Language, Culture, and Development
(First published in The Island/Sri Lanaka)
Any human society can be described as a product of three interrelated, mutually dependent processes which are coterminous: language, culture, and economic activity. Social interaction motivated by our innate gregariousness as a species is at the root of these processes. Though almost certainly they had a common origin at the dawn of human civilization these processes, taken in isolation, are today found to have become infinitely sophisticated and multifaceted. They can be looked at from different perspectives, assigned specific functions, and given appropriately diverse definitions. For example, language is much more than just a medium of communication; culture is infinitely more complex than what a dictionary definition like “a way of life of a particular group” or “a set of beliefs, customs, and art forms characteristic of a community” might suggest; similarly, economic behaviour comprehends an infinity of activities around “organized operation of processes of producing wealth, commodities, services, etc”. But they still serve the rudimentary purpose for which they came into being: supporting the survival of the human species by securing their needs for food, clothing, and shelter in interaction with the natural environment (economic activity), which is facilitated by a mechanism for communication with each other (language), and which is subject to a system of customs, beliefs, values, principles, and rules established to control their individual and collective modes of behaviour (culture).
By ‘language’ is meant the language faculty which is common to all humans. Human language manifests itself in thousands of different forms which we call languages. Probably, at the beginning, our cave-dwelling ancestors lived in groups only marginally different in organization from other apes. With the gradual evolution of the social group through collective economic activity, language, and culture from their nascent state humans became the most successful in their long struggle for survival against nature’s unfriendly phenomena including the threat of wild animals; this may explain humanity’s unique expansion across most inhabitable parts of the earth (and perhaps, correspondingly, the extinction of other competing species engaged in a losing battle with them).
Now, the feature that most distinguishes humans from other animals is their language faculty, an aspect of the power of their highly evolved brain. Undoubtedly, greater language ability gave humans a competitive edge over other allied species in evolutionary history. It goes without saying that language largely accounts for human ‘superiority’ over other animals in the matter of controlling nature. Humans control nature not only to ensure their survival, but to increase their physical comfort and mental happiness. It is through language that knowledge about the world is created, transmitted, preserved, retrieved, and tried out, reviewed, and enhanced. Language is knowledge. Applied knowledge is key to the creation of wealth. As Peter Drucker writes in his book The Age of Discontinuity (1969) knowledge is “… central to our society … as the foundation of economy and social action”. If knowledge is a prerequisite of an economy the connection between language and economic development need hardly be stressed.
Though controversy about language policies has dominated at least half a century of Sri Lankan politics, neither the general importance of language nor its central role in the promotion of economic development received due recognition in our education sphere until recently. This is evident in the relatively low importance that was attached to the study of languages with an emphasis on their functional aspect in our school system. However, at long last, an attempt is now being made to solve the problem through the government’s ten year trilingual programme for teaching schoolchildren the three languages of English, Sinhalese, and Tamil. The governmental initiative has resulted in growing popular awareness of the economic usefulness of learning languages among other benefits.
In the highly globalized and technology-driven world of today English is the most important language we need to possess as a tool of economic development. It is both convenient and beneficial for us to adopt English as a second language in order to interact with the rest of the world in all areas including economic development not only because of the English language legacy left by 150 years of British colonisation, but also because of the recent emergence of English as the single most powerful common language of global communication. There’s no question about this. However, the message implicit in the fact that English is still a closed book to more than 90% of the country’s 20 million people even after 200 years of its dominance on their affairs cannot be overlooked. The current three language enterprise seems to have taken cognizance of this message.
As American anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir (1884-1939) pointed out language, in addition to being a vehicle for the expression of thoughts, perceptions, sentiments, and values characteristic of a community, gives individuals social identity. He further said: “… the mere fact of a common speech serves as a peculiar potent symbol of social solidarity of those who speak the language”. Therefore a language is not something that you can take possession of or discard as easily as you can put on or take off a garment. This is the reason why English failed to establish itself in Sri Lanka as the common tongue of its people despite its dominant position in government and business. There already were the indigenous languages of Sinhalese and Tamil to give the respective speakers of those languages their cultural identity and sense of social solidarity.
Ignorance or deliberate repudiation of their own history and culture leads some people to underrate the indigenous languages, Sinhala and Tamil. For the overwhelming majority of us these languages are vital in the sense that Sapir explained. The change of the medium of instruction from English to local languages benefited the masses. The elevation of Sinhala and Tamil to official language status was also a bona fide move. Such measures were in the interest of the underprivileged masses and were meant to safeguard their rights. At the same time the very architects of these changes were not oblivious of the vital importance of English as a tool of modernisation, and initiated a tradition of teaching English to all schoolchildren from Standard Three onwards. But second language English teaching failed mainly because people don’t learn a new language unless there is a compelling reason for doing so. These days we hear about tens of thousands of young people appearing for Korean language tests in expectation of finding employment in Korea. No government encouragement was offered them for learning the Korean language. Still they took the initiative to learn it because they were motivated to do so by their desire to find lucrative job opportunities in Korea.
English should have been much easier for most of our students to learn because of the abundance of resources for learning it, and all the support that they were usually given to learn it. Their failure was not due to lack of these. It was largely due to the non-perception of a strong motive for learning English. But today the situation is different. Most students, parents, and teachers know that without a knowledge of English there’s no future prosperity. This will motivate the learning of English. At the same time, it’s good to remember that the wholesome development of a society comprehends more than mere material development. That society is truly developed whose members are not only efficient economic units, but also cultured individuals. As for Sri Lankans, they need all three languages (English, Tamil, and Sinhalese) to build such a society.
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Education for Employment
Education for Employment
(Previously published in The Island/Sri Lanka)
Education is, ultimately, the process of acquiring the knowledge and the skills that are required for us to survive as a species. But we humans are too advanced and sophisticated to be satisfied with an education that is just adequate to meet this elementary need. Every human society, except for a few forest dwelling tribes, has an infinity of needs in addition to the very basics of life such as food, clothing, and shelter: accessories for physical comfort, health, entertainment, leisure, travel, schooling for children, and so on. The fulfilment of these needs calls for a workforce with the necessary knowledge and skills to provide the goods and services required. In modern times, an efficient workforce must be equipped with not only basic knowledge and practical skills, but a whole host of other resources such as managerial capacity, organizational finesse, familiarity with information technology, and professional values. It’s a major aim of education to enable the young to acquire these abilities, which qualify them for gainful employment.
Educational reforms introduced since the early 1970’s at least have all taken notice of the general criticism that our education system is not adequately employment oriented. Various curricular improvements have been introduced to address this problem under successive governments, though the problem hasn’t gone away completely. It may be that a government alone cannot solve the problem. The collaboration of the business and industrial sector, and the society at large is vital in this connection. It is heartening to see that there is evidence to show that things are changing in a meaningful way at last. The news item in The Island (07-09-2011) under the headline “A’Level students rush to grab jobs in BPO sector” is about a new encouraging development. It says that the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector is one of the many sectors that have been growing fast over the past few years, and that it creates job opportunities for professionals in an international setting. The great attraction that the BPO sector has for A Level students represents a new trend: many students prefer professional training and employment to a university education with doubtful employment prospects. The Lanka BPO Academy is an institution set up to train personnel for this sector. The popular Island columnist Yasas Abeywickrama (THE CATALYST/Monday) is associated with this academy. The contribution of young professionals like him is invaluable for the promotion of the education for employment concept among the youth.
But let me start with a sweeping look back at the past. The generation born around the time of independence are now in their sixties. Due to the political and economic reforms introduced after independence in the interest of the common masses, they were able to grow up in somewhat better circumstances than their parents had had any chance to (in terms of education, health, employment, standard of living, etc for instance). The present day young are the children of this post-independence generation. The younger generation have had the opportunity to grow up in a generally more egalitarian, independent, and materially less insecure atmosphere than their elders, even though amidst occasional political instability, corruption, and other setbacks exacerbated by internal and external vested interests, all of which appear to be inevitable concomitants of ‘democracy’.
Times have changed, changed utterly. For the masses, that is. The changes have been mostly for the better, and are most conspicuous in the political, economic, social, and cultural spheres. These are naturally more evident to the older generation than to the younger, who might tend to take the status quo for granted: we have, hopefully, put behind us almost a lifetime of mainly destructive ‘struggles’ and are embarking on an age of goodwill and cooperation between sections of the body politic determined to move towards a common destiny as a young nation. Liberalised economic policies, despite certain limitations, have largely benefited the people. Social stratification is less severe; class, caste, rank divisions have begun to count for little. Culturally, our people are adopting more accommodative and adaptive attitudes than before.
Though positive changes have taken place in the educational domain as elsewhere since independence, such as free education for all the children of the country, the change of the medium of education from English to the mother tongue which benefited children from the Sinhala and Tamil speaking homes, the narrowly utilitarian literary character of general education inherited from colonial times hasn’t changed to the extent it should. In other words, changes in education have not kept pace with changes in other fields; education has remained largely irrelevant to the actual needs of the country.
The idea that education should involve preparing the students for a life of work as much as training them for a life of the mind is not new. In fact, all the various educational reforms introduced so far have drawn attention to the real problem of a lack of balance in our education system between book-learning and practical skills acquisition. Yet the bookish bias in education still remains. One reason for this is that work that demands manual exertion is considered inferior to work that requires mental effort. Practical skills mastery is looked down upon as suitable only for the ‘mentally less endowed’ in terms of traditional intelligence (IQ) testing which usually focuses on a general linguistic and mathematical ability. In the society at large the same attitude prevails. Other economically productive jobs such as agriculture, carpentry, various types of crafts, etc are reserved for the academically less promising. (However, this manual-mental distinction is more evidently unsupportable today.) Though there is a great demand for skilled professionals in these fields, there are a large number of educated youth who won’t fancy a career in any of them, and therefore are not interested in acquiring those skills. This is unfortunate. The bias against ‘manual labour’ is wrong, for whatever work people do also invariably involves knowledge and mental effort appropriate to it; this fact is more conspicuous in today’s knowledge world than before.
The downgrading of jobs in the most vital fields such as agriculture, building construction, manufacture of utility goods, food technology, handicrafts, woodwork, (to name just a few out of hundreds of possible examples) is a problem that must be addressed in the interest of the country’s economic wellbeing among other things. The main point is that it is partly a matter of misconceiving what is meant by ‘dignity of work’. Many of our people cannot get rid of traditional class-bound ways of thinking according to which certain jobs are considered to be of a higher rank than others. In education, this faulty attitude is reflected as a bias in favour of ‘academic’ subjects such as science, mathematics, and languages as opposed to technical subjects such as carpentry, plumbing, and dressmaking.
To promote vocational education among the secondary students in schools such harmful misconceptions need to be eliminated. The way to do this is to convince them of the fact that all forms of work are of equal dignity. What matters is not the public recognition that a person gets for belonging to a particular profession but the meaning it has for the worker and the society at large. Let’s teach our young to see work as an opportunity in the same way as the great American inventor, scientist, and businessman Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) did (and he warned others lest they miss it): “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work”. Edison is also remembered for having said “Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration”.
When education is not employment oriented, many educated young people are left without jobs even where jobs are found aplenty, but where persons with the necessary skills to take them up are few. This kind of structural unemployment accounts for a substantial part of the problem of joblessness in Sri Lanka. In this context, the importance of vocational education at the secondary school level need hardly be stressed. Secondary school graduates should be given a basic mastery of technical skills including computer knowledge that enables them to find gainful employment, if they so choose, instead of going to university, but still qualify themselves further academically while working. It is encouraging to see that a trend is now emerging where many young school leavers seem to think it wiser to enrol for vocational courses or find direct employment if possible and pursue higher studies autonomously. This is no drawback for students particularly in some fields such as business, banking, agriculture, motor mechanism, etc. Actually, a work environment is very helpful for focusing the mind. Work and study: each becomes a way to relax for employed students when the other tires them out.
The availability of such an option can be very attractive to many students and parents. It will naturally ease the pressure on the existing university system. It is true that university graduates, if successful in finding a job commensurate with their qualifications, do better than non-university graduates. But, in the case of many Sri Lankan graduate employees their education is often irrelevant to the work they are actually required to do.
Close cooperation between the education and industrial sectors is a vital economic factor for any country, for the most important asset it has is its youth. A country’s education sector is responsible for equipping the young people with the knowledge and skills that industrialists and business people demand.
(Previously published in The Island/Sri Lanka)
Education is, ultimately, the process of acquiring the knowledge and the skills that are required for us to survive as a species. But we humans are too advanced and sophisticated to be satisfied with an education that is just adequate to meet this elementary need. Every human society, except for a few forest dwelling tribes, has an infinity of needs in addition to the very basics of life such as food, clothing, and shelter: accessories for physical comfort, health, entertainment, leisure, travel, schooling for children, and so on. The fulfilment of these needs calls for a workforce with the necessary knowledge and skills to provide the goods and services required. In modern times, an efficient workforce must be equipped with not only basic knowledge and practical skills, but a whole host of other resources such as managerial capacity, organizational finesse, familiarity with information technology, and professional values. It’s a major aim of education to enable the young to acquire these abilities, which qualify them for gainful employment.
Educational reforms introduced since the early 1970’s at least have all taken notice of the general criticism that our education system is not adequately employment oriented. Various curricular improvements have been introduced to address this problem under successive governments, though the problem hasn’t gone away completely. It may be that a government alone cannot solve the problem. The collaboration of the business and industrial sector, and the society at large is vital in this connection. It is heartening to see that there is evidence to show that things are changing in a meaningful way at last. The news item in The Island (07-09-2011) under the headline “A’Level students rush to grab jobs in BPO sector” is about a new encouraging development. It says that the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector is one of the many sectors that have been growing fast over the past few years, and that it creates job opportunities for professionals in an international setting. The great attraction that the BPO sector has for A Level students represents a new trend: many students prefer professional training and employment to a university education with doubtful employment prospects. The Lanka BPO Academy is an institution set up to train personnel for this sector. The popular Island columnist Yasas Abeywickrama (THE CATALYST/Monday) is associated with this academy. The contribution of young professionals like him is invaluable for the promotion of the education for employment concept among the youth.
But let me start with a sweeping look back at the past. The generation born around the time of independence are now in their sixties. Due to the political and economic reforms introduced after independence in the interest of the common masses, they were able to grow up in somewhat better circumstances than their parents had had any chance to (in terms of education, health, employment, standard of living, etc for instance). The present day young are the children of this post-independence generation. The younger generation have had the opportunity to grow up in a generally more egalitarian, independent, and materially less insecure atmosphere than their elders, even though amidst occasional political instability, corruption, and other setbacks exacerbated by internal and external vested interests, all of which appear to be inevitable concomitants of ‘democracy’.
Times have changed, changed utterly. For the masses, that is. The changes have been mostly for the better, and are most conspicuous in the political, economic, social, and cultural spheres. These are naturally more evident to the older generation than to the younger, who might tend to take the status quo for granted: we have, hopefully, put behind us almost a lifetime of mainly destructive ‘struggles’ and are embarking on an age of goodwill and cooperation between sections of the body politic determined to move towards a common destiny as a young nation. Liberalised economic policies, despite certain limitations, have largely benefited the people. Social stratification is less severe; class, caste, rank divisions have begun to count for little. Culturally, our people are adopting more accommodative and adaptive attitudes than before.
Though positive changes have taken place in the educational domain as elsewhere since independence, such as free education for all the children of the country, the change of the medium of education from English to the mother tongue which benefited children from the Sinhala and Tamil speaking homes, the narrowly utilitarian literary character of general education inherited from colonial times hasn’t changed to the extent it should. In other words, changes in education have not kept pace with changes in other fields; education has remained largely irrelevant to the actual needs of the country.
The idea that education should involve preparing the students for a life of work as much as training them for a life of the mind is not new. In fact, all the various educational reforms introduced so far have drawn attention to the real problem of a lack of balance in our education system between book-learning and practical skills acquisition. Yet the bookish bias in education still remains. One reason for this is that work that demands manual exertion is considered inferior to work that requires mental effort. Practical skills mastery is looked down upon as suitable only for the ‘mentally less endowed’ in terms of traditional intelligence (IQ) testing which usually focuses on a general linguistic and mathematical ability. In the society at large the same attitude prevails. Other economically productive jobs such as agriculture, carpentry, various types of crafts, etc are reserved for the academically less promising. (However, this manual-mental distinction is more evidently unsupportable today.) Though there is a great demand for skilled professionals in these fields, there are a large number of educated youth who won’t fancy a career in any of them, and therefore are not interested in acquiring those skills. This is unfortunate. The bias against ‘manual labour’ is wrong, for whatever work people do also invariably involves knowledge and mental effort appropriate to it; this fact is more conspicuous in today’s knowledge world than before.
The downgrading of jobs in the most vital fields such as agriculture, building construction, manufacture of utility goods, food technology, handicrafts, woodwork, (to name just a few out of hundreds of possible examples) is a problem that must be addressed in the interest of the country’s economic wellbeing among other things. The main point is that it is partly a matter of misconceiving what is meant by ‘dignity of work’. Many of our people cannot get rid of traditional class-bound ways of thinking according to which certain jobs are considered to be of a higher rank than others. In education, this faulty attitude is reflected as a bias in favour of ‘academic’ subjects such as science, mathematics, and languages as opposed to technical subjects such as carpentry, plumbing, and dressmaking.
To promote vocational education among the secondary students in schools such harmful misconceptions need to be eliminated. The way to do this is to convince them of the fact that all forms of work are of equal dignity. What matters is not the public recognition that a person gets for belonging to a particular profession but the meaning it has for the worker and the society at large. Let’s teach our young to see work as an opportunity in the same way as the great American inventor, scientist, and businessman Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) did (and he warned others lest they miss it): “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work”. Edison is also remembered for having said “Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration”.
When education is not employment oriented, many educated young people are left without jobs even where jobs are found aplenty, but where persons with the necessary skills to take them up are few. This kind of structural unemployment accounts for a substantial part of the problem of joblessness in Sri Lanka. In this context, the importance of vocational education at the secondary school level need hardly be stressed. Secondary school graduates should be given a basic mastery of technical skills including computer knowledge that enables them to find gainful employment, if they so choose, instead of going to university, but still qualify themselves further academically while working. It is encouraging to see that a trend is now emerging where many young school leavers seem to think it wiser to enrol for vocational courses or find direct employment if possible and pursue higher studies autonomously. This is no drawback for students particularly in some fields such as business, banking, agriculture, motor mechanism, etc. Actually, a work environment is very helpful for focusing the mind. Work and study: each becomes a way to relax for employed students when the other tires them out.
The availability of such an option can be very attractive to many students and parents. It will naturally ease the pressure on the existing university system. It is true that university graduates, if successful in finding a job commensurate with their qualifications, do better than non-university graduates. But, in the case of many Sri Lankan graduate employees their education is often irrelevant to the work they are actually required to do.
Close cooperation between the education and industrial sectors is a vital economic factor for any country, for the most important asset it has is its youth. A country’s education sector is responsible for equipping the young people with the knowledge and skills that industrialists and business people demand.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Multilingualism for the New Age
Multilingualism for the New Age
(Previously published in The Island)
“Knowledge of more than one language points to the expansion of specific types of competence. Multilingualism appears to help people realise and expand their creative potential. In addition, thinking, learning, problem solving and communicating, all of which are transversal knowledge-steeped skills used in our daily lives, show signs of enhancement through multilingualism.” – David Marsh and Richard Hill, from the executive summary of a study commissioned the European Commission (2009)
For us in Sri Lanka the synergy between English and Information Technology is an axial force in making headway in the domain of education for knowledge society. This has been already recognized and is being acted upon as would be clear to anyone sufficiently interested from the various initiatives launched under the aegis of the incumbent government such as the declaration of 2009 as the Year of English and IT, opening of nanasalas (literally ‘Halls of Wisdom’, meaning IT training centres) across the island, the Ten Year Trilingual Plan, and programmes for distributing laptops among school children and university undergraduates, etc. (The state is doing its part; it is up to the bureaucrats, teachers, students and adult citizens to ensure that these ventures succeed by actively involving themselves in them.) We certainly are taking a step towards transforming our society economically, socially, culturally, politically, and institutionally by utilizing knowledge as a source of economic productivity, and as a basis for building a more humane social system.
The phenomenal proliferation of electronic communication resources has enabled millions all over the world to gain easy access to enormous quantities of information at little or no cost. Their capacity to retrieve, process, and store or transmit this information equally cheaply has also increased. In a knowledge society information is gathered and processed for the generation of knowledge. However, that alone does not make it a knowledge society. Applying the knowledge for wealth creation is the vital factor. It should be applied for enhancing the performance of the individuals and the community in general in all such fields as economic, social, political, cultural, and institutional. The liberally available digitalised information and the Internet have made knowledge a powerful factor in the creation of wealth in many countries. According to an Irish government report quoted in the Wikipedia, as much as 70 to 80 percent of economic growth is said to be due to the availability of new and better knowledge. Of course, the knowledge society is not only about economic productivity, it is about people’s individual and social development and empowerment as well.
The correlation between the knowledge society and education need hardly be stressed. Education enhances the knowledge and the creativity of the individuals who constitute the society, and stimulates the strategic application of these qualities to productive processes for the general good. No country can achieve any high level of development, economic or otherwise, without the contribution of its educated sections. A knowledge economy is driven by the members’ brainpower properly channelled. But knowledge is never static; it is an ever renewing, ever growing element, the new driving out or making obsolete the old. Appropriately modernized education is a vital need in a knowledge society.
A knowledge economy promotes economic growth and prosperity. But excessive concern with profit and self interest to the exclusion of humane values tends to strain social cohesion, and threatens social order. An economy based on knowledge essentially serves both private good and public welfare. Education should aim at inculcating in the young those values that favour a proper balance between the two.
In a knowledge based society the economy revolves round the constituent members. Therefore the young need to be taught the values that enable them to work creatively in an atmosphere of cosmopolitan identity, compassion, and community. Inventive economic activity coupled with collaborative interaction instead of selfish isolation and mechanical routine make for social integration.
The amazingly fast rate of change associated with the emerging social transformation (knowledge society) is reflected in a somewhat distressing scenario for teachers at all levels who qualified and joined the profession 20 to 30 years ago, i.e. before the digital revolution, unless they have managed to appropriately keep abreast of the contemporary technological innovations and attitudinal adjustments they call for in the field of education. But they are reaching the end of their careers while the generally IT savvy young are replacing them. Yet the old are not redundant yet, for they are still stronger in certain vital domains including the knowledge of the world, an essential part of which comes from lived experience.
Foremost among those confronting the tidal wave of societal transformations caused by the accelerated generation and dissemination of knowledge through the newest technological innovations are the students, and their teachers old and young. Education for knowledge society means learning to live and work in the new age. In this activity, no subject is more important than the linguistic medium through which such knowledge should be acquired, and processed for the benefit of the community. Language study therefore occupies a central position in the educational curriculum.
In global terms ‘knowledge society’ is like ‘democracy’. Democracy is the most powerful, most prevalent form of government today, and the vast majority of nations are ‘democracies’ with different realisations of the ideal. Democratic states are interrelated. In the same way the world is moving towards being a collection of knowledge societies. If knowledge society means anything, monolingualism is a thing of the past for most nations of the world. To no country is this more relevant than it is to us.
The reason for this is not difficult to find. The knowledge society is characterised by the easy availability of globally networked information. The main task of those concerned with education is to enable students to master strategies of knowledge construction by drawing on this information. For this, the linguistic medium is of the utmost importance. Though there are thousands of languages in the world only a handful such as Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, and Russian are understood and used by very large numbers of people. Even among these probably English is the most widely used language in the world, widely here meaning ‘over a large geographical area’, and ‘covering a wide range of subjects’. Naturally, therefore, English should predominate the knowledge society. To participate in the knowledge society all non-English speaking nations need to learn English in addition to their mother tongues. Since new knowledge can be created in any language it is an advantage for members of knowledge societies to learn more languages. Thus multilingualism is the norm today.
In this situation our special connection with English (which needs no elaboration) is a clear advantage, for it means that the most useful world language for building up and sustaining the knowledge society is within easy reach for us. The much criticised low success rate of the English teaching enterprise has its legitimate causes. Three among these, in my opinion, are prominent: one of these is the non-perception to date of a valid motive for learning English particularly among our rural students; another is the absence of a meaningful and relevant context for interactive communication in the language; a third reason is the scant attention paid to the teaching of language (meaning mother tongues and English) as the indispensable primary resource in the search for knowledge. The current knowledge society project, if convincingly presented to the students, will contribute a great deal towards eliminating these causes. This initiative of the government reflects a recognition of the last mentioned deficiency (among other factors). Education for knowledge society involves, among other things, exploiting the globally networked information resources available on the Internet. This provides the language learner with a live context for interaction with the materials on the Net and even with other students including those from other countries; the resource can be used for interaction within the same class, in addition to normal non-web-based collaborative activities. The realisation that English is THE linguistic key to knowledge generation and application will not fail to motivate the students. Teachers and parents can do a lot to convince the young of this fact.
Since this is the case, teaching/learning English occupies a pivotal position in education for knowledge society. We have to go beyond basic communicative competence. Our aim should be enable the learners to master English as a tool for both constructing and acquiring knowledge by proactively exploring and understanding its linguistic mechanisms and expressive resources as applicable to various disciplines. Applied linguist Professor Bernd Ruschoff (University of Essen) reminds us that instead of the traditional instructivist paradigm the cognitive constructive paradigm is viewed as an important methodological basis for real innovation in foreign language learning today. He further points out that
“….. apart from basic communicative competences, favoured in the communicative classroom of the 80s, developing strategies of language processing and learning competence as well as language awareness and skills in knowledge perception and knowledge construction are needed for the successful outcome of any language curriculum. … ……………….
“Language learning should, therefore, be described as an interactive, dynamic process, in which new knowledge is often acquired when learners are placed in a situation where they can explore sources and resources rather than in a context of formal instruction.”
That is, instead of depending on being ‘taught’ in the traditional sense, students need to turn themselves into independent learners adopting both collaborative and autonomous strategies. The learning of the native languages must be similarly stressed, and their use encouraged between students who speak them as mother tongues and colleagues who speak them as second languages. The trilingual plan, if well implemented, will facilitate the fashioning of a more integrated Sri Lankan community.
Multilingual communicative competency is crucial for the knowledge society. It increases the ‘mobility’ of workers, students and teachers, as well as that of government servants. The mobility factor is especially important for students at higher levels of education who are preparing to assume productive roles in the society. Multilingual ability gives them access to international knowledge sources not available at home; it familiarises them with other languages and cultures, enabling them to hone their linguistic and cross-cultural skills; knowledge of a number of languages exposes them to alternative epistemological traditions of their disciplines; it prepares them for the international job market; and finally, the mobility gained through multilingual competency enables them to assert their democratic rights. The special advantage of having a knowledge of English is that even if they know only English in addition to their native languages, they can draw on the cutting edge sources of knowledge created in other countries without having to learn the languages spoken in those countries because many nations use English as the lingua franca of scientific and intellectual communication.
The education-industry nexus at the higher education level is a particularly important economic factor in business management, science, and engineering. It is also the foundation of lifelong learning for professionals. There’s no professional domain where those engaged can remain up to date and relevant long unless they succeed in keeping pace with fast advancing new knowledge and associated competencies.
In learning to live and work in the knowledge society, multilingual proficiency and IT skills are indispensable. Knowing English alone is equivalent to knowing a number of foreign languages. But all knowledge gained through English will be useless if a person fails to appreciate their own native cultural heritage. That’s why learning the mother tongues cannot be neglected. Multilingual abilities and IT competencies together will enable the present and future young generations to access and utilize the unlimited sources and resources of knowledge available globally in order to enrich their lives and empower themselves in ways we adults have only been able to dream of.
(Previously published in The Island)
“Knowledge of more than one language points to the expansion of specific types of competence. Multilingualism appears to help people realise and expand their creative potential. In addition, thinking, learning, problem solving and communicating, all of which are transversal knowledge-steeped skills used in our daily lives, show signs of enhancement through multilingualism.” – David Marsh and Richard Hill, from the executive summary of a study commissioned the European Commission (2009)
For us in Sri Lanka the synergy between English and Information Technology is an axial force in making headway in the domain of education for knowledge society. This has been already recognized and is being acted upon as would be clear to anyone sufficiently interested from the various initiatives launched under the aegis of the incumbent government such as the declaration of 2009 as the Year of English and IT, opening of nanasalas (literally ‘Halls of Wisdom’, meaning IT training centres) across the island, the Ten Year Trilingual Plan, and programmes for distributing laptops among school children and university undergraduates, etc. (The state is doing its part; it is up to the bureaucrats, teachers, students and adult citizens to ensure that these ventures succeed by actively involving themselves in them.) We certainly are taking a step towards transforming our society economically, socially, culturally, politically, and institutionally by utilizing knowledge as a source of economic productivity, and as a basis for building a more humane social system.
The phenomenal proliferation of electronic communication resources has enabled millions all over the world to gain easy access to enormous quantities of information at little or no cost. Their capacity to retrieve, process, and store or transmit this information equally cheaply has also increased. In a knowledge society information is gathered and processed for the generation of knowledge. However, that alone does not make it a knowledge society. Applying the knowledge for wealth creation is the vital factor. It should be applied for enhancing the performance of the individuals and the community in general in all such fields as economic, social, political, cultural, and institutional. The liberally available digitalised information and the Internet have made knowledge a powerful factor in the creation of wealth in many countries. According to an Irish government report quoted in the Wikipedia, as much as 70 to 80 percent of economic growth is said to be due to the availability of new and better knowledge. Of course, the knowledge society is not only about economic productivity, it is about people’s individual and social development and empowerment as well.
The correlation between the knowledge society and education need hardly be stressed. Education enhances the knowledge and the creativity of the individuals who constitute the society, and stimulates the strategic application of these qualities to productive processes for the general good. No country can achieve any high level of development, economic or otherwise, without the contribution of its educated sections. A knowledge economy is driven by the members’ brainpower properly channelled. But knowledge is never static; it is an ever renewing, ever growing element, the new driving out or making obsolete the old. Appropriately modernized education is a vital need in a knowledge society.
A knowledge economy promotes economic growth and prosperity. But excessive concern with profit and self interest to the exclusion of humane values tends to strain social cohesion, and threatens social order. An economy based on knowledge essentially serves both private good and public welfare. Education should aim at inculcating in the young those values that favour a proper balance between the two.
In a knowledge based society the economy revolves round the constituent members. Therefore the young need to be taught the values that enable them to work creatively in an atmosphere of cosmopolitan identity, compassion, and community. Inventive economic activity coupled with collaborative interaction instead of selfish isolation and mechanical routine make for social integration.
The amazingly fast rate of change associated with the emerging social transformation (knowledge society) is reflected in a somewhat distressing scenario for teachers at all levels who qualified and joined the profession 20 to 30 years ago, i.e. before the digital revolution, unless they have managed to appropriately keep abreast of the contemporary technological innovations and attitudinal adjustments they call for in the field of education. But they are reaching the end of their careers while the generally IT savvy young are replacing them. Yet the old are not redundant yet, for they are still stronger in certain vital domains including the knowledge of the world, an essential part of which comes from lived experience.
Foremost among those confronting the tidal wave of societal transformations caused by the accelerated generation and dissemination of knowledge through the newest technological innovations are the students, and their teachers old and young. Education for knowledge society means learning to live and work in the new age. In this activity, no subject is more important than the linguistic medium through which such knowledge should be acquired, and processed for the benefit of the community. Language study therefore occupies a central position in the educational curriculum.
In global terms ‘knowledge society’ is like ‘democracy’. Democracy is the most powerful, most prevalent form of government today, and the vast majority of nations are ‘democracies’ with different realisations of the ideal. Democratic states are interrelated. In the same way the world is moving towards being a collection of knowledge societies. If knowledge society means anything, monolingualism is a thing of the past for most nations of the world. To no country is this more relevant than it is to us.
The reason for this is not difficult to find. The knowledge society is characterised by the easy availability of globally networked information. The main task of those concerned with education is to enable students to master strategies of knowledge construction by drawing on this information. For this, the linguistic medium is of the utmost importance. Though there are thousands of languages in the world only a handful such as Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, and Russian are understood and used by very large numbers of people. Even among these probably English is the most widely used language in the world, widely here meaning ‘over a large geographical area’, and ‘covering a wide range of subjects’. Naturally, therefore, English should predominate the knowledge society. To participate in the knowledge society all non-English speaking nations need to learn English in addition to their mother tongues. Since new knowledge can be created in any language it is an advantage for members of knowledge societies to learn more languages. Thus multilingualism is the norm today.
In this situation our special connection with English (which needs no elaboration) is a clear advantage, for it means that the most useful world language for building up and sustaining the knowledge society is within easy reach for us. The much criticised low success rate of the English teaching enterprise has its legitimate causes. Three among these, in my opinion, are prominent: one of these is the non-perception to date of a valid motive for learning English particularly among our rural students; another is the absence of a meaningful and relevant context for interactive communication in the language; a third reason is the scant attention paid to the teaching of language (meaning mother tongues and English) as the indispensable primary resource in the search for knowledge. The current knowledge society project, if convincingly presented to the students, will contribute a great deal towards eliminating these causes. This initiative of the government reflects a recognition of the last mentioned deficiency (among other factors). Education for knowledge society involves, among other things, exploiting the globally networked information resources available on the Internet. This provides the language learner with a live context for interaction with the materials on the Net and even with other students including those from other countries; the resource can be used for interaction within the same class, in addition to normal non-web-based collaborative activities. The realisation that English is THE linguistic key to knowledge generation and application will not fail to motivate the students. Teachers and parents can do a lot to convince the young of this fact.
Since this is the case, teaching/learning English occupies a pivotal position in education for knowledge society. We have to go beyond basic communicative competence. Our aim should be enable the learners to master English as a tool for both constructing and acquiring knowledge by proactively exploring and understanding its linguistic mechanisms and expressive resources as applicable to various disciplines. Applied linguist Professor Bernd Ruschoff (University of Essen) reminds us that instead of the traditional instructivist paradigm the cognitive constructive paradigm is viewed as an important methodological basis for real innovation in foreign language learning today. He further points out that
“….. apart from basic communicative competences, favoured in the communicative classroom of the 80s, developing strategies of language processing and learning competence as well as language awareness and skills in knowledge perception and knowledge construction are needed for the successful outcome of any language curriculum. … ……………….
“Language learning should, therefore, be described as an interactive, dynamic process, in which new knowledge is often acquired when learners are placed in a situation where they can explore sources and resources rather than in a context of formal instruction.”
That is, instead of depending on being ‘taught’ in the traditional sense, students need to turn themselves into independent learners adopting both collaborative and autonomous strategies. The learning of the native languages must be similarly stressed, and their use encouraged between students who speak them as mother tongues and colleagues who speak them as second languages. The trilingual plan, if well implemented, will facilitate the fashioning of a more integrated Sri Lankan community.
Multilingual communicative competency is crucial for the knowledge society. It increases the ‘mobility’ of workers, students and teachers, as well as that of government servants. The mobility factor is especially important for students at higher levels of education who are preparing to assume productive roles in the society. Multilingual ability gives them access to international knowledge sources not available at home; it familiarises them with other languages and cultures, enabling them to hone their linguistic and cross-cultural skills; knowledge of a number of languages exposes them to alternative epistemological traditions of their disciplines; it prepares them for the international job market; and finally, the mobility gained through multilingual competency enables them to assert their democratic rights. The special advantage of having a knowledge of English is that even if they know only English in addition to their native languages, they can draw on the cutting edge sources of knowledge created in other countries without having to learn the languages spoken in those countries because many nations use English as the lingua franca of scientific and intellectual communication.
The education-industry nexus at the higher education level is a particularly important economic factor in business management, science, and engineering. It is also the foundation of lifelong learning for professionals. There’s no professional domain where those engaged can remain up to date and relevant long unless they succeed in keeping pace with fast advancing new knowledge and associated competencies.
In learning to live and work in the knowledge society, multilingual proficiency and IT skills are indispensable. Knowing English alone is equivalent to knowing a number of foreign languages. But all knowledge gained through English will be useless if a person fails to appreciate their own native cultural heritage. That’s why learning the mother tongues cannot be neglected. Multilingual abilities and IT competencies together will enable the present and future young generations to access and utilize the unlimited sources and resources of knowledge available globally in order to enrich their lives and empower themselves in ways we adults have only been able to dream of.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Launching into the English Medium through an Integrative Approach
Launching into the English Medium through an Integrative Approach
(Previously published in the Island newspaper, Sri Lanka)
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
(Previously published in the Island newspaper, Sri Lanka)
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
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Jobs, Businesses, and Professions
Jobs, Businesses, and Professions
(First published in The Island/17 December 2010)
“The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.” - John Ruskin (1819-1900), English writer, art critic and social reformer
The three words job, business, and profession all relate to work done in expectation of payment or income, but mean different things in terms of the main motive that drives each. A job is what you do to earn a living, a business involves work relating to the production, buying or selling of goods or services, and a profession is work which requires specialized knowledge and rigorous training, and which is considered to be more a form of honourable service to the society than simple labour to be appropriately remunerated. Disciplined performance on all these three forms of employment is essential for a country’s wellbeing. However, in the society today, one is often struck by the way traditionally hallowed professions such as the medical and the teaching professions are losing their aura of nobility, and degenerating into mere jobs or businesses, though there’s no reason to despair that old values are totally gone.
Professionalism, that is, the practice of skills combined with high standards, while intrinsic to professions by definition, is also expected of jobs and businesses. However, we don’t talk about ‘noble’ jobs or businesses, while we do apply that adjective to a profession. What makes a profession noble is the sense of compassion, generosity, and service that characterizes it. There is nothing very exalted about doing a piece of work to make a living, or exchanging goods or services for money to make a profit. But if your work involves, as in the case of the medical profession, saving people from physical and mental pain, or even death, or, as in the case of the teaching profession, fashioning the character of an individual for life, and if you do that out of compassion for fellow beings rather than covetousness, such ‘service’ should be considered noble.
A job is the least complicated of the three forms of employment. It is a regular occupation, and is nothing more than just a means of making a living. The worker is expected to work a regular number of hours each day, and is paid a regular salary. Usually the type of work the person is expected to do is routine, and allows little room for innovation. There may not be much of an opportunity or need to reveal one’s altruistic spirit, once the duties connected with the job are conscientiously performed.
A business makes an initial investment to produce goods or services for a target customer base. The main purpose of a business is to ensure a return for the money that is invested. Though businesses are usually for-profit organizations, occasionally, there are non-profit making businesses too, such as cooperative establishments, where the income earned is distributed among the members, who are themselves the investors, in the form of enhanced services and other benefits. A non-profit making business may sometimes raise money for a special cause, for example, charity. But, in the case of a business, the overriding concern is to augment returns on the capital resources deployed. Perhaps, moral standards seem to be irrelevant to business. This may be why American author Jim Tully (1886-1947) was prompted to say: “The lawyer and the doctor and other professional men have often a touch of civilization. The banker and the merchant seldom”, something borne out by the recent scams and scandals in the financial investment field in Sri Lanka.
A profession is different from both. The only common feature a profession shares with jobs and businesses is that it is practiced in expectation of some income. But, in reality, the purpose of earning some money becomes incidental to its main motive of providing a vitally important public service. A profession is no profession if it allows itself to become a mere job or business.
A number of special attributes of a profession (and by implication, of a professional) have been identified by different writers. Following are the most frequently stressed ones: a profession is based on a systematic body of scientific knowledge, and practical skills acquired through a formally assessed period of serious study and hard training; it should reflect authority and credibility in the relevant knowledge field, and also a widening of the knowledge field through research; a profession should be informed by compassion and a sense of dedication for public service; it should conform to a culture of values and standards; a profession must be committed to a special code of ethics; and it should demonstrate efficiency and competence in the performance of specific, socially useful, tasks which are challenging. These attributes give status and prestige to those engaged in the professions. Professionals generally enjoy more respect and recognition in society than other workers, and their work is regarded as a service. They are usually better paid than others, though people believe that the important work they do using their advanced knowledge and expertise cannot be valued in terms of money.
In the past, only a few forms of employment were included in the category of professions, such as the careers of doctors, educators, lawyers, engineers, or the (Christian) clergy. In modern times, however, the term is used more inclusively. It is extended to any field (such as business management, journalism, and communication) in which the practitioner performs an important task in a spirit of public service, based on his or her advanced scientific knowledge and hard training acquired over a period of time.
This western concept of profession is quite compatible with our own indigenous cultural attitudes, strongly evident in the medical and teaching fields. The (material) poverty of the ‘vedaralas’ (native physicians) who looked after the health of particularly the rural villagers, the vast majority of the population, almost single-handed until perhaps the beginning of the last century before the western system of medical care spread throughout the country is the theme of the following Sinhalese verse (I learned this verse from my late mother who herself had learnt it in her childhood. I regret my inability to relate it to a source):
Saththare denagath vedaralalata
Neththare nidinatha rae thun yamata
Goththare natha kusagini welawata
Paththare mai vedakama hingamanata
“Physicians who have mastered the art of healing have no rest even at night. You forget about your caste when you are hungry. Truly, this occupation of a physician makes a beggar out of you”.
The verse suggests that the local healers of that bygone era expected and got very little material benefit from practicing their profession. They engaged in it as a duty they owed to society. It seems that they believed that those who had gained medical knowledge were morally obliged to serve the community. They considered it a religious duty, a meritorious act. The society also relied on them to behave in that manner, and accorded them great respect and recognition.
In our knowledge-loving society teachers have always been similarly respected. It was only in the 1970’s that the private tuition centres started in earnest. Before that time, students depended entirely on classroom teaching. Sometimes, teachers offered extra teaching free of charge after school hours. We find no evidence to suggest that teachers of those less modernist times wanted to use their teaching to get materially rich.
This is only a neutral reflection on the past. No implied criticism of the highly commercialised medical and educational spheres that one finds nowadays is intended. Today we live in much more complicated times. We are materially and socially more advanced than before. We have more expectations in life and more opportunities to realize them. If private medical practitioners, and private tutors flourish by plying their trade, that is because there is a great demand for their services. Answering the vital needs of the society is no crime. But, even in the highly commercialized world of today, it is not impossible for them to infuse a sense of professionalism and humanity into their activities.
There are many who do, and enjoy the highest reward they can get for their toil as conceived by Ruskin in my quote at the beginning. That is why any indiscriminate condemnation of private practitioners in the medical or education fields as unconscionable profiteers would not be proper. We have many specialist doctors engaged in private practice who maintain high ethical standards by focusing on their profession rather than profit. The same applies to teachers; in both urban and rural schools some teachers who may be adding to their income by doing some moonlighting often provide free tuition to their needy students after school hours. This must be recognized and those professionals duly honoured for their service.
(First published in The Island/17 December 2010)
“The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.” - John Ruskin (1819-1900), English writer, art critic and social reformer
The three words job, business, and profession all relate to work done in expectation of payment or income, but mean different things in terms of the main motive that drives each. A job is what you do to earn a living, a business involves work relating to the production, buying or selling of goods or services, and a profession is work which requires specialized knowledge and rigorous training, and which is considered to be more a form of honourable service to the society than simple labour to be appropriately remunerated. Disciplined performance on all these three forms of employment is essential for a country’s wellbeing. However, in the society today, one is often struck by the way traditionally hallowed professions such as the medical and the teaching professions are losing their aura of nobility, and degenerating into mere jobs or businesses, though there’s no reason to despair that old values are totally gone.
Professionalism, that is, the practice of skills combined with high standards, while intrinsic to professions by definition, is also expected of jobs and businesses. However, we don’t talk about ‘noble’ jobs or businesses, while we do apply that adjective to a profession. What makes a profession noble is the sense of compassion, generosity, and service that characterizes it. There is nothing very exalted about doing a piece of work to make a living, or exchanging goods or services for money to make a profit. But if your work involves, as in the case of the medical profession, saving people from physical and mental pain, or even death, or, as in the case of the teaching profession, fashioning the character of an individual for life, and if you do that out of compassion for fellow beings rather than covetousness, such ‘service’ should be considered noble.
A job is the least complicated of the three forms of employment. It is a regular occupation, and is nothing more than just a means of making a living. The worker is expected to work a regular number of hours each day, and is paid a regular salary. Usually the type of work the person is expected to do is routine, and allows little room for innovation. There may not be much of an opportunity or need to reveal one’s altruistic spirit, once the duties connected with the job are conscientiously performed.
A business makes an initial investment to produce goods or services for a target customer base. The main purpose of a business is to ensure a return for the money that is invested. Though businesses are usually for-profit organizations, occasionally, there are non-profit making businesses too, such as cooperative establishments, where the income earned is distributed among the members, who are themselves the investors, in the form of enhanced services and other benefits. A non-profit making business may sometimes raise money for a special cause, for example, charity. But, in the case of a business, the overriding concern is to augment returns on the capital resources deployed. Perhaps, moral standards seem to be irrelevant to business. This may be why American author Jim Tully (1886-1947) was prompted to say: “The lawyer and the doctor and other professional men have often a touch of civilization. The banker and the merchant seldom”, something borne out by the recent scams and scandals in the financial investment field in Sri Lanka.
A profession is different from both. The only common feature a profession shares with jobs and businesses is that it is practiced in expectation of some income. But, in reality, the purpose of earning some money becomes incidental to its main motive of providing a vitally important public service. A profession is no profession if it allows itself to become a mere job or business.
A number of special attributes of a profession (and by implication, of a professional) have been identified by different writers. Following are the most frequently stressed ones: a profession is based on a systematic body of scientific knowledge, and practical skills acquired through a formally assessed period of serious study and hard training; it should reflect authority and credibility in the relevant knowledge field, and also a widening of the knowledge field through research; a profession should be informed by compassion and a sense of dedication for public service; it should conform to a culture of values and standards; a profession must be committed to a special code of ethics; and it should demonstrate efficiency and competence in the performance of specific, socially useful, tasks which are challenging. These attributes give status and prestige to those engaged in the professions. Professionals generally enjoy more respect and recognition in society than other workers, and their work is regarded as a service. They are usually better paid than others, though people believe that the important work they do using their advanced knowledge and expertise cannot be valued in terms of money.
In the past, only a few forms of employment were included in the category of professions, such as the careers of doctors, educators, lawyers, engineers, or the (Christian) clergy. In modern times, however, the term is used more inclusively. It is extended to any field (such as business management, journalism, and communication) in which the practitioner performs an important task in a spirit of public service, based on his or her advanced scientific knowledge and hard training acquired over a period of time.
This western concept of profession is quite compatible with our own indigenous cultural attitudes, strongly evident in the medical and teaching fields. The (material) poverty of the ‘vedaralas’ (native physicians) who looked after the health of particularly the rural villagers, the vast majority of the population, almost single-handed until perhaps the beginning of the last century before the western system of medical care spread throughout the country is the theme of the following Sinhalese verse (I learned this verse from my late mother who herself had learnt it in her childhood. I regret my inability to relate it to a source):
Saththare denagath vedaralalata
Neththare nidinatha rae thun yamata
Goththare natha kusagini welawata
Paththare mai vedakama hingamanata
“Physicians who have mastered the art of healing have no rest even at night. You forget about your caste when you are hungry. Truly, this occupation of a physician makes a beggar out of you”.
The verse suggests that the local healers of that bygone era expected and got very little material benefit from practicing their profession. They engaged in it as a duty they owed to society. It seems that they believed that those who had gained medical knowledge were morally obliged to serve the community. They considered it a religious duty, a meritorious act. The society also relied on them to behave in that manner, and accorded them great respect and recognition.
In our knowledge-loving society teachers have always been similarly respected. It was only in the 1970’s that the private tuition centres started in earnest. Before that time, students depended entirely on classroom teaching. Sometimes, teachers offered extra teaching free of charge after school hours. We find no evidence to suggest that teachers of those less modernist times wanted to use their teaching to get materially rich.
This is only a neutral reflection on the past. No implied criticism of the highly commercialised medical and educational spheres that one finds nowadays is intended. Today we live in much more complicated times. We are materially and socially more advanced than before. We have more expectations in life and more opportunities to realize them. If private medical practitioners, and private tutors flourish by plying their trade, that is because there is a great demand for their services. Answering the vital needs of the society is no crime. But, even in the highly commercialized world of today, it is not impossible for them to infuse a sense of professionalism and humanity into their activities.
There are many who do, and enjoy the highest reward they can get for their toil as conceived by Ruskin in my quote at the beginning. That is why any indiscriminate condemnation of private practitioners in the medical or education fields as unconscionable profiteers would not be proper. We have many specialist doctors engaged in private practice who maintain high ethical standards by focusing on their profession rather than profit. The same applies to teachers; in both urban and rural schools some teachers who may be adding to their income by doing some moonlighting often provide free tuition to their needy students after school hours. This must be recognized and those professionals duly honoured for their service.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
The Ten Year Master Plan for a Trilingual Sri Lanka
The Ten Year Master Plan for a Trilingual Sri Lanka
(Previously published in The Island/3rd December 2010)
The 10 year National Master Plan for a Trilingual Sri Lanka (2011-2020) to be launched as a presidential initiative is going to be a massive implementation-oriented language management exercise, probably the most ambitious ever of its kind. A survey carried out by an independent research organization for the Public Survey and Research Unit of the Presidential Secretariat has revealed a clear perception among Sri Lanka’s major ethnic communities of the desirability of a three language system for strengthening national harmony. This is a good trend that should be encouraged and exploited, for the success of any language planning enterprise will ultimately depend on its acceptance by the people.
The Coordinator of the programme, Senior Presidential Advisor Mr Sunimal Fernando, describes the language dimension of the ethnic issue as a chronic wound that has been left untouched in the wishful hope that it would heal by itself in the course of time, for fear of causing pain to the afflicted by probing in it in an attempt to effect a permanent cure. From that perspective, the current undertaking is a bold attempt to bring about a change in the status quo in Sri Lanka’s language planning arena, which, it is hoped, will eventually enhance the prospects of peaceful coexistence among its diverse communities, while opening new vistas of national development. As Professor Rajiva Wijesinghe MP stated in Parliament during the Budget debate recently, “…. multilingualism … is the part of the human resources development that this government alone had the courage to embark on…” (His speech was featured in The Island/28th Monday, November 2010).
Language Planning is a professional activity which is subsumed under Applied Linguistics. It basically involves the participation of three kinds of “language professionals”: politicians, lawyers, and language specialists. These three categories of persons are language professionals in the sense that they use language, in their careers, in a distinctive way, as a weapon, a medium, or an object of study respectively. Language planning is concerned with decision-making about the status, content, teaching and use of languages, especially in volatile contexts where they come into contact, or even to into conflict, involving different groups of people, and where policies and laws must be formulated and implemented. Language planning, therefore, comprises a gamut of activities, which can be broadly grouped into three types: status planning, corpus planning, and acquisition planning.
Status planning is about the determination of the status or standing of a language in relation to other languages in a multilingual society. So it refers to language planning at the macro-sociolinguistic level. Status planning involves decisions about the selection, and the functional allocation or reallocation of a language or language variety (that is, deciding which language/variety should be used for which function, purpose, etc.). In our situation, status planning assumes a conspicuous inter-language character as it involves three distinct languages, in addition to its nature as an intra-language activity when applied to dialects/varieties of a single language. Decisions about which language or language variety should be made a national or official language, or a medium of education, or a link language etc., come within the purview of status planning. Deliberate governmental participation in policy making in this activity is often the case.
Corpus planning is not essentially connected with a corpus (i.e. a computerized collection of language data in the form of written texts and transcripts of recorded speech) though it may use corpora as tools in the process. This is language planning at the micro-sociolinguistic level. It involves selecting and codifying norms in a language, as when it writes grammars, or standardizes spelling, etc.
Acquisition planning is the type of language planning in which a government intervenes in order to influence the status, literacy, distribution, etc. of a language through education. Though nongovernmental organizations may sometimes carry out acquisition planning, government involvement in the process is more common. It is this type of language planning which we are most concerned with on the ten year trilingual master plan.
There are usually five stages to language planning. Accordingly, the proposed trilingual project will involve 1) selection (choosing the standard forms of the three languages), 2) codification (compiling the basic grammars, dictionaries, and textbooks to establish the standard varieties), 3) elaboration (developing these varieties for use in different domains of community life, and encouraging the production of literature written in the standard forms), 4) implementation (the government encouraging the use of the languages), and 5) acceptance (the majority of the population agreeing to use all the three languages in appropriate situations, and to recognize them as a normal part of their social and national identity).
Serious study of language planning as an academic concept started in the 1960’s. Harvard University professor Einar Haugen (1906-1994) is regarded as the pioneer of modern language planning. His 1966 book “Language Conflict and Language Planning, the Case of Modern Norwegian” is still a source of reference for language planners. Our involvement with language planning (though probably it was not described as such at the time) predated the advent of the linguistics of language planning by at least two decades. The change of the medium of education (from English to native tongues) along with the introduction of free education in the mid-1940’s may perhaps be described as a case of acquisition planning because of its connection with education. 1956 marked a watershed in language management. The various amendments brought to the Official Languages Policy under the present Presidential Constitution (1978) since its inception to date represent phases of status planning which have constitutionally guaranteed parity of status to Sinhala and Tamil as national and official languages, while English is recognized as the link language. According to the Official Languages Policy, a person is entitled to be educated through the medium of either of the National Languages; recently, English has rejoined Sinhala and Tamil languages as a medium of education; both Sinhala and Tamil are the languages of administration throughout Sri Lanka; the maintenance of public records and the transaction of business in public institutions are done in Sinhala in all the provinces of Sri Lanka other than the Northern and Eastern Provinces where Tamil shall be used; however, the Sinhala or Tamil linguistic minorities of the Northern and Eastern Provinces, or of all the other Provinces respectively are enabled to have their business attended to through the medium of their own native language, or another language of their choice; the language of legislation and that of the courts, too, are both Sinhala and Tamil; all laws and subordinate legislation are enacted or made and published in Sinhala and Tamil, together with a translation in English. When citizens feel that their language-related rights are being violated, there is provision for legal redress.
If constitutionally and legally there is no room for any citizen to suffer discrimination on the basis of language or ethnicity, then why is that there appears to be a persistent (though usually unexpressed) impression that ethnic harmony is going to remain as much a chimera as ever into the foreseeable future?
From my point of view, a number of answers can be suggested to explain such a pessimistic view. But here I will only write about what I consider the most immediate one among the different causes of the apparent malaise: our failure to implement fully the Official Languages Policy at the grassroots administrative level, where ordinary citizens transact business with the state/government. This failure has a simple cause, and that is the fact that a considerable number of government servants lack acceptable proficiency in more than one language. However, this is a situation that successive governments have been trying to remedy through language training programmes.
The trilingual initiative of the government is a timely one in this context. The idea is to turn Sri Lanka into a trilingual nation within the next ten years. The current peaceful atmosphere, and the growing popular awareness of the usefulness of the scheme would encourage the architects of the plan to hold out hope that it will succeed if properly implemented.
The successful completion of the ten year plan will depend on a number of factors. The commitment of those who are entrusted with the tasks involved in the five stages of the language planning enterprise will be foremost. Hardly less important will be the purposeful mobilization and exemplary professionalism of the educational authorities including teachers. The positive response of the target population is the next essential condition. Here the most important ingredient will be motivation. The students must be made to see a legitimate reason for undergoing the hassle of learning three languages where one or at the most two would appear to be sufficient. In addition to convincing them of the necessity of an English knowledge for a decent education, it will be necessary to inculcate them with an attitude of mutual respect and fellow feeling among the different communities.
In working towards that goal, the colonial origin of the language or ethnic problem should not be overlooked, nor a myth substituted instead. 1956 was not the beginning of our troubles, rather it was the successful conclusion of one stage of our emergence from the incubus of imperial domination, as later 1972 was. During their occupation the imperialists sought to strengthen and perpetuate their predatory stranglehold on our diverse nation by deliberately dividing it along ethnic lines. The privileged status that they conferred on sections of the population which had embraced the English language and the Christian religion was not to the advantage or the liking of the dispossessed masses of all communities. However, even among the privileged who enjoyed imperial patronage there was discrimination against representatives of the majority ethnic community paralleled by preferential treatment meted out to those of the minorities. Since the emancipation of the downtrodden of all the communities ushering in democratic rule meant the end of the perks and privileges that they were enjoying under the occupiers, naturally those elements were opposed to the fulfilment of the legitimate aspirations of the majority. We must come to terms with this past instead of demonising the majority community and blaming them for every problem that the country faces. Mutual hatred and recrimination fed by myths will take us nowhere.
Before independence, the ordinary masses belonging to all communities suffered as third class citizens in their own country except the thin upper crust of the population that collaborated with them. The supremacy of English and the undue privileged status of the small minority (the so-called elite) which benefited from that lingering colonial afterglow was significantly attenuated, if not completely eliminated, by the changes introduced in 1956. The real or perceived linguistic anomalies following from ‘Sinhala only’ (which was no worse than ‘English only’ in multilingual America or ‘Hindi only’ in multilingual India as ‘national’ languages) have been constitutionally resolved since. Today we live in a country where we are all equal citizens, enjoying the same linguistic and other rights. Just as we share equal rights, we must shoulder equal responsibilities.
It is said that divisive tendencies based on the language issue eventually led to the separatist terror which ravaged the country for thirty years. We have now successfully put behind us both of those problems. If the language problem put us in trouble in the past, this time around a trebly powerful language factor has come to our help. We are on the threshold of a new era of national unity and economic development, neither of which is possible without the other. No more propitious time has ever emerged for such a bright prospect for development since Independence. The key to economic and social advancement is a developed human resource base, for which high quality education is a sine qua non. The three language treasure that we have inherited or acquired must be utilized to the full for human resource development in pushing for the goal of Sri Lanka being eventually hailed as the Wonder of Asia.
(Previously published in The Island/3rd December 2010)
The 10 year National Master Plan for a Trilingual Sri Lanka (2011-2020) to be launched as a presidential initiative is going to be a massive implementation-oriented language management exercise, probably the most ambitious ever of its kind. A survey carried out by an independent research organization for the Public Survey and Research Unit of the Presidential Secretariat has revealed a clear perception among Sri Lanka’s major ethnic communities of the desirability of a three language system for strengthening national harmony. This is a good trend that should be encouraged and exploited, for the success of any language planning enterprise will ultimately depend on its acceptance by the people.
The Coordinator of the programme, Senior Presidential Advisor Mr Sunimal Fernando, describes the language dimension of the ethnic issue as a chronic wound that has been left untouched in the wishful hope that it would heal by itself in the course of time, for fear of causing pain to the afflicted by probing in it in an attempt to effect a permanent cure. From that perspective, the current undertaking is a bold attempt to bring about a change in the status quo in Sri Lanka’s language planning arena, which, it is hoped, will eventually enhance the prospects of peaceful coexistence among its diverse communities, while opening new vistas of national development. As Professor Rajiva Wijesinghe MP stated in Parliament during the Budget debate recently, “…. multilingualism … is the part of the human resources development that this government alone had the courage to embark on…” (His speech was featured in The Island/28th Monday, November 2010).
Language Planning is a professional activity which is subsumed under Applied Linguistics. It basically involves the participation of three kinds of “language professionals”: politicians, lawyers, and language specialists. These three categories of persons are language professionals in the sense that they use language, in their careers, in a distinctive way, as a weapon, a medium, or an object of study respectively. Language planning is concerned with decision-making about the status, content, teaching and use of languages, especially in volatile contexts where they come into contact, or even to into conflict, involving different groups of people, and where policies and laws must be formulated and implemented. Language planning, therefore, comprises a gamut of activities, which can be broadly grouped into three types: status planning, corpus planning, and acquisition planning.
Status planning is about the determination of the status or standing of a language in relation to other languages in a multilingual society. So it refers to language planning at the macro-sociolinguistic level. Status planning involves decisions about the selection, and the functional allocation or reallocation of a language or language variety (that is, deciding which language/variety should be used for which function, purpose, etc.). In our situation, status planning assumes a conspicuous inter-language character as it involves three distinct languages, in addition to its nature as an intra-language activity when applied to dialects/varieties of a single language. Decisions about which language or language variety should be made a national or official language, or a medium of education, or a link language etc., come within the purview of status planning. Deliberate governmental participation in policy making in this activity is often the case.
Corpus planning is not essentially connected with a corpus (i.e. a computerized collection of language data in the form of written texts and transcripts of recorded speech) though it may use corpora as tools in the process. This is language planning at the micro-sociolinguistic level. It involves selecting and codifying norms in a language, as when it writes grammars, or standardizes spelling, etc.
Acquisition planning is the type of language planning in which a government intervenes in order to influence the status, literacy, distribution, etc. of a language through education. Though nongovernmental organizations may sometimes carry out acquisition planning, government involvement in the process is more common. It is this type of language planning which we are most concerned with on the ten year trilingual master plan.
There are usually five stages to language planning. Accordingly, the proposed trilingual project will involve 1) selection (choosing the standard forms of the three languages), 2) codification (compiling the basic grammars, dictionaries, and textbooks to establish the standard varieties), 3) elaboration (developing these varieties for use in different domains of community life, and encouraging the production of literature written in the standard forms), 4) implementation (the government encouraging the use of the languages), and 5) acceptance (the majority of the population agreeing to use all the three languages in appropriate situations, and to recognize them as a normal part of their social and national identity).
Serious study of language planning as an academic concept started in the 1960’s. Harvard University professor Einar Haugen (1906-1994) is regarded as the pioneer of modern language planning. His 1966 book “Language Conflict and Language Planning, the Case of Modern Norwegian” is still a source of reference for language planners. Our involvement with language planning (though probably it was not described as such at the time) predated the advent of the linguistics of language planning by at least two decades. The change of the medium of education (from English to native tongues) along with the introduction of free education in the mid-1940’s may perhaps be described as a case of acquisition planning because of its connection with education. 1956 marked a watershed in language management. The various amendments brought to the Official Languages Policy under the present Presidential Constitution (1978) since its inception to date represent phases of status planning which have constitutionally guaranteed parity of status to Sinhala and Tamil as national and official languages, while English is recognized as the link language. According to the Official Languages Policy, a person is entitled to be educated through the medium of either of the National Languages; recently, English has rejoined Sinhala and Tamil languages as a medium of education; both Sinhala and Tamil are the languages of administration throughout Sri Lanka; the maintenance of public records and the transaction of business in public institutions are done in Sinhala in all the provinces of Sri Lanka other than the Northern and Eastern Provinces where Tamil shall be used; however, the Sinhala or Tamil linguistic minorities of the Northern and Eastern Provinces, or of all the other Provinces respectively are enabled to have their business attended to through the medium of their own native language, or another language of their choice; the language of legislation and that of the courts, too, are both Sinhala and Tamil; all laws and subordinate legislation are enacted or made and published in Sinhala and Tamil, together with a translation in English. When citizens feel that their language-related rights are being violated, there is provision for legal redress.
If constitutionally and legally there is no room for any citizen to suffer discrimination on the basis of language or ethnicity, then why is that there appears to be a persistent (though usually unexpressed) impression that ethnic harmony is going to remain as much a chimera as ever into the foreseeable future?
From my point of view, a number of answers can be suggested to explain such a pessimistic view. But here I will only write about what I consider the most immediate one among the different causes of the apparent malaise: our failure to implement fully the Official Languages Policy at the grassroots administrative level, where ordinary citizens transact business with the state/government. This failure has a simple cause, and that is the fact that a considerable number of government servants lack acceptable proficiency in more than one language. However, this is a situation that successive governments have been trying to remedy through language training programmes.
The trilingual initiative of the government is a timely one in this context. The idea is to turn Sri Lanka into a trilingual nation within the next ten years. The current peaceful atmosphere, and the growing popular awareness of the usefulness of the scheme would encourage the architects of the plan to hold out hope that it will succeed if properly implemented.
The successful completion of the ten year plan will depend on a number of factors. The commitment of those who are entrusted with the tasks involved in the five stages of the language planning enterprise will be foremost. Hardly less important will be the purposeful mobilization and exemplary professionalism of the educational authorities including teachers. The positive response of the target population is the next essential condition. Here the most important ingredient will be motivation. The students must be made to see a legitimate reason for undergoing the hassle of learning three languages where one or at the most two would appear to be sufficient. In addition to convincing them of the necessity of an English knowledge for a decent education, it will be necessary to inculcate them with an attitude of mutual respect and fellow feeling among the different communities.
In working towards that goal, the colonial origin of the language or ethnic problem should not be overlooked, nor a myth substituted instead. 1956 was not the beginning of our troubles, rather it was the successful conclusion of one stage of our emergence from the incubus of imperial domination, as later 1972 was. During their occupation the imperialists sought to strengthen and perpetuate their predatory stranglehold on our diverse nation by deliberately dividing it along ethnic lines. The privileged status that they conferred on sections of the population which had embraced the English language and the Christian religion was not to the advantage or the liking of the dispossessed masses of all communities. However, even among the privileged who enjoyed imperial patronage there was discrimination against representatives of the majority ethnic community paralleled by preferential treatment meted out to those of the minorities. Since the emancipation of the downtrodden of all the communities ushering in democratic rule meant the end of the perks and privileges that they were enjoying under the occupiers, naturally those elements were opposed to the fulfilment of the legitimate aspirations of the majority. We must come to terms with this past instead of demonising the majority community and blaming them for every problem that the country faces. Mutual hatred and recrimination fed by myths will take us nowhere.
Before independence, the ordinary masses belonging to all communities suffered as third class citizens in their own country except the thin upper crust of the population that collaborated with them. The supremacy of English and the undue privileged status of the small minority (the so-called elite) which benefited from that lingering colonial afterglow was significantly attenuated, if not completely eliminated, by the changes introduced in 1956. The real or perceived linguistic anomalies following from ‘Sinhala only’ (which was no worse than ‘English only’ in multilingual America or ‘Hindi only’ in multilingual India as ‘national’ languages) have been constitutionally resolved since. Today we live in a country where we are all equal citizens, enjoying the same linguistic and other rights. Just as we share equal rights, we must shoulder equal responsibilities.
It is said that divisive tendencies based on the language issue eventually led to the separatist terror which ravaged the country for thirty years. We have now successfully put behind us both of those problems. If the language problem put us in trouble in the past, this time around a trebly powerful language factor has come to our help. We are on the threshold of a new era of national unity and economic development, neither of which is possible without the other. No more propitious time has ever emerged for such a bright prospect for development since Independence. The key to economic and social advancement is a developed human resource base, for which high quality education is a sine qua non. The three language treasure that we have inherited or acquired must be utilized to the full for human resource development in pushing for the goal of Sri Lanka being eventually hailed as the Wonder of Asia.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Technology-mediated Language Teaching
Technology-mediated Language Teaching
(First published in The Island/Friday 26th November 2010)
Any teaching-learning situation involves a dynamic interrelationship between three components: the learner, the subject, and the teacher. The role of the teacher in this relationship is to initiate and maintain effective learner engagement with the subject. Pedagogy is about how this can be done efficiently. A handy tool that modern teachers can use in their teaching is found in the form of Information and Communications Technology (ICT).
Incidentally, the word ‘pedagogy’ has an interesting etymology: According to the Chambers Dictionary, it derives from ‘pedagogue’, (‘teacher’), which itself entered the English language partly through French and Latin from the Greek ‘paidagogos’ (‘a slave who led a boy to school’). Considering the ‘slaving’ (working hard, usually for someone else) that conscientious teaching involves today, ‘pedagogy’ is an appropriate term for a teacher’s strategic role in the instruction process. The technology tool has the potential to ease a teacher’s burden considerably. But, how does this apply to an English language teaching situation?
Each English teacher, whether a novice or an expert, confronts a unique set of pupils in a unique setting (place, time and circumstances), and faces the unavoidable challenge of determining their own classroom practice to suit the pupils. A novice teacher may be required to rely on their own (perhaps totally uninformed) devices or, luckily, on guidance where it is available, while an expert practitioner usually draws on personal knowledge and experience in doing this.
A teacher’s classroom practice consists of the specific teaching and learning activities that are designed. Individual decisions about these are based on the teacher’s ideas, beliefs, or assumptions about the nature of language, and the psychology of language learning on the one hand, and on the other, on their knowledge of English, and their understanding of the pupils’ learning styles. In other words, a teacher’s understanding of how learners learn English in terms of a particular pedagogic ideology will determine their decisions about the overall classroom procedure to be adopted.
According to available information, already about 84% of the households in Sri Lanka enjoy the electricity facility; computer literacy is at 30%, and is fast spreading; English and IT are being promoted as related subjects. (The level of computer literacy that is required in the English language classroom is not high, and is limited.) In this context, using ICT would prove a popular strategy for enhancing language teaching and learning. This shouldn’t be interpreted as a proposal to provide a few computers for each class, and hand over all the teaching to them while the teachers sit back and idle. ICT will only be a tool. It will be used sometimes for part of a lesson with one group of students, while the others are engaged with other activities. ICT use in the class can also be expected to train the pupils to do self-access work with a computer at home.
Today, ICT is in common use, particularly in administration and business spheres. There is no important office, shop, bank, hospital, factory, or firm that doesn’t use it. Not using ICT where the routine work involves communicating and computing would be deemed primitive. School children would love innovations that put them in contact with modern technology which is now a normal feature everywhere else. English language learners do not enjoy being left behind in this general movement towards technological modernity. Young people will quickly embrace ICT integration into English language instruction because it is trendy, in addition to being attractive in other ways.
If ICT use can be ‘normalized’ in our schools (in the sense that the computer becomes as normal a feature in every classroom as the black- or whiteboard has been to date), then it will prove to be an effective leveller between urban and rural schools. The need to attend expensive urban centres for educational support will be greatly reduced for rural students, because they will be able to access the necessary sources of information online. We already have a number of government and private sector-sponsored online education programmes. Technology-based education in Sri Lanka has a promising future. (Ref. my column for 27th August and 3rd September 2010)
In terms of pedagogy, the two most important advantages of technology-based English language instruction will be: 1) it will be highly motivational, and 2) it will create a highly productive context for effective language learning. Of these, the second advantage may be elaborated thus: ICT provides multimodal interaction, that is, communicative activities involving all the four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing; it will allow differentiated instruction, which is a strategy in which students of mixed ability levels are helped to proceed at their own rates while learning the same concepts; ICT also encourages autonomous learning. The first advantage, the valuable motivational factor, is due to the novelty and the variety that modern technology constantly brings into the language learning experience.
Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) first appeared in the early 1980’s. CALL programmes required learners to respond to cues on the computer screen, and involved tasks such as matching sentence halves, filling in gapped texts, and doing multiple-choice activities. CALL materials of the present day are more sophisticated than these. Access to ICT has enabled both teachers and students to go beyond the use of computer programmes to the use of the Internet and web-based resources. In view of this, the term Technology Enhanced Language Learning (TELL) was coined in the 1990’s. In an attempt to reflect the growing possibilities offered by the Internet and ICT, other terms have been suggested to replace CALL and TELL such as Web-enhanced Language Learning (WELL), Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL). Since the use of the computer remains relevant to all of these, experts in the field still prefer to stick to the original term, namely, CALL.
Teachers can use CALL materials prepared by the authorities, or those that they compile by themselves in an institution. The Internet offers a wide variety of CALL materials. These can be used to supplement a course that is already being delivered. The language teaching professionals who develop such materials subscribe to a particular philosophy. For example, assumptions about the three components of a teaching-learning situation mentioned at the beginning of this essay are implicit in most CALL materials. One assumption is that, in order to become independent learners, students need teachers to guide them in choosing what to learn and how to learn it, and the specific language (that is, the style of English: formal, informal, etc.) that they should focus on. An assumption relating to the subject (English) is that the English language represents a variety of styles that serve different purposes. For instance, the language needed to ask someone you know for a favour differs in grammar and vocabulary from that needed to request a similar favour from a stranger or a social superior. Teachers guide pupils not only by selecting appropriate materials, but by structuring the activities for learning, and for monitoring their progress; teacher guidance helps the learners to continue learning English and to expand their knowledge of the language.
It is now generally accepted that second language learners learn a language by specific stages, as Tony Erben et al (Teaching English Language Learners through Technology. Routledge, 2009) point out. Teachers can’t force it on them all at once. Learners will acquire new language structures only when they are cognitively and psychologically ready to do so. For example, learners listen and respond non-verbally to simple commands, and become able to say short formulaic structures such as “yes”, “no”, “Good morning”, “Thank you”, and develop a receptive vocabulary of a few hundred words, before they begin to manage one or two-word answers or short utterances. These two phases of language acquisition represent the first two of four such stages that Krashen and Terrel (1983) described (viz. preproduction, and early production stages; the other two are the speech emergence stage, and the intermediate fluency stage). Incidentally, according to Tony Erben and his co-authors, in spite of there being various other taxonomies (ways of classifying and naming) to categorize stages of language development, many education systems in the US adopt the four-tier model proposed by Krashen and Terrel that I have just mentioned. Later researchers (e.g. Pienemann, 1989, 2007) have confirmed that there is an immutable language acquisition order.
A teacher cannot alter this natural process. But they can definitely quicken the pace of language development. The multimodal resources made available through ICT are an ideal way for activating the natural phases of second language acquisition. Technology enables the teacher to create an ‘acquisition-rich classroom’ via interactive pedagogic activities. The authors of the above-mentioned book summarize ‘useful research generalizations’ provided by Ellis (2005) among others into five principles for generating such an acquisition-rich language learning environment.
The first of these is that the English language learners should be provided with many opportunities to read, to write, to listen to and to discuss oral and written English texts expressed in a variety of ways. This involves not only the ability to listen to a spoken text or read a written text, and learn what is there to learn, but also the ability to communicate the information acquired to another person (who wants to learn it ). Academic literacy is today defined as the ability to use speaking, listening, reading, writing, and critical thinking to learn what they want to learn, and to communicate or demonstrate that learning to others who need it.
The second principle is that the learners need to focus their attention on patterns of English language structure. To become efficient communicators, they must learn the language structures that help them express themselves clearly, and the rules that govern the appropriateness of language for a particular context. The assumption that there is a natural order or sequence of language acquisition implies that grammatical structures emerge in the communicative utterances of the learners in a fixed, regular order. The teacher’s responsibility is to create a language-rich environment which induces them to use grammar relevant to the acquisition stage they have reached.
The third principle says that the language learners need to be given classroom time to use their English productively. This is based on the assumption that the interaction that takes place when second language learners, engaged in talk with their colleagues, ‘negotiate’ for meaning. That is, conversation is not usually a straightforward matter of exchanging ready-made pieces of information between the interlocutors; the messages get clarified, or even modified, the meaning more defined through questioning, agreeing with what is said but with reservations, or totally disagreeing, or asking for clarifications, and so on; this is supported by other forms of feedback including non-verbal clues such as facial expressions revealing incomprehension, confusion, or disagreement, etc; thus meaning is newly created in the course of a ‘negotiating’ process. Interaction through such negotiation for meaning is assumed to facilitate language learning. In the domain of second language acquisition (SLA) theory, this is known as the interaction hypothesis, which has been primarily developed by M. Long (1996, 2006). The availability of input of the right quality and quantity, together with provision for output (i.e. opportunities for using the second language) advances language development.
According to the fourth principle, students need to be given the opportunities to spot their errors, and to correct them. Teachers should encourage learners to reflect on their language, on ‘correct’ forms of language. This must happen at least in the English classroom. For most of the time that children spend at school, they engage in activities which focus on their understanding of subject matter; rarely do they have an opportunity to notice the contribution language makes towards communicating the content of the lessons clearly without misrepresenting it. Wrong grammar is a problem where there is a need for clarity and precision of presentation. It is only when students are aware of this, and make a conscious effort to discover their errors, and correct them that they can become efficient communicators. Teachers should help them in this. Ideally, every teacher must be a language teacher.
The fifth and final principle in our list is based on all that preceded. It advises the teacher to design activities that maximize interaction among the learners in English. Students’ active involvement in linguistic communication in the class is the main factor that ensures successful language learning.
The five principles delineated above provide parameters for a curriculum that addresses the language acquisition needs of the learners. Sensitivity to the four stages of language development should be an essential feature of such a curriculum.
Of course, technology can be used in English teaching within the classroom without having to constantly go online. For example, teachers and learners can work offline with pre-downloaded instruction materials, or with such materials photocopied, which would be safer in places where there are frequent power and connectivity breakdown problems.
(First published in The Island/Friday 26th November 2010)
Any teaching-learning situation involves a dynamic interrelationship between three components: the learner, the subject, and the teacher. The role of the teacher in this relationship is to initiate and maintain effective learner engagement with the subject. Pedagogy is about how this can be done efficiently. A handy tool that modern teachers can use in their teaching is found in the form of Information and Communications Technology (ICT).
Incidentally, the word ‘pedagogy’ has an interesting etymology: According to the Chambers Dictionary, it derives from ‘pedagogue’, (‘teacher’), which itself entered the English language partly through French and Latin from the Greek ‘paidagogos’ (‘a slave who led a boy to school’). Considering the ‘slaving’ (working hard, usually for someone else) that conscientious teaching involves today, ‘pedagogy’ is an appropriate term for a teacher’s strategic role in the instruction process. The technology tool has the potential to ease a teacher’s burden considerably. But, how does this apply to an English language teaching situation?
Each English teacher, whether a novice or an expert, confronts a unique set of pupils in a unique setting (place, time and circumstances), and faces the unavoidable challenge of determining their own classroom practice to suit the pupils. A novice teacher may be required to rely on their own (perhaps totally uninformed) devices or, luckily, on guidance where it is available, while an expert practitioner usually draws on personal knowledge and experience in doing this.
A teacher’s classroom practice consists of the specific teaching and learning activities that are designed. Individual decisions about these are based on the teacher’s ideas, beliefs, or assumptions about the nature of language, and the psychology of language learning on the one hand, and on the other, on their knowledge of English, and their understanding of the pupils’ learning styles. In other words, a teacher’s understanding of how learners learn English in terms of a particular pedagogic ideology will determine their decisions about the overall classroom procedure to be adopted.
According to available information, already about 84% of the households in Sri Lanka enjoy the electricity facility; computer literacy is at 30%, and is fast spreading; English and IT are being promoted as related subjects. (The level of computer literacy that is required in the English language classroom is not high, and is limited.) In this context, using ICT would prove a popular strategy for enhancing language teaching and learning. This shouldn’t be interpreted as a proposal to provide a few computers for each class, and hand over all the teaching to them while the teachers sit back and idle. ICT will only be a tool. It will be used sometimes for part of a lesson with one group of students, while the others are engaged with other activities. ICT use in the class can also be expected to train the pupils to do self-access work with a computer at home.
Today, ICT is in common use, particularly in administration and business spheres. There is no important office, shop, bank, hospital, factory, or firm that doesn’t use it. Not using ICT where the routine work involves communicating and computing would be deemed primitive. School children would love innovations that put them in contact with modern technology which is now a normal feature everywhere else. English language learners do not enjoy being left behind in this general movement towards technological modernity. Young people will quickly embrace ICT integration into English language instruction because it is trendy, in addition to being attractive in other ways.
If ICT use can be ‘normalized’ in our schools (in the sense that the computer becomes as normal a feature in every classroom as the black- or whiteboard has been to date), then it will prove to be an effective leveller between urban and rural schools. The need to attend expensive urban centres for educational support will be greatly reduced for rural students, because they will be able to access the necessary sources of information online. We already have a number of government and private sector-sponsored online education programmes. Technology-based education in Sri Lanka has a promising future. (Ref. my column for 27th August and 3rd September 2010)
In terms of pedagogy, the two most important advantages of technology-based English language instruction will be: 1) it will be highly motivational, and 2) it will create a highly productive context for effective language learning. Of these, the second advantage may be elaborated thus: ICT provides multimodal interaction, that is, communicative activities involving all the four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing; it will allow differentiated instruction, which is a strategy in which students of mixed ability levels are helped to proceed at their own rates while learning the same concepts; ICT also encourages autonomous learning. The first advantage, the valuable motivational factor, is due to the novelty and the variety that modern technology constantly brings into the language learning experience.
Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) first appeared in the early 1980’s. CALL programmes required learners to respond to cues on the computer screen, and involved tasks such as matching sentence halves, filling in gapped texts, and doing multiple-choice activities. CALL materials of the present day are more sophisticated than these. Access to ICT has enabled both teachers and students to go beyond the use of computer programmes to the use of the Internet and web-based resources. In view of this, the term Technology Enhanced Language Learning (TELL) was coined in the 1990’s. In an attempt to reflect the growing possibilities offered by the Internet and ICT, other terms have been suggested to replace CALL and TELL such as Web-enhanced Language Learning (WELL), Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL). Since the use of the computer remains relevant to all of these, experts in the field still prefer to stick to the original term, namely, CALL.
Teachers can use CALL materials prepared by the authorities, or those that they compile by themselves in an institution. The Internet offers a wide variety of CALL materials. These can be used to supplement a course that is already being delivered. The language teaching professionals who develop such materials subscribe to a particular philosophy. For example, assumptions about the three components of a teaching-learning situation mentioned at the beginning of this essay are implicit in most CALL materials. One assumption is that, in order to become independent learners, students need teachers to guide them in choosing what to learn and how to learn it, and the specific language (that is, the style of English: formal, informal, etc.) that they should focus on. An assumption relating to the subject (English) is that the English language represents a variety of styles that serve different purposes. For instance, the language needed to ask someone you know for a favour differs in grammar and vocabulary from that needed to request a similar favour from a stranger or a social superior. Teachers guide pupils not only by selecting appropriate materials, but by structuring the activities for learning, and for monitoring their progress; teacher guidance helps the learners to continue learning English and to expand their knowledge of the language.
It is now generally accepted that second language learners learn a language by specific stages, as Tony Erben et al (Teaching English Language Learners through Technology. Routledge, 2009) point out. Teachers can’t force it on them all at once. Learners will acquire new language structures only when they are cognitively and psychologically ready to do so. For example, learners listen and respond non-verbally to simple commands, and become able to say short formulaic structures such as “yes”, “no”, “Good morning”, “Thank you”, and develop a receptive vocabulary of a few hundred words, before they begin to manage one or two-word answers or short utterances. These two phases of language acquisition represent the first two of four such stages that Krashen and Terrel (1983) described (viz. preproduction, and early production stages; the other two are the speech emergence stage, and the intermediate fluency stage). Incidentally, according to Tony Erben and his co-authors, in spite of there being various other taxonomies (ways of classifying and naming) to categorize stages of language development, many education systems in the US adopt the four-tier model proposed by Krashen and Terrel that I have just mentioned. Later researchers (e.g. Pienemann, 1989, 2007) have confirmed that there is an immutable language acquisition order.
A teacher cannot alter this natural process. But they can definitely quicken the pace of language development. The multimodal resources made available through ICT are an ideal way for activating the natural phases of second language acquisition. Technology enables the teacher to create an ‘acquisition-rich classroom’ via interactive pedagogic activities. The authors of the above-mentioned book summarize ‘useful research generalizations’ provided by Ellis (2005) among others into five principles for generating such an acquisition-rich language learning environment.
The first of these is that the English language learners should be provided with many opportunities to read, to write, to listen to and to discuss oral and written English texts expressed in a variety of ways. This involves not only the ability to listen to a spoken text or read a written text, and learn what is there to learn, but also the ability to communicate the information acquired to another person (who wants to learn it ). Academic literacy is today defined as the ability to use speaking, listening, reading, writing, and critical thinking to learn what they want to learn, and to communicate or demonstrate that learning to others who need it.
The second principle is that the learners need to focus their attention on patterns of English language structure. To become efficient communicators, they must learn the language structures that help them express themselves clearly, and the rules that govern the appropriateness of language for a particular context. The assumption that there is a natural order or sequence of language acquisition implies that grammatical structures emerge in the communicative utterances of the learners in a fixed, regular order. The teacher’s responsibility is to create a language-rich environment which induces them to use grammar relevant to the acquisition stage they have reached.
The third principle says that the language learners need to be given classroom time to use their English productively. This is based on the assumption that the interaction that takes place when second language learners, engaged in talk with their colleagues, ‘negotiate’ for meaning. That is, conversation is not usually a straightforward matter of exchanging ready-made pieces of information between the interlocutors; the messages get clarified, or even modified, the meaning more defined through questioning, agreeing with what is said but with reservations, or totally disagreeing, or asking for clarifications, and so on; this is supported by other forms of feedback including non-verbal clues such as facial expressions revealing incomprehension, confusion, or disagreement, etc; thus meaning is newly created in the course of a ‘negotiating’ process. Interaction through such negotiation for meaning is assumed to facilitate language learning. In the domain of second language acquisition (SLA) theory, this is known as the interaction hypothesis, which has been primarily developed by M. Long (1996, 2006). The availability of input of the right quality and quantity, together with provision for output (i.e. opportunities for using the second language) advances language development.
According to the fourth principle, students need to be given the opportunities to spot their errors, and to correct them. Teachers should encourage learners to reflect on their language, on ‘correct’ forms of language. This must happen at least in the English classroom. For most of the time that children spend at school, they engage in activities which focus on their understanding of subject matter; rarely do they have an opportunity to notice the contribution language makes towards communicating the content of the lessons clearly without misrepresenting it. Wrong grammar is a problem where there is a need for clarity and precision of presentation. It is only when students are aware of this, and make a conscious effort to discover their errors, and correct them that they can become efficient communicators. Teachers should help them in this. Ideally, every teacher must be a language teacher.
The fifth and final principle in our list is based on all that preceded. It advises the teacher to design activities that maximize interaction among the learners in English. Students’ active involvement in linguistic communication in the class is the main factor that ensures successful language learning.
The five principles delineated above provide parameters for a curriculum that addresses the language acquisition needs of the learners. Sensitivity to the four stages of language development should be an essential feature of such a curriculum.
Of course, technology can be used in English teaching within the classroom without having to constantly go online. For example, teachers and learners can work offline with pre-downloaded instruction materials, or with such materials photocopied, which would be safer in places where there are frequent power and connectivity breakdown problems.
Friday, January 7, 2011
Teaching Language through Literature
Teaching Language through Literature
(First published in The Island/Friday 12th November, 2010)
Children love to play with language. Toddlers sometimes coin their own non-sense musical phrases and enjoy singing them repeatedly. Older children play games in which singing is an essential accompaniment to physical movements. They like to listen to stories and relate ones which they already know or which they make up. Children display a natural dramatic talent. They enjoy reciting poetry. The love of using their language creatively for the sheer joy of it is natural to humans, and is at the root of the creation of, and the engagement with, literature. This situation can be exploited to promote the learning of English as a second language by including a literary element in the English curriculum from the beginning.
Some educators in the past rejected the use of literary texts as ‘drill materials’ for the development of the four basic language skills on the grounds that in such a situation students would learn neither language nor literature sufficiently well. Therefore they preferred to defer the introduction of literature to a later stage when the students would be expected to have gained enough mastery of the language to respond to literature without difficulty. However, with the communicative language teaching approach steadily gaining currency, and the ‘drill’ aspect of language practice becoming less emphasized, this attitude changed. Today it is normal to incorporate literary pieces in English language textbooks.
Literature provides interesting language practice materials. It affords a chance for the learners to be aware of the creative possibilities of language that enable them to communicate ideas and states of mind beyond the merely routine, utilitarian level. Behind its apparent triviality, literature hides that which makes us human in a profound sense. It has its birth in the human passion for creating beautiful forms by drawing on the resources of language, such as the sound and sense of words, rhythm, rhyme, etc. Words are the raw material that literary artists shape into formal beauty. There is pleasure in creating literature, and in reacting to it. In spite of the pleasure element that literature is ordinarily associated with, it is nevertheless serious business, for it is concerned with intensely felt experience. Through its formal beauty literature helps us to reflect on the deeply sorrowful aspect of our existence (bereavement, betrayal, loss, and endless other eventualities) which all humans share, and just as well, to celebrate the most cherished things in life (love, marriage, birth of a baby, fulfilment of hopes, discovery of beauty, and the rest). In the end, we experience the “serene joy” of coming to terms with the bitter-sweet nature of our existence. Thus literature increases our capacity for making sense of our world, for expressing it, and for sharing it with our fellow humans, which enriches our humanity.
In literature, therefore, language is used for exploring a level of experience that goes beyond the merely physical to encompass our emotional life in which we actually ‘live’, in the sense that we are concerned with such things as the ultimate meaning, the frustrations and the fulfilments, and the agonies and the ecstasies of our existence, and above all with the ultimate joy of living in the face of these contradictions. It is not that these abstract notions about the value of literature should be conveyed to the students verbally; in reality, it would be after many years of familiarity with literature that generalisations such as those come within their powers of comprehension. But children have an instinctive fascination with the mysterious power of language to transport them to a different plane of experience.
Literature usually involves four forms: essay, poetry, fiction, and drama; but now we also include film in this list. Though both drama and film are primarily for watching, the manuscripts of plays and the shooting scripts of films can be read and enjoyed as literature. All these literary forms represent language being used for interpreting the world of experience, and communicating it to others through the engagement of their aesthetic sense (= ability to enjoy things of beauty).
The prevalent communicative language teaching principles would suggest that literature is an easily exploitable resource for language instruction. The great potential of literature as a context for pleasurable as well as useful language practice lies in its intrinsic appeal to youthful creativity, its inclusion of all the four basic language skills and more, and its wide scope for collaborative engagement among the students, in addition to individual interaction with the texts.
My comments here relate to the teaching of English as a second language to Sri Lankan students. Of course, no such thing as teaching the language exclusively through literature is intended. Literature is viewed here as one important way of using language. Language teaching and learning should involve more than literature. The important thing is that when specimens of literature are presented as components of an English teaching course they should be subordinated to the actual purpose of using literature in that situation, which is providing an interesting context for authentic language use. But the value of the texts as literature should not be discounted. Otherwise, there will be no difference between the other forms of texts included in the same course and the literature pieces in their treatment, rendering the latter redundant.
However, it is obvious that we cannot initiate our students to all the intricacies of the literary experience from the word go, although its essence is nascent in the crudest form of their contact with literature. Just as an insistence on perfect grammar, pronunciation, and accent, etc tends to frighten students out of a purposeful attempt to learn English, so a perceptibly rigid concern on the part of teachers to deal with literary texts exclusively as literature will kill the second language learners’ interest in them. What the teachers can exploit, particularly at the beginning level, is literature’s appeal to the children’s native love of using language creatively for the pleasure it generates.
In the language teaching context, therefore, the value of literature lies in its potential for providing a context for authentic linguistic communication in a unique aspect of language use. Creative literature uses language for exploring the world of imagination, thought, and values, as distinct from using it to deal with merely factual and utilitarian information. The usual English language textbooks contain a few examples of literature such as simple poems, short stories, extracts from longer fiction, or drama, and essays among a majority of non-literary texts. The way that student interaction with non-literary texts is stage-managed (that is, the way non-literary texts are taught, in traditional terms) is not suitable for stimulating interaction with literary texts.
The sort of literature presented to students for engagement and enjoyment should be graded according to their age and their level of attainment in English language proficiency. Thus at the primary level, singing nursery rhymes would be a good introduction to the literary experience through the delightful music of the words, and the visual images that the rhymes conjure. Children may be given the opportunity to draw pictures to illustrate their songs as an additional activity.
At the same time, the amount of contribution that they make towards the real purpose of the lesson – linguistic development – should be the determinant criterion in the selection and assignment of learning tasks. For example, what useful purpose will learning and singing nursery rhymes serve apart from the delightfulness of the activity itself? It will serve to teach the children the pronunciation of English sounds; when they memorise the verses, they remember some chunks of English which they can repeat later in appropriate contexts, and this would increase their familiarity with English, and also give them a sense of confidence about their ability to learn the language. It would also be good for students to be asked to compose their own poems.
There are other criteria to be taken into consideration in the selection of samples of English literature for the English curriculum.
Since our real focus is teaching English as a second language, and not teaching English literature for its own sake, the specimens chosen should necessarily exemplify contemporary English, English from around the world as well as what we are familiar with in Sri Lanka. English literature is being produced in many countries and cultures, and there is an inexhaustible literary commonwealth for curriculum makers to draw on. So there probably is no vacancy for Chaucer or Shakespeare in an English language course book except in a modernised version. Selections may be from any number of English using countries around the world including our own.
The selections should be appropriate for the age, the interests, the proficiency level and the cultural background of the students. The literariness of the texts can be increasingly emphasized as the students’ language proficiency grows. Since unconventional use of language is normal in literature, especially in poetry, sophisticated literary texts are not suitable for beginning language students. These should be introduced at the higher levels where the learners know what the conventional forms are well enough to identify deliberate deviations from the norm that writers use to create special literary effects.
The purpose of including literature in the English curriculum is to exploit the potential it has for generating interesting classroom interaction and discussion in the language. A story, a poem, an essay, or a piece of drama can lead to lively discussion among the students, when it is well handled by a knowledgeable teacher. Usually, there are two kinds of questions that are asked to guide the students: specific and general. To illustrate these, I’ll refer to James Thurber’s (1894-1961) short humorous essay “The Moth and the Star”. If teacher guidance is limited to asking such specific comprehension questions as “Who did the young moth tell about his love of the star?”, “What was her reply?”, “What did she ask him to set his heart on instead?”, or “Was his father happy about the moth’s behaviour?” etc, these will get ready answers from the students, but lead to limited classroom discussion. An exclusive general question like “Whose point of view, in your opinion, is the author supportive of, the young moth’s or his parents’?” should naturally invite a variety of responses, and hence create more discussion, but may be a bit too challenging for the majority of the students to tackle. (Readers may visit my literature blog heli29.wordpress.com for the text of Thurber’s essay) A more sensible approach would be to first ensure the students’ understanding of the facts of the story through specific questioning, and then to enable them grasp what interesting point of view or argument or theme the separate facts build up to.
If, for the sake of asserting our common humanity, we want English to bring the peoples of the world to us, and to take us to them across all kinds of cultural, political, social, and other barriers, reading English literature from around the world and adding our own share to the ever expanding literary commonwealth will prove the surest way to do that. By incorporating good specimens of English literature in the second language textbook materials for developing language facility through maximising communication and interaction among the students in the literary use of the language, we can take our first steps towards that lofty ideal.
(First published in The Island/Friday 12th November, 2010)
Children love to play with language. Toddlers sometimes coin their own non-sense musical phrases and enjoy singing them repeatedly. Older children play games in which singing is an essential accompaniment to physical movements. They like to listen to stories and relate ones which they already know or which they make up. Children display a natural dramatic talent. They enjoy reciting poetry. The love of using their language creatively for the sheer joy of it is natural to humans, and is at the root of the creation of, and the engagement with, literature. This situation can be exploited to promote the learning of English as a second language by including a literary element in the English curriculum from the beginning.
Some educators in the past rejected the use of literary texts as ‘drill materials’ for the development of the four basic language skills on the grounds that in such a situation students would learn neither language nor literature sufficiently well. Therefore they preferred to defer the introduction of literature to a later stage when the students would be expected to have gained enough mastery of the language to respond to literature without difficulty. However, with the communicative language teaching approach steadily gaining currency, and the ‘drill’ aspect of language practice becoming less emphasized, this attitude changed. Today it is normal to incorporate literary pieces in English language textbooks.
Literature provides interesting language practice materials. It affords a chance for the learners to be aware of the creative possibilities of language that enable them to communicate ideas and states of mind beyond the merely routine, utilitarian level. Behind its apparent triviality, literature hides that which makes us human in a profound sense. It has its birth in the human passion for creating beautiful forms by drawing on the resources of language, such as the sound and sense of words, rhythm, rhyme, etc. Words are the raw material that literary artists shape into formal beauty. There is pleasure in creating literature, and in reacting to it. In spite of the pleasure element that literature is ordinarily associated with, it is nevertheless serious business, for it is concerned with intensely felt experience. Through its formal beauty literature helps us to reflect on the deeply sorrowful aspect of our existence (bereavement, betrayal, loss, and endless other eventualities) which all humans share, and just as well, to celebrate the most cherished things in life (love, marriage, birth of a baby, fulfilment of hopes, discovery of beauty, and the rest). In the end, we experience the “serene joy” of coming to terms with the bitter-sweet nature of our existence. Thus literature increases our capacity for making sense of our world, for expressing it, and for sharing it with our fellow humans, which enriches our humanity.
In literature, therefore, language is used for exploring a level of experience that goes beyond the merely physical to encompass our emotional life in which we actually ‘live’, in the sense that we are concerned with such things as the ultimate meaning, the frustrations and the fulfilments, and the agonies and the ecstasies of our existence, and above all with the ultimate joy of living in the face of these contradictions. It is not that these abstract notions about the value of literature should be conveyed to the students verbally; in reality, it would be after many years of familiarity with literature that generalisations such as those come within their powers of comprehension. But children have an instinctive fascination with the mysterious power of language to transport them to a different plane of experience.
Literature usually involves four forms: essay, poetry, fiction, and drama; but now we also include film in this list. Though both drama and film are primarily for watching, the manuscripts of plays and the shooting scripts of films can be read and enjoyed as literature. All these literary forms represent language being used for interpreting the world of experience, and communicating it to others through the engagement of their aesthetic sense (= ability to enjoy things of beauty).
The prevalent communicative language teaching principles would suggest that literature is an easily exploitable resource for language instruction. The great potential of literature as a context for pleasurable as well as useful language practice lies in its intrinsic appeal to youthful creativity, its inclusion of all the four basic language skills and more, and its wide scope for collaborative engagement among the students, in addition to individual interaction with the texts.
My comments here relate to the teaching of English as a second language to Sri Lankan students. Of course, no such thing as teaching the language exclusively through literature is intended. Literature is viewed here as one important way of using language. Language teaching and learning should involve more than literature. The important thing is that when specimens of literature are presented as components of an English teaching course they should be subordinated to the actual purpose of using literature in that situation, which is providing an interesting context for authentic language use. But the value of the texts as literature should not be discounted. Otherwise, there will be no difference between the other forms of texts included in the same course and the literature pieces in their treatment, rendering the latter redundant.
However, it is obvious that we cannot initiate our students to all the intricacies of the literary experience from the word go, although its essence is nascent in the crudest form of their contact with literature. Just as an insistence on perfect grammar, pronunciation, and accent, etc tends to frighten students out of a purposeful attempt to learn English, so a perceptibly rigid concern on the part of teachers to deal with literary texts exclusively as literature will kill the second language learners’ interest in them. What the teachers can exploit, particularly at the beginning level, is literature’s appeal to the children’s native love of using language creatively for the pleasure it generates.
In the language teaching context, therefore, the value of literature lies in its potential for providing a context for authentic linguistic communication in a unique aspect of language use. Creative literature uses language for exploring the world of imagination, thought, and values, as distinct from using it to deal with merely factual and utilitarian information. The usual English language textbooks contain a few examples of literature such as simple poems, short stories, extracts from longer fiction, or drama, and essays among a majority of non-literary texts. The way that student interaction with non-literary texts is stage-managed (that is, the way non-literary texts are taught, in traditional terms) is not suitable for stimulating interaction with literary texts.
The sort of literature presented to students for engagement and enjoyment should be graded according to their age and their level of attainment in English language proficiency. Thus at the primary level, singing nursery rhymes would be a good introduction to the literary experience through the delightful music of the words, and the visual images that the rhymes conjure. Children may be given the opportunity to draw pictures to illustrate their songs as an additional activity.
At the same time, the amount of contribution that they make towards the real purpose of the lesson – linguistic development – should be the determinant criterion in the selection and assignment of learning tasks. For example, what useful purpose will learning and singing nursery rhymes serve apart from the delightfulness of the activity itself? It will serve to teach the children the pronunciation of English sounds; when they memorise the verses, they remember some chunks of English which they can repeat later in appropriate contexts, and this would increase their familiarity with English, and also give them a sense of confidence about their ability to learn the language. It would also be good for students to be asked to compose their own poems.
There are other criteria to be taken into consideration in the selection of samples of English literature for the English curriculum.
Since our real focus is teaching English as a second language, and not teaching English literature for its own sake, the specimens chosen should necessarily exemplify contemporary English, English from around the world as well as what we are familiar with in Sri Lanka. English literature is being produced in many countries and cultures, and there is an inexhaustible literary commonwealth for curriculum makers to draw on. So there probably is no vacancy for Chaucer or Shakespeare in an English language course book except in a modernised version. Selections may be from any number of English using countries around the world including our own.
The selections should be appropriate for the age, the interests, the proficiency level and the cultural background of the students. The literariness of the texts can be increasingly emphasized as the students’ language proficiency grows. Since unconventional use of language is normal in literature, especially in poetry, sophisticated literary texts are not suitable for beginning language students. These should be introduced at the higher levels where the learners know what the conventional forms are well enough to identify deliberate deviations from the norm that writers use to create special literary effects.
The purpose of including literature in the English curriculum is to exploit the potential it has for generating interesting classroom interaction and discussion in the language. A story, a poem, an essay, or a piece of drama can lead to lively discussion among the students, when it is well handled by a knowledgeable teacher. Usually, there are two kinds of questions that are asked to guide the students: specific and general. To illustrate these, I’ll refer to James Thurber’s (1894-1961) short humorous essay “The Moth and the Star”. If teacher guidance is limited to asking such specific comprehension questions as “Who did the young moth tell about his love of the star?”, “What was her reply?”, “What did she ask him to set his heart on instead?”, or “Was his father happy about the moth’s behaviour?” etc, these will get ready answers from the students, but lead to limited classroom discussion. An exclusive general question like “Whose point of view, in your opinion, is the author supportive of, the young moth’s or his parents’?” should naturally invite a variety of responses, and hence create more discussion, but may be a bit too challenging for the majority of the students to tackle. (Readers may visit my literature blog heli29.wordpress.com for the text of Thurber’s essay) A more sensible approach would be to first ensure the students’ understanding of the facts of the story through specific questioning, and then to enable them grasp what interesting point of view or argument or theme the separate facts build up to.
If, for the sake of asserting our common humanity, we want English to bring the peoples of the world to us, and to take us to them across all kinds of cultural, political, social, and other barriers, reading English literature from around the world and adding our own share to the ever expanding literary commonwealth will prove the surest way to do that. By incorporating good specimens of English literature in the second language textbook materials for developing language facility through maximising communication and interaction among the students in the literary use of the language, we can take our first steps towards that lofty ideal.
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