn both languages. Such a situation would encourage voluntary language learning. Since future educational schemes are likely to be more job-oriented than now Sinhalese and Tamil students will be able to make a choice of Tamil and Sinhalese respectively if they know that they will be required to interact with people speaking only one of those languages in a particular social/working environment in the time to come. Unless such a worthwhile target is offered for them to focus on second language Sinhala or Tamil will suffer the same fate as English has done over the past sixty years.
The English medium will potentially prove to be even more problematic than teaching English as a second language for other reasons. Decisions about language always involve coming to grips with complex sociopolitical issues relating to such vital areas as national identity, human rights, equal educational opportunities, etc. Raising Sinhala and Tamil to official status displacing English which was the language of a very small privileged minority did improve the situation in those areas. Now the problem is if the return of English could mean the undoing of whatever was achieved under the language policies adopted after independence. For example, will it confer certain advantages on one section of the population while depriving another of the same?
I am not suggesting that the English medium should be abandoned; it should be there, just as much as Sinhalese and Tamil mediums must be there, for there are Sri Lankans, though a minority, whose mother tongue is English, and others who choose to study in English for their own reasons. Parents must have the freedom to choose the type of education their children should receive. That is a fundamental human right recognized even by the UN. So, let’s have all the three mediums side by side, but proficiency in English as a second language must be made compulsory for the Sinhalese and Tamil medium students. There must also be freedom for all students to change their medium when they find that necessary, after proving their eligibility to do so.
It is worth considering how the changeover to the English medium is likely to impact on the Sri Lankan school system, which consists mainly of a large network of government schools and a relatively small number of non-government schools (the latter expanding at a rate, though). Government schools are of two types: national schools and provincial schools; the national schools come under the central Ministry of Education, and the provincial schools under the provincial councils. Private schools and International schools, which are non-government schools, are generally autonomous institutions. Though not controlled by the Ministry of Education, private schools follow the regulations and curricula of the Ministry in all three media. On the other hand, the international schools, which have only the English medium, follow foreign, mostly British, syllabuses. Naturally, the socio-economic background of the students who are generally likely to attend these different categories of schools will determine the degree of reception that the English medium will enjoy.
My feeling is that it will find a better haven in non-government schools than in government schools for obvious reasons. Usually, only those parents who can afford to pay high fees will send their children to private or international schools; often they themselves have had a background of English education, or can afford to reinforce their children’s education with further help from private tutors. Children in government schools who opt to follow the English medium must depend on their teachers and other meagre resources available in such an environment. At the beginning at least, there will be an acute scarcity of teachers capable of teaching different subjects in English. However, it may be said, with some reservations, that this problem will not affect the private and international schools to such an extent since teachers who want to serve in those schools will invariably be required to have the ability to teach in the English medium.
In any case, continued public acceptance of the English medium will depend on how successful it is in the government school system. There are already about 10,000 government schools across the island, and this number will increase when the Ministry of Education creates in the next few years a system of 1000 well equipped secondary schools (as envisaged) on par with today’s so-called national or popular schools; according to its plans, some of these schools will be newly built, while the rest will be existing schools appropriately upgraded; they will be located in all the electorates, fairly distributed according to demand. This is a measure taken in order to put an end to the current mad rush for securing places in the so-called “popular” schools in towns that leads many parents to resort to fraudulent practices such as doctoring documents and bribing school authorities. An added incentive for them to seek admission for their children to town schools is that these schools offer the English medium. The special schools that the Ministry is going to establish in the provinces should also have this facility.
There are already more than one hundred International Schools in the country today, and we can only expect more of them to be established in the future. Begun in the early 1980’s for the children of expatriates in Sri Lanka working under various projects these schools were later thrown open to local students too whose parents could afford to pay high fees for an English medium education of international standards. At the beginning these International Schools were mainly located in urban centres such as Colombo and Kandy; but today they are found even in some remote places, and cater to a mainly local student population. International Schools are business ventures registered under the Board of Investment (BOI) and as such do not come under any government ministry responsible for education. They are autonomous private institutions the majority of which prepare students for British examinations.
International schools are probably the least ‘national’ in a vitally important sense, though not all such institutions would deserve that description. The education they deal in may be of ‘international’ standards. But if it has no ‘national’ value the country will be just wasting its resources. The education of the country’s young is an unavoidable national responsibility that we all share. The government should help the international schools to be pro-national institutions without writing them off as a systemic aberration.
Today, the formal education system in Sri Lanka is being subjected to some profound changes, albeit tacitly. The reintroduction of the English medium along with the reauthorization of private education amounts to a virtual reversal of the post-independence reforms, obviously demanded by the exigencies of the fresh national resurgence that is taking place in the wake of decades of relative stagnation. In this context, the state cannot and should not relinquish its responsibility and initiative in education. Whether the schools are government or non-government, national or international, they are all sustained on the country’s wealth, and the people have a right to demand value for their money. What the country needs out of education is a generation of young people equipped with the knowledge and skills, and the moral character necessary to work for the happiness of all Sri Lankans without discrimination.

Concluded

English in General Education - A Historical Perspective

English in General Education - A Historical Perspective
(First published: The Island/1st October 2010)
For well over two hundred years now English has been playing a predominant role, in one form or another, in all spheres of national activity in our country such as civil administration, justice, business, industry, and education. During most of this period, the majority of the population had reason to believe that it was a weapon wielded against them by a foreign power bent on subverting them spiritually as well as temporally. But today, they are witnessing an apparent sea change in their attitude towards English. They are courting it as an agent of modernization and development, at some cost though.


The history of the present form of formal education in our country opens with the establishment of a rudimentary school system by the British in the first half of the nineteenth century. Rev. Cordiner arrived in Sri Lanka (then known among foreigners as “Ceylon”) in 1799 to serve as chaplain of the British garrison in Colombo. Later on, he became the principal of all the schools in the settlement. The Christian institutions created by Governor Edward Barnes (1824-1831) in 1827 were intended to train suitable young natives for “communicating a knowledge of Christianity to their countrymen”. Obviously, the cultural subversion of a predominantly non-Christian population was one of the foremost aims of the colonisers. Protestant schools established in the island numbered well over two hundred. Christian schools and colleges dominated formal education until 1886. The English medium education provided in these institutions also aimed at turning out the personnel necessary from among the local youth to work in subordinate positions in the government and business enterprises owned by foreigners. These schools catered to the elite which mainly comprised the Westernized English speaking Christians of all communities. There was also a system of primary vernacular schools meant for children from the downtrodden classes who formed the majority. But vernacular education did not qualify them for a position above the level of a school teacher or a notary public. These young people were deliberately debarred from access to the superior education that was available only in the English schools: the English schools, which were highly subsidized by the government and could offer free tuition, charged fees in order to make them too expensive for the majority of the country’s young to attend. Secondary and collegiate education in English cost the government Rs 84 and Rs 214 per student per annum respectively, whereas the corresponding figure for a child in a vernacular school was Rs 14-16.

This discriminatory treatment of the subject population created a relatively contented, privileged, English speaking, elitist, Christian minority and a hostile, dispossessed, discontented, native language speaking, mainly Buddhist, and Hindu majority. Both groups were ethnically diverse. But while their common language and religion, and the comprador status united the privileged minority, there was nothing for the dispossessed majority to share in harmony than their wretchedness under the foreign yoke.

The Sinhalese Buddhist revivalist movement led by patriotic nationalists like Anagarika Dharmapala attracted the attention of theosophist Colonel Henry Steel Olcott from America who arrived in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in 1880. Colonel Olcott, together with local leaders, pioneered the establishment of Buddhist schools such as Ananda College in Colombo and Dharmaraja College in Kandy. These were English medium schools.

The grant of universal franchise in 1931 accelerated reforms in many areas. In that year, English schools which alone provided secondary and collegiate education had on roll 84,000 students; this contrasted with 476,000 students in primary vernacular schools. Dr C.W.W. Kannangara, as Minister of Education (1931-47) in the State Council, introduced far-reaching reforms that benefited all classes, particularly the previously neglected rural children. It was during his tenure that the Central College system was inaugurated which made an English medium education available free of charge to the village students; the University of Peradeniya was also established in the same period. But the most outstanding achievement of his which he is remembered by was the Free Education Scheme (1944). He managed to see the Free Education Act through the State Council in the teeth of opposition from the elite. The replacement of English with native languages as the medium of instruction was effected in 1945.

Changes brought about in 1956 and after were aimed at restoring justice to the common people who had long been denied it both under the Europeans and, following their departure, under the local ruling class dominated by the Westernized English speaking elite. The takeover of private schools (1961) was another significant move in the same direction. Those who pioneered the policy changes of 1944, 1945 and 1961 were nevertheless mindful of the importance of the English language for education, and did everything possible to promote the teaching of it as a second language. However, the next two decades did not see the expected level of acceptance and mastery of English among the general mass of students as a tool of enhancing their education that they now received in their own mother tongue as their right.

Various well-meaning educational reforms have been introduced particularly since 1970 to date by successive regimes resulting in some moderate improvement in the critical areas focused, such as the lessening of the traditional mismatch between the education provided and the society’s actual needs (“The university has departments; the society has problems” as an eminent academic once put it), improved prospects of bridging the perennial urban-rural gap, increased focus on the employability of the youth, etc. In the meantime, the normally poor knowledge of English one sees among the majority of our students has been identified by most as a central defect responsible for the less than satisfactory performance of our education system, and this has ramifications for all other issues.

A stock reaction to this situation is to question the wisdom of the language planners, and policy-makers of the past who substituted Sinhala and Tamil for English as the medium of instruction. Those who thus criticise the Kannangaras and the Bandaranaikes either ignore or are ignorant of the fact that the high level of English knowledge from which an inexcusable decline is alleged to have occurred was not a universal phenomenon. In fact, the high level of English language proficiency was rather the exception than the rule in the context of the new free education system that was suddenly expanded to include every social stratum without discrimination between the rich and the poor. Earlier English medium education used to be the exclusive preserve of a privileged few. When education was made free, it was obviously not possible to make it available to all the children of the country in the English medium because English had been used until then by an infinitesimal minority among the population. According to the census of 1946, after nearly one hundred and fifty years of government sponsored English education (restricted as it was to a minority), only about 6% of the total population had even a very elementary knowledge of the language.

We shouldn’t forget that since the 1944 reforms English as a second language has been an important component of the school curriculum for all the children of the island irrespective of their social background. For the vast majority of our population any serious contact with English in educational terms should be considered as originating there. So, when some people talk about the excellent standards of English that obtained before the introduction of swabhasha education, and blame its decline on an allegedly misguided insistence on the necessity of teaching in the mother tongue by the nationalists, they are making it appear as if English had been available to all and sundry prior to those reforms. Plainly, where general English language proficiency was concerned, there never was a paradise for the poor devils to lose.

In keeping with the best informed expert opinion and the democratically most acceptable choice of the time, English was replaced with the mother tongue of the child as the medium of instruction. In the Central Schools, which originally offered English medium instruction to the generality of rural students, the switchover to the mother tongue was complete by the beginning of the 1960’s. Although official attention to the teaching of English was never relaxed the period 1960-80 saw a steady waning of enthusiasm about acquiring a knowledge of English among school children and even among students in higher education (as already pointed out) because they found or rather believed that an education received in the mother tongue was adequate for their purposes. No doubt, this attitude was shared among many ordinary people.

That was a brief two decades in which, at least some of us Sri Lankans, perhaps the majority, felt almost completely free from the baleful influence that English exercised on our lives as the language of imperial occupation during the two hundred years of our association with it. The natural aversion to English meant that the majority of the population, unconsciously perhaps, rejected it when it was offered as a second language; even those who would have hankered after it as a means of gaining power, prestige, and position in the days of British rule now found it a spent force. Such nationalistic antipathy towards English (which, until recently, was only to be expected) was among the factors accountable for the general failure of the state English teaching programme.

This was contrary to what the pioneering educational reformers, language planners, and policy-making politicians intended. They clearly understood that English was indispensable for Sri Lanka to forge ahead educationally and economically, and did everything necessary to promote its learning by the youth of the country; they expected the changed role of English as the key to modernization to be appreciated by the populace in a context where the indigenous languages were restored to their due status. However, these expectations seem to have been broadly frustrated. English, after all, might not have shed its kaduwa associations in the perception of ordinary people. Or perhaps, they’ve believed to date that they could survive without English.

The introduction of the free market economic policies in 1978 proved a politico-economic watershed with far-reaching consequences for the country both internally and externally. The changes brought it more in line with the idea of globalism – prioritising the so-called ‘interests of the whole world’ over those of individual countries or nations. (The term ‘global village’ is already over forty years old, although the concept itself obviously predated it.) Internally, the state of majority vis-à-vis minority politics became more unsettled than before, creating an exposed flank for biased internationalist manipulation against the country. In this context, English has assumed increased significance for us, internationally, as the lingua franca of global communication, and inside the country, as an ethnically neutral medium especially in the education domain and in the job market. At the same time, English is the obvious key to the utilisation of the modern information and communications technologies that are fast advancing. Above all, English is being recognized as the indispensable medium of advanced education particularly in the scientific and technological fields.

English is thus making a resurgence in a fundamentally different role. It is seen as a tool ready to hand rather than feared as a ‘kaduwa’ (sword) to buckle under. During colonial times, English was an instrument of foreign domination and exploitation, except for those who gained from it at the expense of the rights of the majority. Today, “Learn English” is the mantra of modernization which is popular even in the remotest districts of the island; it is more acceptable to the general public than ever. Everybody seems happy. The return of English enjoys the vital political support and official backing it needs.

However, there’s a real challenge before us: that of devising ways and means to forestall the re-emergence or perpetuation of such problems as the denial of equality of educational opportunity to significant sections of the population, failure to create a level playing field for job-seekers from disadvantaged backgrounds, and potential threats to the survival of our cultural identities embodied in our own ancient languages and literatures, etc. which may result from the re-introduction of English as the dominant medium of education. These are the very problems that earlier generations tried to overcome by introducing educational reforms that included the determination of the relative value of English in the scheme of things.

A Way out of Trouble with Grammar

A Way out of Trouble with Grammar
(First published in The Island/24th September 2010)
Probably, it isn’t much of a problem to use classical grammatical labels to identify words in English sentences. But it’s a different matter when, even today, some grammarians claim, as those of the eighteenth century did, that the English sentence structure should faithfully follow the Classical Latin sentence structure. They will insist, for example, that it is not correct or proper to say “The girl speaks better than him” (which is more usual among today’s English speakers) and that the sentence should be “corrected” to read “The girl speaks better than he (does)”, or that to say “The manager asked the secretary to carefully re-draft the letter” is wrong, because of the “split infinitive”, and that it should be amended as “The manager asked the secretary to re-draft the letter carefully”. This is what is known as the prescriptive approach.
With the realization that the classical model of grammatical analysis would not fit every language, linguists started adopting a different approach which has prevailed for most of the past one hundred years: they collect samples of the language they want to analyse (called ‘corpora’, the plural form of ‘corpus’ meaning a collection of information about a language in the form of transcripts of speech recorded or written texts in that language), and study these to establish regular patterns of structures of the language in actual use. This descriptive approach is the basis of various modern analyses of language structure.
Structural analysis represents one type of descriptive grammar. Its main purpose is to study the distribution of forms in a language. The usual method is to set ‘test-frames’ such as sentences with slots in them.

The …………… makes a lot of noise.
I heard a …………… yesterday.

We can suggest a lot of forms that will fit into these slots (e.g. dog, parrot, beggar, radio, train). Because they go into the same test-frame we can say that they are probably examples of the same grammatical category. This is the category we label as “nouns”. But there are many other forms that do not fit these test-frames (e.g. George, a train, an engine). Different test-frames are needed for these.

…………… makes a lot of noise.
I heard …………… yesterday.

Among forms that occupy these slots are the engine, a train, the vendor with a megaphone, and an ambulance. They can be said to belong to another grammatical category. The label given to such forms is “noun phrases”. (The example test-frames are from George Yule’s “The Study of Language”, Cambridge University Press, 1997).

As suggested in the barest outline above, a lot of well founded criticism was made against traditional English grammar, and more accurate models of grammatical analysis were proposed instead. However, students of English and teachers the world over still depend on a common core of traditional grammar (prescriptive generalizations about the form and usage of varieties such as British Printed English (i.e. written variety). The main reason for this is that the terms of traditional grammar, notwithstanding their impreciseness and lack of accuracy, help the average users of English to easily identify and understand most forms in the language. The terms provide the metalanguage necessary for dealing with those concepts. The plethora of ‘grammars’ available in the market testifies to the popularity of traditional grammar, which has enjoyed revived pedagogical attention at least for the past twenty years.
I’ll mention the titles of just three grammar books that happen to be on my table at this moment: 1) A Communicative Grammar of English by Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvick. Second Edition, 1994. Reprinted by Pearson Education Asia Pte. Ltd. 2000; 2) Collins Cobuild English Grammar edited by John Sinclair et al. HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Glasgow. 1990. Reprint 2000; 3) Practical English Usage by Michael Swan. International student’s edition. Oxford University Press. New Delhi. 2006. There are hundreds of such grammar books designed for use by English learners at all levels from the beginning to the advanced.
They present what may be taken as the ’common core’ grammar (touched on above) that marks all varieties of English in the world. The existence of a grammatical ‘common core’ is actually a very good thing for learners of English, for it helps them make sense of English in whatever form it manifests itself .
‘Usage’ provides the basis for determining the correctness or acceptability of grammatical constructions. The compilers of the modern grammars rely on corpora (mentioned above) for their examples. Stored on computers these corpora contain many millions of words of spoken and written English as it is used today. Earlier grammarians had to make up their own examples to illustrate grammar points, and unsurprisingly, these examples seemed stilted, and hence rarely approximated real live usage. By way of example, we may take a look at the Bank of English at the Birmingham University which had collected 20 million words of the English language in the 1980’s; the 1987 first edition of the Collins Cobuild English Dictionary was based on this corpus. The 1995 edition of the same dictionary includes patterns of use identified and explained by its editorial team ( headed by Professor John Sinclair) in 200 million words of spoken and written English across the world. To suggest another example, the Cambridge Grammar of English (2006) edited by Professors Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy claim to have skimmed a corpus of “800 million words of real spoken and written English”.
The grammar books I have referred to above can be taken as random examples of commonly available grammars that are more suitable for advanced learners of English who seek a theoretical knowledge of English grammar, especially teachers. For the use of learners of English at the school level there are similarly tailor-made practice grammar books even in greater abundance in the local bookshops {e.g. Essential English Grammar by Raymond Murphy, Advanced English Grammar by Martin Hewings (both available in special low priced South Asian editions), and The Complete Grammar by Michael Strumpf and Auriel Douglas. The last is by American authors; it is a kind of question-answer compendium of English grammar for the average learner of the language without any practice exercises; a low priced Indian reprint of this book is also available.}
All these grammar guides and practice books are written by authors who are from among English speakers of the two main national varieties, British and American. There can’t be any better exponents of common core English grammar than those, in my opinion. Some Sri Lankan authors too have produced very good grammar books. Two examples that come to mind are the latest editions of W.H. Samaranayake’s Practical English (first pub. 1940), and Bertram Chinnaiyah’s Steps to Mastery of English Grammar (first pub. 1985?). There are also cheap, low quality, ersatz English teaching manuals which are mere rehashes of material pilfered from other sources, or which are put together by persons with a smattering knowledge of English in order to make some quick money. It’s up to the teachers, students, and their parents to be discriminating when they shop for good grammar books.
Modern grammar books reflect a sensitivity to both prescriptive and descriptive approaches. Particularly at the beginning levels, prescriptive grammar is a practical necessity: students must be taught the basic rules of the great game of language that is played inside one’s head (thinking), between two people or among many users as the case may be. But all that is said here should be qualified by the principle of unstoppable change that all languages are subject to. All aspects of a language – pronunciation, forms of words, their meanings, even grammar – undergo change over time. It should also be borne in mind that absolutely faultless grammar, either in speech or in writing, is rarely achieved, and that perfect grammatical accuracy is less important than successful communication.
Explicit grammar teaching or learning should not be done as an end in itself. It can only be a necessary initial step towards the gradual development of communicative capacity in the individual learner. In the traditional prescriptive grammar direct explanations are the norm. Language learning is viewed as a linear process; a language is believed to be constituted of discrete entities, and learning it is assumed to involve the gradual accumulation of these distinct items. This is a wrong position to adopt. There is empirical evidence to suggest that language learning is an organic, rather than linear, process. That is, in learning a language there is regression or backsliding, sudden advances in competence, and interaction between grammatical competence and performance; the grammatical forms are not learned in isolation, but in relation to the global context of a meaningful text.
Such a view of language learning supports the idea of grammatical instruction as Consciousness Raising (CR), which may be roughly defined as encouraging learners to focus on a text in order to discover for themselves the grammatical rules in operation there. CR requires learners to think creatively. Explicit grammar instruction can reinforce such independent discovery. Advocates of CR reject the alleged dichotomy between conscious learning and subconscious acquisition (a la Krashen, 1982). Unlike traditional grammar teaching, CR devotes greater attention to the form-function relationship (i.e. how a particular structure expresses meaning). Another speciality of CR is that it focuses on the grammatical structures and elements in relation to a broader discourse context. The rather naïve traditional assumption that once a grammar point has been taught it necessarily becomes a part of a learner’s existing knowledge is alien to CR.
Apart from explicit grammar instruction in the second language classroom, especially at the beginning stages, teachers need to provide for self-learning among their students. There are good grammar books available for this purpose. The Internet provides even better resources for multimodal (not only written) grammar practice. There are hundreds of free websites that offer grammar explanations and exercises at different levels of difficulty. Below are just a few examples of such websites for the interested readers to explore:
http://www.eslgold.com/grammar.html/ (for elementary to advanced), http:www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/English/chairs/linguist/real/index/html/
(for intermediate to advanced),
http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc (for high intermediate to advanced).
From a strictly linguistics point of view, it may even be a laughable matter to be talking about this very complex subject of grammar in this manner. But teachers are bound to be more practical than theoretical by the very nature of their metier. At no time in the history of English language teaching has grammar been ignored as irrelevant or dispensable, though the necessity of teaching it has received varying degrees of attention from time to time. Today it is generally agreed that the mastery of grammar along with that of vocabulary plays a central role in language development. Though ordinarily it is possible for most people to attain an acceptable level of proficiency in English without a serious enough formal grounding in its grammar, the ability to speak and write English correctly and coherently is considered one of the most important attributes of an educated person. The lack of such an ability may reveal a poor educational background.
For the average Sri Lankan learners of English the ability to express themselves in good spoken and written English, particularly in education and job situations, is the ultimate goal. For achieving this target, a good practical knowledge of grammar is essential. Though grammar is a very complex affair, its teaching and learning can be simplified through the judicious use of prescriptive as well as descriptive grammar. Explicit teaching of grammar should be backed by copious practice in multifarious, meaningful contexts.

Talking about Grammar without Grumbling

Talking about Grammar without Grumbling
(First published in The Island/17th September 2010)
A fairly widely held belief among learners of English as a second language is that the study of grammar is a major stumbling block to their making any headway. They seem to view grammar as esoteric and abstruse; their attitude is: ‘Why should we bother about something which only a few specialists understand and which many ordinary people would have a hard time grappling with if they wanted to learn it?’ Such an outlook is both erroneous and harmful, because the truth is that a sound knowledge of any language is not possible without a proper grounding in its grammar. But learning it by rote is equally unhelpful. When properly approached, grammar will prove that, after all, it is not such a bugbear as some people make it out to be.
The two most important aspects of a language that a language learner must tackle are its vocabulary and its grammar. Learning a language entails fleshing out the skeleton of grammar in words and phrases; in other words, it basically involves the internalizing of grammatical rules and the learning of vocabulary items which are adequate for effective communication in that language in a particular context. Therefore a course of language instruction needs to focus on the teaching of grammar and vocabulary, while maximizing the communicative use of the target language; the latter (i.e. the communicative use of the target language) may be regarded as the mainstay of language instruction.
When Communicative Language Teaching came into general acceptance, the previous insistence on the mechanical mastery of structure under the so-called audio-lingual approach was abandoned in favour of an emphasis on the importance of learning to communicate as the main goal of language learning. However, as before, grammatical rules were left to be inductively learned by the students; in other words, explicit explanation of grammatical points was avoided. Later, this attitude was relaxed, and whatever technique seemed to help the learners to communicate through the target language was accepted depending on the age, the proficiency level, and the needs, etc. of the students. More modern research has revealed that no efficient language learning results from exclusive reliance on discovery learning alone, and that explicit teaching of grammar is necessary. We need to recognize the usefulness of mother tongue/first language translations (a pragmatic throwback, on occasion, to the traditionally discredited Grammar Translation technique, which, however, refuses to be completely banished wherever English is taught in the world); similarly, the usefulness of accommodating in our methods other devices such as mechanical drills on a peripheral basis perhaps, though these may run counter to commonly accepted practice in the field, shouldn’t be lost sight of.
A word of caution will not be out of place here: such strategies should not be resorted to as a means of camouflaging the teachers’ own ignorance, ill-preparedness or plain incompetence. A well conceived methodology makes for efficiency in the long run. But the practical teacher is not averse to trying out even old fashioned techniques that prove handy as short cuts in certain classroom situations.
In spite of the beliefs of teachers and researchers, there are many English language learners who believe that they need to be taught grammar, and that the majority of language teaching experts agree that they are right. However, no explicit teaching should be done for its own sake, but only as ancillary to the more productive autonomous efforts of students who rely, for their progress, on a sense of language awareness driven by an inquiring mind.
By ‘language awareness’ is meant a motivated language learner’s sensitivity to the way a language operates, including a desire to discover structural patterns and relationships that underlie its expressive potential. This is especially important for second language learners. Human babies are born with an innate capacity for acquiring the language that surrounds them. Second language learners have already internalized the grammar of their mother tongue. Their familiarity with how people learn a language enables them to make a conscious effort to make sense of a second language, which is facilitated by language awareness.
Traditional grammar came in for criticism with the advent of the ‘science’ of linguistics at the beginning of the previous century. Later in the same century formal grammar teaching fell into disrepute because of at least four reasons: 1) the traditional Grammar Translation technique focused on the mere teaching of grammar rules, without paying attention to the vital need for speaking and using the language; 2) all structural approaches including the audiolingual method had little to do with real communication which was later identified as the main purpose of language learning; 3) contemporary English language teaching often insisted on grammar teaching that emphasized usage rules or rules of language etiquette; such rules, while containing mere do’s and don’ts, were found to be inadequate to account for the deep structural patterns in the language; and 4) traditional English grammar is modelled on analytical frames applied to the study of classical Latin and Greek, and it does not reveal the truth about the structure of English which is a very different language from them.
Such a reasoned negative attitude to grammar is different from the uninformed cavilling at it that we sometimes hear today. But rejecting grammar teaching/learning even on such grounds as those just mentioned would be premature for learners of English who are still at a basic level of proficiency in the language.
The vast majority of our learners of English learn it as a second language. This means that they have already acquired their mother tongue and may even have had a formal training in the basic elements of its vocabulary and grammar at school, a situation that could facilitate the intellectual feat involved in the acquisition of a second language. To put it in different words, the experience of learning their mother tongue can help them to grasp the basic ideas about the vocabulary and the grammar of the English language.
Very often objections are raised against the learning of English grammar as difficult by students, and even by uninformed adults. Perhaps it is a bit too complicated, but it is not prohibitively so. And one reason for a feeling of relief on the part of the learners is that grammar rules are finite in number, as opposed to the infinity of correct sentences in the language that these few rules make it possible for a competent user of the language to construct. An English language course of more than ten years’ duration that is administered in our schools will be more than adequate for learners of English to learn all these rules, practise them thoroughly, and internalize them.
Then, what actually do we mean by ‘grammar’?
Combinatoriality is a distinguishing feature of human language. This is the principle by which linguistic rules combine elements of language to generate more complex structures. For example, phonemes are combined into morphemes, morphemes into words, words into phrases, phrases into clauses and sentences. In a very generalized sense, the study of these rules constitutes what is known as grammar.
There are at least three basic views of grammar. The first is a psychological view of grammar: each competent speaker of a language has a kind of ‘mental grammar’, an internalized linguistic knowledge which enables them to produce and to understand ‘correctly’ structured expressions in that language; this grammar knowledge cannot be taught; it is subconsciously acquired by individual speakers. (This was a notion identified as “competence” in Chomskyan linguistics.) The second looks at grammar from a sociological point of view, and represents a ‘prescriptive’ approach to grammar: it involves what are identified as the proper or best structures to be used in a language. A third concept of grammar (embodied in a ‘descriptive’ approach) involves the investigation of structures actually found in a language, usually for the purpose of describing the grammar of a particular language as distinct from the grammar of any other language. Modern grammatical analysis usually adopts this third view.
Further, grammar may be defined in two ways according to Dr David Crystal (The Penguin Dictionary of Language, 1998): 1) ‘A systematic analysis of the structure of a language’; in this sort of analysis a distinction is often drawn between a descriptive grammar and a prescriptive grammar. The same definition covers a number of other grammars such as a reference grammar, a performance grammar, a competence grammar, and so on; 2) ‘A level of structural organization which can be studied independently of phonology and semantics, generally divided into the branches of syntax and morphology’; morphology studies the structure of words, and syntax the rules that govern the way words are combined to form sentences.
In traditional grammar, sentential analysis involves the use of such terms as the parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, articles, conjunctions); there are also terms that refer to other grammatical categories: person, number, tense, voice, gender, etc. These words actually originated in the grammatical analyses of the Classical Latin and Greek languages, which were the languages of learning, philosophy, science, and religion in Europe before ‘vernacular’ languages like English came into prominence. English grammarians since the Renaissance (14th to 16th century) considered it appropriate to subject English to the same sort of analysis as that applied to those ‘prestigious’ languages. It was not realized at the beginning that an established descriptive frame used for Latin, though probably suitable for other Romance languages like Spanish or Italian, would not be so useful for dealing with the grammar of a Germanic language such as English. That Classical Latin grammar based analytical concepts were even more unsatisfactory for describing non-European languages became clear when American scholars wanted to investigate North American Indian languages at the end of the nineteenth century. And it was only after the emergence of the study of linguistics, usually associated with Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), in the second decade of the twentieth century that terms used in traditional grammatical analysis were found inappropriate for representing the reality about the structure of the English language accurately.
The imprecision of simple definitions of the usual elements such as the parts of speech found in traditional English grammar is well known to those who are concerned with such matters. Nouns, for example, used to be defined as “names of persons, places, and things”; but this wouldn’t accommodate words such as “happiness”, “love” (as in “He sang about love”), “driving” (as in “His driving is awful”) in the category of nouns although they function like nouns; a more elaborate description of nouns is: “nouns are words that refer to people, creatures, objects, places, states (e.g. parenthood, childhood), phenomena, and abstract ideas as if they were things”. “As if they were things” doesn’t make for precision! Then there are other traditional categories such as person (First, Second, Third), number (singular, plural), tense, voice (active, passive), and gender. In English the gender relationship is in terms of natural gender (the biological distinction between male and female): In “The woman fed her child” the agreement between the ‘woman’ and ‘her’ is based on this biological distinction. In English gender does not have the significance that it has in French, Spanish or German in which languages gender distinctions are grammatically based.

Cultivation of Critical Thinking

Cultivation of Critical Thinking
(First published in The Island/20th August 2010)
Education is good just so far as it produces well-developed critical faculty . . . A teacher of any subject, who insists on accuracy and a rational control of all processes and methods, and who holds everything open to unlimited verification and revision, is cultivating that method as a habit in the pupils. Men educated in it cannot be stampeded . . . They are slow to believe. They can hold things as possible or probable in all degrees, without certainty and without pain. They can wait for evidence and weigh evidence . . . They can resist appeals to their dearest prejudices. Education in the critical faculty is the only education of which it can be truly said that it makes good citizens.
Sumner, W.G. (1940)


We belong to the species known as homo sapiens (the thinking/rational/wise human) which, according to the Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary (1996), is “characterized by a brain capacity averaging 1400 cc (85 cubic in.) and by dependence on language and the creation and utilization of complex tools” Thinking is innate in us. It is this characteristic that distinguishes us from other animals.
We humans use our thinking capacity basically to meet three native drives: self-gratification, self-interest, and self-preservation. Because by nature our thinking is imperfect this can lead to problems. Our thinking is often prejudiced, unfair, and plainly wrong, as Dr Richard Paul (Director of Research of the Center for Critical Thinking, and the Chair of the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking, California, USA) points out, due to our innate ego-centrism (‘It’s true because I believe it’) and our innate socio-centrism (‘It’s true because that’s what my group believes’); it also results from our innate wish fulfilment (‘It’s true because I want to believe it’) and our innate self-validation (‘It’s true because I have always believed it’), and our innate selfishness. Flawed thinking causes trouble in our day-to-day life and also in more serious matters such as education, business, politics, diplomacy, communication, etc which touch the destinies of whole societies.
If confirmation of this is demanded, we have a plethora of evidence around us. There’s the notorious Sakvithi case in which some four thousand eager investors were swindled out of a billion rupees and in which the fraudster escaped into hiding under the very nose of the authorities, until apprehended recently with the help of some watchful public-spirited citizen; in spite of the wide publicity given to this event over the media we still hear about people getting defrauded in new scams; the general public is perplexed by the inefficient, awkward way measures to control the deadly dengue epidemic are being carried out; we may refer with national shame to the failed CFA with the terrorists which, although it was clearly forced on us through ‘international’ complicity with the separatist criminals, was negotiated with the involvement of some of our leaders, a few of whom were reputed intellectuals, later offering only to defend it before the public, instead of at least expressing some reservations; we may talk about how we are regularly sickened by news about fatal accidents involving children at play, or about undergraduates who resort to violent demonstrations, and get involved in fratricidal conflicts at the instigation of insignificant outsiders. All of these and countless other similar disastrous acts of commission and omission would have been easily avoided, had the victims or those responsible for them acted with some forethought.
Training in critical thinking should be considered as an educational priority in Sri Lanka today, like training in language and computer, particularly for students on the threshold of higher education. In this connection, we need to remember that training in critical thinking is not possible without training in language, in which I include both the mother tongue of the students and English. My feeling is that more attention should be paid to this aspect of education than ever before.
It may be good to introduce critical thinking as a major component of a compulsory language paper or even as a separate paper at the AL. To accommodate critical thinking in the curriculum without adding to the workload that the students must cope with at this level the amount of ground to be covered in the ‘speciality’ subjects may be appropriately curtailed. The reason is that what matters in education ultimately is not how much one knows but how well the educated person can think in a given field of knowledge and in general life. Albert Einstein, often described as the greatest scientist of the twentieth century, wrote in his book Ideas and Opinions (1954) thus:
It is not enough to teach a man a speciality. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good. Otherwise he – with his specialized knowledge – more closely resembles a well trained dog than a harmoniously developed person. He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings in order to acquire a proper relationship to the individual fellow-men and to the community…Overemphasis on the competitive system and premature specialization on the ground of immediate usefulness kill the spirit on which all cultural life depends, specialized knowledge included. It is also vital to a valuable education that independent critical thinking be developed in the young human being, a development that is greatly jeopardized by overburdening him with too much and with too varied subjects. Overburdening necessarily leads to superficiality (pp. 66-67).
Dr Richard Paul, when asked to define ‘critical thinking’, said that definitions are at best “scaffolding for the mind”, and produced the following “bit of scaffolding” for the questioner to construct the meaning of the term: “critical thinking is thinking about your thinking while you’re thinking in order to make your thinking better” (Think Magazine 1992).
I found this scaffolding built into a fuller definition by Dr Richard Paul and his partner Dr Linda Elder:
Critical thinking is, in short, self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking. It requires rigorous standards of excellence and mindful command of their use. It entails effective communication and problem solving abilities and a commitment to overcome our native ego-centrism and sociocentrism. (2007)
Out of a number of mutually compatible definitions, I picked this up as a valid and sufficiently comprehensive statement of what constitutes critical thinking. In terms of this definition, critical thinking is a dynamic process that improves itself by analysing, assessing, and reorganising; according to the same source the analysis of thinking involves identifying its purpose, the question at issue, the data available, inferences, assumptions, implications, main concepts, and the point of view. To assess one’s own thinking means to check it for clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, significance, logic, and fairness. Critical thinking is thinking under control, which calls for a high degree of self-discipline, together with effective communication and problem solving abilities. Our thinking often loses its objectivity by our ego-centrism (our natural human tendency to ignore the rights and needs of others in our selfish concern with our own interests) and sociocentrism (similar self-serving concern with the interests of the group that we identify ourselves with); critical thinking demands a commitment to overcome these shortcomings.
Dr Richard Paul and Dr Linda Elder, in their “Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking” (2007) set out eight elements of thought that should be applied with sensitivity to the universal intellectual standards of clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, logic and significance. The eight elements of thought are: purpose, question at issue, information, interpretation and inference, concepts, assumptions, implications and consequences, and finally point of view.
I’ll briefly explain what these terms mean. We analyse thinking in terms of the eight elements of thought, the first of which is purpose. We always think for a purpose; the critical thinker identifies this purpose clearly. It is equally important for the thinker to be clear about the question or the issue to be resolved. Information is the data, the facts that are collected for solving the problem that has been identified. Inferences are the conclusions that you draw about the issue using the information you have. Assumptions are what you consider to be true or valid, or what you take for granted as a basis for your conclusions. Implications and consequences are those that would follow if someone accepted your position. Concepts are the theories, definitions, laws, principles, models that implicit in your analysis. The point of view means the frames of reference and perspectives from which the problem is approached.
According to Drs Richard Paul and Linda Elder students new to critical thinking move from their Unreflective thinker status to the Challenged thinker position (where they realise the inadequacy of their thinking capacity and decide to improve it); from there they move on to the Beginning thinker stage in which they learn what critical thinking involves; the next step is for them to become Practical thinkers and engage in conscious practice; further practice leads them to the Advanced learner stage, from where they proceed to the Master thinker stage; in this final stage, critical thinking becomes second nature to the cultivated thinker.

The authors summarise the qualities of a well cultivated critical thinker as follows. Such a thinker
• identifies important issues, formulating them clearly and precisely,
• Collects and assesses relevant information, using abstract ideas to interpret it effectively,
• Arrives at well-reasoned conclusions and solutions, testing them against relevant criteria and standards,
• Thinks with an open mind within alternative systems of thought, recognizing and assessing, as needs be, their assumptions, implications, and practical consequences, and
• communicates effectively with others in figuring out solutions to complex problems.

The need for the cultivation of critical thinking cannot be exaggerated, especially for the youth of the country who are its future. The unfortunate truth, however, is that for generations it has not been given the attention that is due to it. Training in critical thinking comes within the purview of education. Critical thinking must be included in the school curriculum as a part of the language syllabus, if not as a separate subject at Grade 12, for the young people most need it when they are in higher education. This is necessary for creating a future Sri Lankan society consisting of good citizens who are cultivated critical thinkers.
I wish to wind up this essay with another extract from William Graham Sumner who writes in his Folkways (1906):
The critical habit of thought, if usual in society, will pervade all its mores, because it is a way of taking up the problems of life. Men educated in it cannot be stampeded by stump orators ... They are slow to believe. They can hold things as possible or probable in all degrees, without certainty and without pain. They can wait for evidence and weigh evidence, uninfluenced by the emphasis or confidence with which assertions are made on one side or the other. They can resist appeals to their dearest prejudices and all kinds of cajolery. Education in the critical faculty is the only education of which it can be truly said that it makes good citizens.
(Mainly based on information drawn from the criticalthinking.org website)
Rohana R. Wasala
End

Looking forward to a Future of Prosperity

Looking forward to a Future of Prosperity
(Previously published in The Island/13th August 2010)

Beginning with the 1948 Independence we have had five watersheds that determined in turn the orientation of the Sri Lankan national polity over the past sixty-two years, the other four being 1956 (political empowerment of the common people), 1972 (the reinforcement of political independence through a republican constitution), 1978 (introduction of the executive presidency and open market economic strategies by a new constitution), and 2009 (achievement of a high level of political stability and national unity in the wake of the elimination of separatist terrorism, with enhanced prospects of accelerated economic development ).
The victory over terrorism to which we were held hostage for thirty long years allows us to look forward to a well earned future of peace and prosperity. It’s a grand vision. The Government has articulated this vision as that of transforming Sri Lanka into the commercial hub of Asia or Asia’s Economic Miracle in fact, which is by no means too far-fetched an ideal.
I personally believe that we have had only six national leaders of vision among the eleven ruling (from an executive position) at different times to date since Independence, six leaders able to imagine a better future based on their clear understanding of the existing state of affairs: Mr D.S. Senanayake, Mr S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike and his widow Mrs Sirima Bandaranaike, Mr J.R. Jayawardane and his successor Mr R. Premadasa, and the incumbent Mr Mahinda Rajapakse. Only leaders of vision make a lasting, positive impact on the course of a country’s history. Successful politicians, like great scientists, are persons of imagination.
A situation has evolved that fosters hopes of a bright future for Sri Lanka. Seven important factors, in my view, characterise the status quo: a stable administration under an able leader, a well established democratic form of government with a vibrant, discriminating electorate, broad international support secured without compromising national autonomy, the possibility of an unprecedented national consensus, major development programmes underway across the island, positive key economic indicators (though subject to fluctuation), and realistic expectations of future oil revenues. Of course, not everyone will share my optimistic assessment of the situation; besides, I am not unaware of the unfortunate reality that each factor mentioned above is undermined by its own intrinsic imperfections. Yet, I believe that unlike the average politician, the vast majority of us ordinary citizens prefer to focus on the benefit that accrues from each of these factors to the nation rather than on its potential for affecting the petty electoral fortunes of those on either side of the government-opposition divide, and will not fail to appreciate good things done for promoting the national interest, whoever is their author.
Mr Mahinda Rajapakse has been voted in for a second term at the helm, which he will start next November, in three months’ time. His re-election and the landslide win by the UPFA which he leads at the subsequent parliamentary election furnish clear proof of the public endorsement of his way of ruling and the popular recognition of his successful performance at the top. Ridding the country of terrorism amidst so much overt and covert opposition, both internal and external, was entirely due to his resourceful leadership. But the nature of politics being what it is, no politician can be expected to be perfect; there’s a tendency for certain individuals near and dear to him (not his brothers), though their loyalty to him is apparently absolute, to embarrass him with their quirky excesses. This the public still seem to be ready to tolerate (in the belief that our pragmatic President will bring them under control somehow), because they are anxious to have him lead the country for some years more until the victory over terrorism that he achieved is further consolidated and the country rebuilt. The President himself shows genuine concern with building democratic consensus about the decisions that he must make.
No one can deny that democracy broadly prevails in Sri Lanka today. One might express reasonable reservations, though. Institutions of democracy are intact: there’s media freedom; elections are held in due course, but naturally an element of strategic manipulation is not absent in their timing. The rule of law generally holds, and the government’s writ operates through the length and breadth of the country including the north and east for the first time in nearly thirty years. For a country just emerging from almost four decades of armed insurgency (first in the south under the JVP, then in the north and east under the LTTE) this is a remarkable situation.
In my opinion, it’s a national achievement, and it’s mainly due to the mature, patient, and intelligent electorate that Sri Lanka is lucky to have, more than to the exertions of politicians of every colour who try to influence its will. The vast majority reject every form of extremism, though we are saddled with a few extremist politicos, who are appropriately left in the doldrums. The opposition’s belly-aching about the high cost of living is incredibly naïve as a strategy to create disaffection with the government among the voters in spite of many examples of its extensive development efforts in evidence throughout the country. Do these purblind politicians think that the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who have been converging on Hambantota over the past few days from all parts of the island just to have a glimpse of the bottom of the harbour basin before it permanently disappears under water will believe that the government is doing nothing by way of development?

Unlike some of his antagonists Mr Rajapakse has a great deal of empathy with these ordinary voters and likes to move among them, sit, talk, and eat with them whenever there’s an opportunity. He knows that they are literate people with a mature political sense; they are proud people who don’t like to be dictated to, and especially resent what they see as unnecessary foreign interference in their affairs. In Mr Rajapakse they believe they have a national leader who is strong enough not to be fazed by the impositions of the so-called international community, and who acts with great diplomatic aplomb as well as foresight in courting friendship with countries outside the circle of our traditional ‘allies’. Sri Lanka has been able to garner enough diplomatic support and protection from our foreign friends in the face of subtle attempts to condemn us in world forums at the instigation of the few well entrenched terrorist sympathizers among Tamil expatriates. We enjoy dynamic friendly relations with more countries in the world now than under previous administrations, and that too, without compromising our sovereignty and autonomy.
Prospects for developing national unity embracing all sections of the polity are brighter today than ever. Even some ex-Tiger members are now with the government, which sends a clear signal to those among expatriate Tamils who had supported the terrorists before their destruction, and who are the sheet anchor that some LTTE remnants might try to fall back on in order to pursue their separatist goal, although that would prove a doomed enterprise. The government has already successfully reached out to a section of the leadership of Tamils abroad with an invitation to take part in the development of the war affected areas, and there are signs that many of them are willing to return home to Sri Lanka. This trend is likely to go on, but the anti-Sri Lanka media blitzkrieg still sustained with some success by those who lived on the business of supporting separatist terror has yet to be effectively neutralized.
The Rajapakse administration started rebuilding the war ravaged north and east even before the war was well over. Its numerous development programmes launched in accordance with the ‘Mahinda Chinthana’ (The Vision of Mahinda) manifesto in such vital sectors as education, roads and railways, agriculture and fisheries, air and naval communications, trade, and energy now cover the whole country. A mega seaport is being built at Hambantota, and a big airport at Mattala in the same area. The first phase of the Hambantota port which commenced construction work just over two years ago has been completed and will be declared open by the President on 15th Sunday; on that day, the harbour basin will be filled with water. There are new power projects, express motorways, railroads, communication towers, bridges, tourist hotels, and other infra-structure facilities being added to the country’s resource base. The government also encourages private sector participation in development work.
Of course, when major projects are embarked on, allegations of corruption, mismanagement, misappropriation of funds etc are normal as is the likelihood of corruption. However, the problem with many charges of corruption raised by opposition politicians is their ritual nature: politicos out of power customarily sling mud at those in power, hoping to bring them down; there’s hardly any attempt to substantiate these allegations, and so, to the public it becomes clear that these politicians’ concern is not with the elimination of corruption if any, but with improving their own chances of making political capital out of such allegations. If there’s enough reason to believe that there is corruption, then it must be duly investigated and put an end to; that responsibility devolves not only on the government, but on the opposition as well. The development work that is going on should not be scuttled merely on account of unsubstantiated charges of corruption.
Most of Mr Rajapakse’s first term was taken up with resolving the problem posed by the terrorists. First he made a genuine attempt to resolve the crisis through negotiations, but finally, his hand being forced by their intransigence, he managed to finish them off militarily. Even during this unsettled period the country’s GDP grew at an average rate of 5%. Between 2007 and 2009 Sri Lanka’s foreign exchange reserves rose significantly. Today the GDP growth rate has reached 5.5%, with the GDP at LKR 2582.95 billion.
There is encouraging information about the feasibility of tapping petroleum and gas reserves around the country. The oil industry will provide employment for our young people, and also save the large amount of foreign exchange that we now spend for importing petrol and gas. It is claimed that the oil reserves potentially available are in excess of our needs, which means, very likely, we’ll be exporting some of our oil in the near future.
So, the government has set the scene for a gamut of development activities; a new vista of progress has opened. But success will depend on the cooperation of every Sri Lankan citizen. The key activists in this national endeavour will be politicians, public and private sector workers, and civil society leaders. It should be completely free from all political, ethnic, religious, or class considerations.
The war against terrorism was won amidst cynical opposition from internal and external sources. The ramshackle alliance of forces ranged against the government during the most critical stages of the humanitarian operations closed ranks amongst themselves and tried to bring down a popular regime that was succeeding in its humanitarian campaign. It was made out that toppling the Rajapakse rule was more urgent than overcoming terrorism! Fortunately for the country, some patriotic opposition politicians joined the government, breaking ranks with their leadership. Ordinary Sri Lankans today hope that the development programmes now in progress will forge ahead under similar circumstances, perhaps with even more explicit across the board collaboration.
It is high time that all of us realized that Sri Lanka will economically stagnate so long as we are not truly united as one nation. Some communalist politicians seem to wrongly believe that the minorities they claim to represent cannot have their rights unless the majority community remains divided into several camps. A true patriotic politician is one who struggles for the rights of every Sri Lankan irrespective of their ethnicity, religion, language, gender, politics, or culture. For such a politician, “my people” means all the people of Sri Lanka; when politicians behave like that, others will more than readily fall in line, because that is the vision of ordinary Sri Lankans.
National unity and economic development go together; each sustains the other. I sometimes think that the chances for separatist demands would have been minimized or nipped in the bud if we were rich enough. Which community in the world would want to secede from an affluent state whose economic and political power results from national unity rather than from ethnic, religious or any other kind of fragmentation, on allegations of real or perceived discrimination, and condemn themselves to a life of poverty and privation?
The most critical issue to be resolved was the separatist terrorism that was a near insurmountable roadblock to the country’s forward march. Now, thanks mainly to Mr Mahinda Rajapakse’s stewardship, we have put it behind us. But, a shadow of a revival of separatist sentiments, however ineffectual these may be, will not fade away until we remove a major pretext for the interference of those countries that consider it their prerogative to have some influence over Sri Lanka in order to serve their own geopolitical interests, by ensuring that the benefits of the victory over terrorism are shared equitably by all the communities in a free, democratic Sri Lanka, and by maintaining heightened vigilance and appropriate defence readiness.
We have arrived at the most propitious moment ever since Independence for embarking on national development: the country is peaceful after the demise of the terrorist threat; we’ve are well on our way towards economic recovery; people are convinced that something is being done in earnest, which is essential for public acknowledgement of and participation in the nation-building process. There’s a clear vision, and a well thought out strategy to translate it into reality.

Where visions and strategies are matched, success is assured. Success in our case is the survival of Sri Lanka as a free prosperous nation, which will ultimately depend on our ability to feed and protect ourselves (i.e. economic independence and national security, respectively).