(Previously published in the MIDWEEK REVIEW of The Island on Wednesday 11th March 2009)
As for English, which we recognise to be another important tool of rural empowerment, its penetration across the country and especially into the rural hinterland has been held back by constraints of a very different nature. English was and still continues to be perceived and delivered as a gateway to elite status and an emblem of class and privilege. The curriculum and teaching methods followed in our country which places importance not on its use for communication but on its rules of grammar, and make a fetish of dictum, perfect grammar and pronunciation, have only served to maintain it as the exclusive preserve of a selfish privileged class and a tool of social repression.
(From the speech delivered by President Mahinda Rajapakse at the launch of 2009 as the Year of English and IT at the Presidential Secretariat on February 13, 2009)
The observation contained in the above passage and the context in which it was made should engage the attention of all those who are interested in the teaching of English in this country, particularly, parents, teachers, and educational authorities among them. That a privileged but egoistic elite have always been and still are trying to impede the acquisition by the less fortunately circumstanced sections of the society of a knowledge of English is a popular, oft-repeated charge among certain English language teaching professionals. This class are said to jealously guard English as their exclusive possession, because it is the main source of their power, prestige, privilege, and position; they resent any inroads made by the lower classes into their domain by gaining a knowledge of English. At the same time, the very declaration of a year dedicated for English and Information Technology is a measure of the importance attached by the state to the teaching of the two subjects, which, in our educational context, are obviously correlated; not only does this context underscore the seriousness with which English language teaching is treated by the present administration, but also hints at the sociolinguistic dimension of that activity.
The purpose of this article is primarily not to critique the view expressed in the speech referred to, but to make some cautionary comments on it lest it should be erroneously interpreted to suggest that certain vitally important elements of the English language can be ignored in teaching it. Such an eventuality would be to the detriment of the students who need and want to learn English.
The teaching of English in this country is thought by those who subscribe to the above view to be dominated by curricula and methodologies that cater to a certain rarefied ‘poshness’ in terms of ‘perfect’ grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary; this alleged conspiratorial insistence on ‘perfection’ in the areas of language mentioned is supposed to have put English beyond the reach of ordinary people.
(I must make some clarification at this point. My choice of a passage from a speech given by the President as the epigraph to this article is solely based on the fact that I see it as the latest articulation of a prevalent view in the field of teaching English in our country about which I have my personal reservations. It is not intended to detract in the least from the well deserved public approbation of the President’s deep commitment to the success of the teaching of English. His dedication to this cause is unquestionable as evidenced in the very pragmatic way in which he is trying to deal with the problem by being instrumental in inaugurating a Year of English and IT, and by inspiring a job-oriented ‘English as a life skill’ project with Indian help before that .)
IF we have substantial evidence to believe that there really is at present a ‘high class’ conspiracy to sabotage the English teaching programme by making an unconscionable demand for linguistic ‘perfection’, then I too would unhesitatingly condemn such a reactionary stand for two main reasons: 1) to try to monopolize an invaluable and indispensable resource like a good knowledge of the English language to the disadvantage of a vast majority of the population is a violation of democracy as well as social justice, and 2) as commonly known, there is no universally accepted or acceptable ‘perfect’ form of English, or of any other language for that matter, in terms of grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, etc.
What I am concerned with in this essay, as I have already said in different words, is the danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater! This is because any attack on an alleged unreasonable demand for ‘perfect’ grammar, pronunciation, and dictum could easily degenerate into a facile advocacy of an ‘anything goes’ attitude among teaching circles towards those vital aspects of language.
More meaningful and more effective measures than just denouncing what is seen as obsessive attention to the necessity of ‘perfect’ grammar, pronunciation, etc. have been implemented over the past sixty-five years in order to restrict or overthrow altogether the undue influence of the ‘elite’ class: the introduction of free education (1944), the change of the medium of instruction (1945), the dethronement of English and the concurrent restoration of the national languages to official status in the post-1956 years, and the take-over of private schools (1961) figure prominently among these. Even at present such changes are taking place. (When democracy, common decency, and commitment to an egalitarian society are fostered, class distinctions will vanish.) It is a fact, however, that the ‘elite’ still remains dominant, though their dominance is not so absolute as it used to be in the past. Whether that dominance is today affecting the national task of teaching English is, however, doubtful.
What, after all, is this ‘elite’ variety of English that should be rejected in favour of a ‘dehegemonized’ English that is claimed to be more accessible, and more ‘learner-friendly’ to our students? The latter remains to be defined, too. Even if such questions could probably be dealt with satisfactorily, their relevance to the practical business of teaching English is, I think, minimal, because the fact is that, most fundamentally, English remains one language all over the world in spite of its hundreds of identifiable varieties. At the very basic level, what we should teach is this one English language in our own way, that is, the way all of us Sri Lankans who know English have learned it.
Probably we didn’t learn it the way we were taught; or maybe we learned it both because of the way we were taught or in spite of it. I think that we acquired English by using it to ‘communicate’ although we were not aware of this at the time, and also, in parallel with that, by making a conscious effort, as second language learners, to understand how the vital elements of the language such as its phonology, grammar, and lexis, and numerous other linguistic and nonlinguistic factors that help generate that communication.
(Here I am using the word ‘communicate’ very broadly to include all the functions and purposes for which we use language.)
The whole of the past century saw an endless search for the perfect method of teaching languages, but no such method could be devised. However, in the course of this long search for better and better ways of language teaching various ‘approaches and methods’ have been developed. These are generally based on their authors’ assumptions and beliefs about the nature of human language, the psychology of language learning, and their (i.e. the authors’) determination of a set of principles derived from these for the purpose of practical teaching, as Richards and Rodgers explain in their classic ‘Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching’ (2001, 2nd ed.) The same writers define an approach as ‘a set of beliefs and principles that can be used as the basis for teaching a language’. Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is such an approach. Their definition of a method is ‘…a specific instructional design or system based on a particular theory of language and of language learning… (with) …detailed specifications of content, roles of teachers and learners, and teaching procedures and techniques.’ Audiolingualism and Counselling-Learning are two examples of methods. The obvious difference between an approach and a method is that the latter specifies content, goals and objectives, and provides clear guidelines for the teachers, making things comparatively easy for them, whereas the former is more general, and more flexible, lending itself to varying interpretations relying on the teachers’ own knowledge, experience and ingenuity. Hence approaches usually last longer than methods. According to Richards and Rodgers CLT has been accepted as the ‘most plausible basis for language teaching’ since the 1980’s. CLT, I think, is the approach adopted in our state English language teaching programme.
Strangely, the critical observation in the epigraph to this essay faults the ‘curriculum and teaching methods followed in our country’ for giving importance to rules of grammar, perfect pronunciation, etc. instead of emphasizing the use of English for communication. This contains a contradiction, because effective communication is not possible without rules of grammar, pronunciation, and the rest of linguistic, and certain nonlinguistic ingredients.
No language teaching approach or method discounts the importance of providing instruction in the following areas: pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, appropriacy, discourse and language skills. Pronunciation refers to the ability to pronounce words. Native speakers and competent nonnative speakers of English possess this knowledge, which relates to the three areas of speech, viz. sounds, stress, and intonation.. Of these perhaps the last area, intonation, is the most familiar to Sri Lankans who study English as a second language, because the falling and rising pitch of voice within a sentence is a feature found in our local languages. For example, the sentence ‘He’s from China’ may be uttered as a statement of fact with a falling tune that gives a sense of finality, or it may be uttered as a question with a rising tune. Stress is a different matter. Speakers of Sinhalese stress words only if they want to emphasize them. In English stress is an essential feature. We have word stress and sentence stress. Each word or word phrase has one primary stress, e.g.. NEVer, BUS route. English word stress can be even phonemic (i.e. it is used to change the meaning of a word), e.g. perMIT is a verb, but PERmit is a noun This is not found in our language. Therefore it must be taught to our learners of English. However, since among Sri Lankan English speakers themselves failure to produce this sort of stress may not be much of a problem. A question of intelligibility may arise when we converse with outsiders. Some English speech sounds are quite unfamiliar to us; sometimes we can not even hear them, let alone articulate them, unless we deliberately learn them. The Arabic language does not have a phoneme ‘p’, it has only ‘b’. So an Arab student of English can easily confuse ‘p’ for ‘b’, since both sounds have the same place of articulation (being bilabials), the difference between them being that ‘b’ is voiced, and ‘p’ voiceless. Such a learner must expressly be taught this English phoneme ‘p’. So, pronunciation is an element that must be taught to second language learners.
A human baby’s brain is equipped with an innate language learning mechanism, which gets activated when he or she is exposed to the language spoken around. The baby learns intuitively not only the disparate vocal sounds and sound patterns in the form of words and phrases, but also the implicit set of rules for combining distinct speech sounds into words, words into phrases, and phrases into sentences. Thus the child acquires the unique human ability of generating an infinite number of sentences by using the finite set of speech sounds available in his or her mother tongue, and the similarly finite number of rules for arranging them in structural patterns such as words, phrases, and clauses. The grammar of a language is made up of this finite set of rules. It is grammar that distinguishes human from animal language.
We learn our mother tongue in the natural way referred to above. Our knowledge of the grammar of our mother tongue that we gain as children is intuitive. (When we talk about teaching grammar, we have in mind the formal linguist’s grammar that is recorded in books, which of course derives from the grammar that the native speakers naturally acquire when immersed in their specific linguistic backgrounds.
Second language learning takes place in a different environment. The term ‘natural’ was applied to approaches or methods that conformed to the naturalistic principles underlying mother tongue acquisition in young children. The Direct Method which emerged at the beginning of the last century was also called The Natural Method. Many traditional approaches including CLT advocate using the target language in communicative situations to the exclusion of the learners’ mother tongue for effective learning to take place.
Communicative use of the target language should go hand in hand with a conscious effort on the part of the learners to learn and internalize the grammatical features of the language. Both inductive (using specific observed facts to arrive at general rules to explain them), and deductive (to deduce specific instances from a general rule) are used for grammar instruction. However, the most efficient, most effective way to help the learner towards learning the grammar of the target language is inducing language awareness in them or Consciousness Raising (CR). The Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (1992) defines Consciousness Raising thus:
An approach to the teaching of grammar in which instruction in grammar (through drills, grammar explanation and other form-focused activities) is viewed as a way of raising the learners’ awareness of the grammatical features of the language. This is thought to indirectly facilitate second language acquisition. A consciousness raising approach is contrasted with traditional approaches to the teaching of grammar, in which the goal is to instill correct grammatical patterns and habits directly.
Thus the CR approach is opposed to ‘correct grammatical patterns and habits’ being instilled directly. Mechanical instilling of ‘perfect’ grammar, and grammatical habits is not what we should advocate, but causing the learning of essential grammar.
‘Perfect’ forms of grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary are non-existent; but the teaching of those vital elements of English must be given its due prominence in the second language instructional system including the methodologies adopted, materials prepared, and the actual day-to-day teaching done in the classrooms.
Rohana R. Wasala
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