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
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
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.
(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.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
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
(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
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