Nationalism and Communalism

First published in The Island of 20th Wednesday, February 2008



That ‘rabid Sinhala Buddhist nationalism’ is to blame for the ongoing national crisis in our country is treated as an incontrovertible truth by many members of the ‘liberal’ intelligentsia, both local and foreign, who offer comments on the problem. Some even appear to use it as an excuse for condoning LTTE terrorism. In a sense, such views are insignificant because they condemn something that is not there. But they also can do some harm: they mislead the powerful ‘international community’ whose cooperation is indispensable for the resolution of the conflict sooner or later.



Since these analysts and commentators, including the native ones among them, have no intimate knowledge of or familiarity with the ordinary Sinhalese Buddhist masses (due to the communication gap that exists between them), they tend to satisfy themselves with popular generalizations, which do not usually correspond to the reality. But if they had an opportunity to survey the opinions of the ordinary Sinhalese Buddhists – the majority of them are rural villagers – about the current crisis they would have been simply amazed by the latter’s anti-communalism, sense of tolerance, fair play and accommodation towards their minority compatriots, an enlightened attitude shared by the average members of those minority communities.



The ordinary Sinhalese do not even think about an exclusive ownership of the island or of a part of it. What they might say, if they were queried, is that from time immemorial Sri Lanka has been known as their native land, and that they have no other country to call their own; they also believe that they must share it with all the minorities who live with them, and that these minorities must enjoy the same rights and privileges as themselves, not less , not more. There are no traditional homelands in this country. The whole island is the traditional homeland of all the communities, whether majorities or minorities.



It is a gross misrepresentation of the so-called ethnic crisis in Sri Lanka to assert that it is a straight fight between the southern Sinhalese and the northern Tamils. Just as the ordinary Sinhalese do not claim the sole proprietorship of the island or a part of it the ordinary Tamils do not subscribe to the Tamil extremists’ claim that the north and the east constitute their exclusive homeland. In 1995 Tamils formed 9% of the Sri Lankan population, and the Sinhalese 83%. The Tamils live scattered among the other communities all over the island, with a large enough concentration of their population in the north and the east to form majorities in those provinces. In fact, more Tamils live in the south among the Sinhalese than in the north and east. Therefore the term ‘ethnic conflict’ is actually a misnomer. The conflict is between the Sri Lankan state and a group of rebel extremists who demand one-third of the land mass and two-thirds of the coastline for 9% of the population on an ethnic basis.



Some commentators try to reduce the national crisis to an internecine rivalry between those who came to the island first and others who did so later. This is a fallacy, too. Of the two communities Sinhalese and Tamils, whether they came to the island together or at different times, only the Sinhalese can be said to have developed a distinctive civilization in this island., the evidence for which is found in abundance.



There is an attempt in some quarters to explain away Sinhalese nationhood by asserting that the Sinhalese are a hybrid people, and that they have no claim to a distinctive racial identity. The truth is that no race on earth can satisfy the infamous Hitlerite insistence on the ‘purity’ of race, which was associated with the heinous crime of genocide inflicted on the Jews in the 1930’s and 40’s in Europe!

The racial stock of any ethnic community is, more often than not, a composite one with the probable exception of isolated jungle tribes such as the Veddahs of our country or the Pygmy tribe known as the Mbuti of the Democratic Republic of Congo. We don’t normally carry out DNA tests on individuals before we assign them to a particular race or ethnic group! In general acceptance a person’s ethnicity is determined in terms of physical characteristics such as colour of skin, shape of head, facial features and bodily stature, and cultural traits such as language, customs, religious beliefs and traditional modes of behaviour peculiar to a group of people that set them apart from other similar groups. Probably the language spoken by a race is its most vital characteristic. However, the language that is traditionally associated with a racial group also undergoes constant change, but it doesn’t lose its historical identity. The same applies to a race. All races share this quality of illusory constancy in flux much as a river that is given an unchanging identity over millennia perhaps in spite of the fact that its physical composition changes every fraction of a second.



The division of human societies in terms of shared racial and cultural characteristics is essential for the physical survival and overall advancement of the whole human race. We still talk about the awesome achievements of the ancient Chinese, Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, and Romans, etc. They accomplished those astonishing feats of human endeavour as races through the refinement of their racially inherited knowledge and skills. The assertion of one’s racial identity and its meaningful expression for the common good of all humanity is a good thing. These divisions need not be fences that keep one group of people from another. Going beyond racial boundaries to reach out to the rest of the humanity is better, but the ‘Ascent of Man’ (though the very phrase smacks of gender-bias) is still well short of the level of sophistication which would make such ideal cosmopolitanism possible. Until humanity attains to that stage of development we must be content to live with our racial divisions. Yet we need not, nay must not, be so retrogressive as to condemn ourselves to racialism ( the fanatical belief in the superiority of one’s own race) that leads to ruinous hate and rivalry among people.



Racialism is not a common characteristic of the Sinhalese people contrary to what certain critics would have us believe. The Sinhalese are self-effacing even in their everyday appearance. Their everyday dress has no special features that reveal their race or religion. (The so-called ‘national dress’ – a long white ‘banian’ for the upper body and a ‘verti’ for the lower part - adopted and popularized by Mr SWRD Bandaranaike in 1956, later adopted particularly by politicians of both the main parties, and also by other community leaders as a means of identifying themselves with the ‘common man’, is today called, among ordinary people, the ‘kapati suit’ meaning the ‘garb of a cheat’!). What is more, they do not put any marks on their bodies to distinguish themselves from others. Their names do not always reveal their ethnicity either.







Even some apparently impartial commentators argue that the LTTE terrorism that has ravaged our country over the past quarter of a century was provoked by the essentially 20th century phenomenon of ‘rabid Sinhala Buddhist nationalism’. Nothing can be further from the truth. The division between the Sinhalese majority and the minorities was created and exploited by the British colonial rulers in pursuit of their own ends. And the Sinhala Buddhist nationalism which inspired and spearheaded the freedom struggle was unjustifiably identified with raw communalism and made a bugbear of by some minority politicians. The members of the majority race were required to black out their true history as it potentially hurt communal feelings of others. I learned from one of my teachers that the popular children’s novel (1939) by the Englishman Denis Clark entitled ‘Golden Island’ was banned in schools in the 40’s because it is woven round the story of the warrior king Dutu Gemunu (who ruled Lanka from 161 to 137 BCE). In the recent past, the teaching of history as a school subject was stopped for the same reason.



The Sinhala Buddhist consciousness is as old as the history of the island. In ancient times our country was known to the outside world as the Sinhaladvipa, (‘the country of the Sinhalese’ from which Seylan or Ceylon derives), Taprobane (from ‘Tambapanni/Tamraparni’), or Serendip (Serendib as Arabs called it from ‘Swarnadipa’ ‘the Golden Island’). The map of the island drawn by Ptolemy the Greek astronomer and geographer in the second century CE marks Anuradagama (later Anuradhapura) as the central city. It had been founded, according to one tradition, by a companion of Prince Vijaya, the legendary founder of the Sinhalese race. This national consciousness survived many vicissitudes of their fortunes amidst internal and external threats until the arrival of the Portuguese in 1505. Our country suffered foreign domination in some parts or in the totality of its territory for the next 450 years, but the nationalist spirit didn’t die. For the Sinhalese, independence from the British in 1948 meant a restoration of their long lost national sovereignty over the country. This independence, they thought, was however not only for them; it was also for the minorities who were their partners in nation building. But the minority groups (or more correctly certain members of the elite who claimed to represent them, although they , like their counterparts in the majority race, were alienated from their own people) were not too ready to appreciate or willing to accommodate these sentiments, calling into question the trustworthiness of Sinhalese politicians in the matter of sharing political power equitably after independence from the British.



Although the dominant group of pioneer national leaders who came from all communities did not put a premium on internecine racial divisions, hoping to forge one multiethnic ‘Ceylonese national identity’ in the earlier stages of the independence movement, ethnic tensions started coming to the fore when a trend towards the achievement of self-rule emerged in the first half of the 20th century. This was mainly due (not unlike the situation today) to the wrong interpretation of Sinhalese Buddhist political ideals which were not properly articulated or understood by the local politicians who came almost exclusively from the privileged westernized elite. Even those among them who were sympathetic to Sinhalese nationalist sentiments believed that these would divide the ‘Ceylonese’, and hence chose to ignore them while focusing on what they considered ‘ more urgent matters’.



To go back a little in history, after the amalagamation of the Kandyan kingdom with the rest of the island in 1815 the British started consolidating their rule. They introduced occasional reforms, which were primarily meant to establish an efficient trouble-free imperial administration, and only secondarily to promote the welfare of the subjects. The first Legislative Council (1833) consisted of six unofficial members nominated by the Governor – one member to represent the Sinhalese, one for the Tamils, and four for Europeans. This lasted for the next seventy-five years, until in 1909 in response to revived agitation for constitutional reforms, the number of the unofficial members was raised to eight – three for Europeans, two for Sinhalese, one for Tamils, one for Burghers, and one for the Muslims (Think of the ‘improved’ communal balance in the Legislative Council, ignoring the fact of its powerlessness to influence government policy in actual practice: three for European interests, three for minorities, and only two for the Sinhalese!)



Although the membership of the Legislative Council allowed little participation in actually determining or influencing government policy, the deliberate imbalance in racial representation that it embodied showed the more favoured position of the minorities as opposed to the majority Sinhalese. The imperialists preyed on the country, and left the scavenging job to others, including the comprador class (the elite formed of members from all the communities).



Any move towards redressing this anomaly was met with apprehension by the minorities. However, as a result of joint demands made by the Ceylon National Association based in Colombo and the Jaffna Association, the Manning Reforms of the early 1920’s introduced a form of territorial (instead of communal) representation, which enlarged the Legislative Council giving the Sinhalese a decisive edge over the minorities in the legislature.



The fears and suspicions of the minorities aggravated when the Ceylon National Congress of Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam began pressing for self government, because the minorities concluded that if the demand for self-government was granted, then an excessively powerful Sinhalese majority would be ensconced in a position of perpetual domination over them. Attempts to allay these fears, such as the proposal to allocate a special seat for Tamils of the Western Province (where there was a concentration of them engaged in official and business activity), actually worsened the disagreements. Eventually, Tamils under the Jaffna Association left the Ceylon National Congress despite the concerted efforts of leaders like D.S. Senanayake, A. Mahadea and F.Molamure to stop their withdrawal.



When the Donoughmore Commissioners who arrived in the island in the late 1920’s offered universal suffrage based on territorial representation, Tamils opposed it arguing that this would give the Sinhalese majority an advantage over the minorities. But the Commissioners went ahead with their reforms. The Legislative Council was replaced with a State Council. The first State Council elections under the Donoughmore Constitution were held in June 1931. The Jaffna Tamils in general boycotted the polls, but later gave up the boycott, and got elected to the State Council in fresh elections in 1934. The price that they had to pay for the initial boycott was that they forfeited their chance of joining the Board of Ministers. The State Council experience provided Mr D.S. Senanayake with an opportunity to show his abilities as an efficient manager. He was a committed nationalist opposed to colonialism, communism, and communalism, and firmly believed in, and worked with dedication for, the ideal of a multiethnic united Ceylonese nation.



But some Tamil politicians thought that the Sinhalese majority would not allow the special privileges they had enjoyed under the British to continue, and wanted to somehow check what they considered the emerging Sinhalese majoritarian ascendancy. Mr G.G.Ponnambalam came out with his outrageous 50-50 proposition in the early 1940’s when the Soulbury Constitution for an independent Ceylon was being mooted : that is, fifty seats in the legislature for the majority, and fifty for the minorities, and also the ministerial positions to be allocated on the same basis! Simply, this would have violated the very basic democratic principle of equality, because, the minorities being only about 20% , and the majority Sinhalese 80%, it would mean that one member of a minority was equivalent to four Sinhalese! Yet the Sinhalese are still condemned as communalists.



Mr D.S. Senanayake did not approve of Mr S.W.R.D.Bandaranaike’s Sinhala Maha Sabha of 1937 for obvious reasons, though it could be seen as a parallel development to the communal line of the minorities that gradually became marked in the decades preceding independence.



Had the minority leaders, especially the Tamils, and certain less wise Sinhalese politicians acted in the broadminded, democratic, statesmanlike , non-racialist way that Mr D.S. Senanayake did in responding to the progressive reforms towards self-rule gradually exacted from the British colonial administration over a period of more than one hundred years from 1833 to 1948, an achievement made by the sincere efforts of a galaxy of patriotic freedom fighters from all communities, seeds of division between the majority and the minorities would not have been sown, and the country would not have been condemned to taste the bitter poisonous fruits of communal politics that we are reaping today.







Rohana R. Wasala

The Uniqueness of Human Language

Previously published in the Midweek Review, The Island of Wednesday, 8^th April 2009

Although living in social groups is not unique to humans, among the myriad forms of animal life on earth only the human species can be said to have undergone the evolutionary process known as civilization. The term civilization refers to the general social development of the human race over the millennia with steadily growing levels of knowledge, skills, mastery of natural forces through science and technology, commerce, government, art, religion, etc. In the final analysis, this never-ending activity is based on the creation, dissemination, refinement, preservation, and transmission down the ages, of ideas. But for language none of these would have been achieved by the humankind. And language itself is a concomitant of the exceptionally advanced brain power of the humans.

What language (especially human language) itself is strikes me as a daunting thing to form an idea of, and I, with my essentially limited knowledge, will not presume to attempt a definition of it in this essay or most likely anywhere else. However, there is hardly any difficulty in identifying human language when we come across an example of it. It is a thing we cannot afford to ignore; it is as common and as precious (nevertheless) in the human intellectual domain as the air we breathe in our physical environment. I will be content here to point to certain characteristics of human language in support of the thesis of my essay – the species-specificity of human language (i.e. language being a distinguishing characteristic of the human species).

Extensive research done over the past eighty years or so into the capacity of animals to learn human language seems to have drawn a blank except for the demonstration of some intelligent apes’ potential to deal with the “barest rudiments of language”. (Noam Chomsky denied even this rudimentary linguistic capacity for animals.)

It was in the 1930’s that two scientists, Luella and Winthrop Kellog, raised an infant chimpanzee called Gua together with their baby son. It was reported that Gua could understand about a hundred words, but did not articulate any of them. Another chimpanzee, Viki, in the 1940’s, brought up under similar conditions by another scientist couple (Catherine and Keith Hayes), after five years of training, was eventually able to produce rather poorly articulated versions of ‘mama’, ‘papa’, and ‘cup’. This, actually, is a noteworthy achievement in view of the fact that non-human primates’ vocal tracts are not physically structured for producing human speech sounds.

In 1966 Beatrix and Allen Gardner, recognizing that chimpanzees are not physically equipped for producing human speech, started teaching a chimpanzee which they named Washoe a version of American Sign Language (ASL). ASL has all the distinctive features of human language. Three and a half years of training gave Washoe the ability to use signs for more than a hundred words including ‘airplane’, ‘baby’, ‘window’ and you’. She was even able to combine some of these to produce sentences of the kind ‘more fruit’, ‘open fruit drink’, which demonstrated some inchoate linguistic productivity. Some of these forms appeared to be her own inventions, eg., ‘water bird’ for ‘swan’. It was seen that she could understand many more signs than she could produce. Washoe was said to be capable of having rudimentary conversations mainly of the question-answer type.

About the same time, Ann and David Premack experimented with a chimpanzee called Sarah. She was taught to manipulate a set of shapes for communicating with humans. The shapes represented words. These could be arranged into ‘sentences’. Sarah was trained to link these shapes to objects or actions. After learning to use a large number of these plastic shapes, she was able to select a blue triangle to get an apple. There is no natural connection between a blue plastic triangle and an apple. Therefore this symbol was arbitrary. Sarah was able to make such sentences as ‘Mary give chocolate Sarah’.

In 1973, Duane and Sue Rumbaugh subjected three chimpanzees (Lana, Sherman, and Austin) to a training technique with a similar artificial language, which they called Yerkish. A set of symbols on a large keyboard linked to a computer was available for Lana and others to manipulate. For example, they had to press four symbols in the correct order to produce the message ‘Please machine give water’.

However, many greeted these claims with skepticism. They argued that Lana and the other chimpanzees used the word ‘please’ without understanding its meaning. The chimpanzees did not know that they could produce a meaningful utterance by omitting ‘please’. The sign for ‘please’ was merely the equivalent of a button on a vending machine; the ability to use it did not need any language knowledge.

It was the psychologist Herbert Terrace who produced the most convincing arguments against claims of chimpanzees’ linguistic achievements. He used a chimpanzee called Nim Chimpsky (a deliberate play on the name of Noam Chomsky, who had asserted that language is an innate ability unique to the human species). This experiment began in 1973.

Nim was taught American Sign Language under controlled conditions. Nim’s classroom activities were carefully recorded and videotaped. He, like Washoe before him, seemed to be developing a linguistic ability much like human children. However, close inspection of the videotapes showed that this impression was wrong: Nim was not actually capable of synthesizing more complex structures out of simpler ones in the way that human children do besides, Nim responded to his teachers’ signing, but rarely initiated any signing by himself. This observation led Terrace to reinvestigate the video records of Washoe’s use of sign language. He argued that both Nim and Washoe only appeared to use signs as language. Terrace concluded that these chimpanzees were clever animals which produced a certain kind of behaviour (signing) in order to be rewarded; their signing was not linguistic at all.

It may appear that animal communication and human communication have certain features in common. Both animals and humans use ‘signs’, either visual or vocal to communicate. For example, bees are known to pass on information about available sources of nectar to their colleagues through a kind of dance, while we choose to convey some information solely through gestures in certain situations without using language at all. However, since language is basically dependent on the manipulation of vocal symbols, it would be relevant here to consider how linguistically close animal communication could be to human communication in terms of ‘articulated’ sounds.

One feature common for both animals and humans is the use of the vocal- auditory channel. Human language is typically generated through the vocal organs and perceived through the ears , but it can also be transmitted without sound, through writing or visual signs. Many other species (eg. monkeys, elephants, dolphins, birds)use the vocal-auditory channel. Another common element is reciprocity (i.e. the sender of a signal can also be the receiver of a similar signal). A third shared feature is specialization, which means that linguistic signals do not serve any other purpose such as breathing. A fourth is that for both humans and animals vocal signals are non-directional (linguistic signals can be picked up by any individual within hearing range). Finally, rapid fade characterizes vocal signals, whether animal or human, which means that these disappear as soon as they are produced. Thus, in certain merely ‘mechanical’ ways animal vocal communication and human language show some close resemblance.

On the other hand, there are infinitely more significant features which are almost entirely unique to human language, while being only vestigially present in animal communication. These characteristics are connected with man’s uniquely advanced ability to think, which is impossible without language.

A human can talk not only about what is present to his or her senses at the time of speaking, but also about things which are yet to happen, or happened in the past, or are merely imagined. This property of human language is known as displacement. Displacement is generally absent in animal communication. Bees are able to indicate sources of food to other worker bees by means of a dance. This may suggest that bee communication has the quality of displacement, but the important thing is that this is extremely limited. Bees, for example, cannot refer to ‘the garden we visited yesterday’.

The second distinctive quality of human language is arbitrariness. That is, there is no natural connection between a linguistic form and its meaning. The English word ‘dog’ has no intrinsic relationship with the animal it denotes. The onomatopoeic theory of language origin may seem to contradict this: words such as boom, clash, crash, cuckoo, and slurp suggest by their sound the objects or activities they name. The truth is that such onomatopoeic words are actually not numerous enough to account for the infinitely vast and complex phenomenon of language.

In the case of animal communication there is a clear relationship between one sound and its intended message. Squirrels, for instance, have one call for mating, one for sharing food, one for warning of danger, etc., (and it is my personal experience that they have a special call to signal the presence of a snake in the vicinity). Arbitrariness, therefore, is not present in animal communication; but it is a distinctive quality of human speech.

The next characteristic feature of all human languages is that new sentences are made all the time. Children who are learning a language make sentences which they have never heard before; adults also do the same in dealing with novel ideas and new situations. This property of productivity is not shared by non-human signifying systems. Vervet monkeys are said to have thirty-six vocal calls, and cicadas only four. These sets of signals are fixed in range. Animals do not produce new signals or combinations of signals for new experiences or events. They have fixed reference (that is, each signal is specific to a particular object or occasion).

Cultural transmission is the way human language is passed on from one generation to the next. Although babies possess an innate capacity for language, they do not genetically inherit their parents’ language. What they acquire is the language that they are exposed to. On the other hand, a dog, for instance, need not necessarily listen to its parents’ barking before it can do the same. The signals used for animal communication are not usually culturally transmitted. In their case, transmission is biological.. Animals do not learn their communication systems; they acquire them instinctively.

Human linguistic sounds are discrete, i.e. they are meaningfully distinct. For example, the sounds represented by the letters f and v in English are not very different from each other, but the use of one rather than the other in a word is meaningful, eg. fine/vine, fat/vat. The calls of animals cannot be analysed into such discrete units that can recur in other combinations.

Yet another distinguishing property of human language is its duality, which means that it is organized at two levels simultaneously. At one level we can produce the individual sounds such as a, p, and t. They have no specific meaning. We can also produce these sounds in a particular combination (eg. apt, tap, pat), which is meaningful. This means that at one level of articulation we have distinct sounds, and at the other distinct meanings. This feature, known as duality or double articulation, makes it possible for us to produce a very large number of sound combinations using a limited set of distinct sounds. A dog’s ‘woof’ cannot be shown to be the combination of three distinct sounds w, oo, and f; neither can a dog be said to put these sounds in different patterns to convey different meanings. Animal communication, therefore, does not demonstrate duality.

The most distinctive feature of human language is that it is rule-governed (structured). When children learn a language, they invariably learn its grammar. The grammar of a language comprises its phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic rules, along with its vocabulary. The remarkable thing is that no one teaches them these; they just ‘pick them up’. For example, a child who is acquiring English as his or her mother tongue will learn the process of sentence construction, notions of tenses, forming questions, transformations, nominalizations and other complex manoeuvres without overt teaching. This crucial grammar-based nature of human language is not even minimally present in animal communication. No animal signifying system can achieve the infinite productivity and complexity of human language.

The human being is the most ‘dominant’ creature on earth and the only ‘civilized’ one. Among animals, the humans govern the earth and have already attained enough scientific knowledge and technological expertise to make their presence felt even beyond the solar system if there are any other similarly advanced intelligent beings out there in our celestial neighbourhood! All this has been possible thanks to the humans’ unique intellectual capacity, which goes hand in hand with language.

Advanced rational thinking is probably the most characteristic activity that sets the humans apart from other animals, though there are many instances of animal behaviour that demonstrate something like rational thought (My dog Ralph, a Doberman pinscher, leaves me in no about this). Human thinking is done through language, and would be impossible without it. Language is the means by which human beings assimilate existing knowledge, create new knowledge, disseminate it to their fellow humans, preserve it , and pass it on to posterity. Human beings experience their world, and live their lives through language to an extent inconceivable in the case of animals. True, animals have their own communication systems, but these are narrowly geared to their biological need of survival.

The universal ability that human babies are equipped with to acquire any particular language gradually in a relatively short period of time without being subjected to a course of instruction, but through mere exposure to it, and the extremely limited results of animal language research show that human language is a biologically determined innate faculty specific to the human species. So, neither the many instances of animal communication that we commonly observe nor the scientists’ attempts to train animals to speak or use language like human beings can be said to provide enough evidence for us to challenge the claim that language is a unique human possession.

Rohana R. Wasala

The Problem of Writing Textbooks for ELT

Previously published in The Island on Wednesday 4, June 2008

I write the following in the national interest as a parent and an educationist with a view to drawing the attention of those concerned to a vital issue in the relevant field. No criticism of individuals or a particular institution is intended. Contrary opinions are welcome.

Instructional materials play a vital role in any language teaching system. They contribute to the organizational aspect of a method or approach along with five other elements in terms of the model of methodological analysis elaborated by Richards and Rodgers in their book Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching (2001. 2^nd ed.Cambridge University Press): the general and specific objectives of the particular method or approach, a syllabus model, types of learning and teaching activities, learner roles, and teacher roles.

The role of instructional materials is determined by the primary goal envisaged for them by the designers of the relevant language teaching programme (e.g. to present content, that is, the language items to be taught; practice content; to facilitate interactive communication between learners; or to enable learners to practice content unaided by the teacher, and so on). In fact, a particular design for an instructional system allocates a set of roles to materials. Basically they are meant to support the syllabus, the teacher, and the learners. The syllabus specifies the content choice and organization, that is, selection of language items, and their sequencing and gradation respectively. The instructional materials elaborate these further.

In a functional communicative language teaching context instructional materials are chosen on the basis of their efficacy in promoting interactive communication through the target language among the learners, the operative principle being one of ‘using the language to learn it’ (and not the other around).

Among the wide variety of language teaching materials three types may be described as especially important in such a context: text-based materials (i.e. textbooks generally), task-based materials (e.g. problem-solving tasks, role plays, games, etc.), and realia (things from real life such as real objects, newspaper articles, magazines, maps, posters, advertisements, etc.). All three types are important for the success of a formalized, uniform instructional system like the state English language teaching programme. Of these, however, I feel, textbooks are the most important type of materials since they are evidently the mainstay of the school English language teaching project of Sri Lanka’s Department of Education .

It would not be realistic to expect a textbook, however well made it may be, to fulfill all the various needs in any given language classroom. However, though perfection is not probable, nor even possible, in this matter of coursebook preparation, attempts at such a goal will always pay dividends. As far as Sri Lanka is concerned a drive towards the production of good textbooks for teaching English can receive an impetus from the circumstance indicated in the following paragraph..

In his ‘Language Teaching Methodology’ (1991. Prentice Hall International (UK) Ltd. p. 209) David Nunan refers to the burdensome nature of the creation of materials in foreign language teaching contexts (as opposed to second language teaching contexts) due to the non-availability of authentic source and stimulus material. We enjoy the advantage implied here (i.e. that of an abundance of source and stimulus material) because our English teaching programme is essentially a second language teaching one.

I am not here talking about English medium instruction. My focus is on the teaching of English as a second language, which undoubtedly concerns the interests of the largest proportion of the student population of the country as a whole. A good way to ensure democratic egalitarianism and also to meet the demand for fiscal accountability in the country’s education system is obviously to do everything possible to make a success of teaching English as a second language, not to concentrate too much on a return of the English medium. Bilingualism (i.e., proficiency in English, plus Sinhala or Tamil in our case) rather than monolingualism in English or in one of the native languages, should be our national goal. Only such a policy will allow the general student population (comprising mainly the rural poor) to benefit from a knowledge of English, while enjoying their birthright of receiving an education in their own native language.

(A word about the oft-asserted link between proficiency in English and employability: the truth, I think, is that, in the current scheme of things, it is not a matter of English alone; it’s a problem of English plus ‘class’! Many employers would prefer to employ a person from the ‘elite’ with a smattering of English rather than another from a less privileged section of the society with an excellent command of the language. This, of course, is a serious issue that must be dealt with separately.)

Emphasis on English as a second language, instead of English as the medium of education, will serve two very important ends among others: for one thing, it will save the indigenous languages from the threat of extinction in the face of the dominance exercised by English; for another, it will provide a universally available key to the ever expanding storehouse of human knowledge and culture at the present time, obviating the danger of a constricting insularity among the young.

A second language is a language a person acquires in order to serve some communicative purpose after they have learnt their mother tongue or first language. One’s mother tongue need not necessarily be one’s first language; a person born to Sinhala speaking parents, or growing up as a baby in a Sinhala speaking environment will learn Sinhala as their mother tongue, and later continue to use it as their first language, i.e. the language in which they normally function in education, work, general communication, travel, etc.; in this case Sinhala assumes the roles of that person’s mother tongue, and first language, in other words, their mother tongue and first language are identical; one can also adopt another language than one’s mother tongue as one’s first language, as some Sri Lankans whose mother tongue is either Sinhala or Tamil do by choosing to use English to function in the normal spheres of activity. But we use the description second language to refer to English in a situation where it is available to a person as an additional language in which they can operate in.

We have a substantial number of people who have opted to use English as their first language, though their mother tongue is one of the native languages. Yet the vast majority of us who have acquired a knowledge of English use it as a second language, which means that many of us enjoy the privilege of choosing between our own native tongue and English as our first language in specific situations. (This could confuse the reader a little. There won’t be any confusion if we grasp the point that labels such as mother tongue, first language, second language, and many other similar epithets cannot be permanently fixed to any particular language; the badge only refers to the way any language is used in a particular situation; it is like the same man changing his identity as son, brother, husband, father, or grandfather in relation to different members of his family.)

For a relatively small number of Sri Lankan citizens English is their native/mother tongue; for many more it is their first language. However, for the largest number of Sri Lankans who have anything to do with English it is a second language. Therefore the state English language teaching programme must be geared (as it already is) to teaching the language as a second language for it to be relevant to the widest national interest.

The successful running of the second language teaching programme is, as is well known, hampered by the paucity of resources, especially in the suburban and rural schools, which account for over 90% of the 10,000 strong school system. There are dedicated English teachers with a very good knowledge of their subject and an excellent professional record. Unfortunately, the Department of Education doesn’t have enough of them. The majority of the teachers are poorly trained, and possess only a low level of proficiency in English. Audiovisuals (pictures, charts, maps, audio- and video- players, OHP’s, etc) are not uniformly available in the majority of schools. Technological innovations such as computer software and internet facilities are an absolute rarity. This lack of resources, both human and material, precludes the creation of the basic classroom environment that is essential for stimulating communicative language use among the learners of English.

In this state of resource scarcity the most generally available instructional material is the English textbook. The textbooks are required to compensate for the poor quality of teachers and also for the shortage of other resources. The English textbooks are required to perform a teacher education function, in addition to its more central function of promoting language learning among the students through its communicative use. Much, therefore, is naturally expected of the English textbooks that are produced for use in schools. And ensuring that they maintain a high enough level of excellence is of great concern for educationists, and the general public.

If the English textbooks are to serve the expected ends they must meet a number of criteria ( which, incidentally, are applicable to other instructional materials as well). And these criteria are based on the very fundamental assumption that the textbooks will be efficient tools in the hands of teachers and learners only in so far as they carry a high potential of promoting creative interaction between them, and of triggering, in the process, plenty of communicative language use in the English language classroom and outside of it.

First, they must be based on a thorough knowledge of the students for whom they are meant, an empathetic understanding of their social and cultural background, their emotional and educational needs and expectations, a grasp of their attitude to the task of learning English, and an appreciation of their vision of what they could achieve by a mastery of English as a second language. The employment of mostly local textbook writers (and probably others with a similar outlook on the local scene) may be seen as an attempt to fulfill this need.

A good textbook does not neglect the affective side of the teaching-learning process. It, along with other instructional materials, contributes towards the creation of a safe, friendly and cooperative learning environment that is conducive to meaningful interaction among the learners through the communicative use of the target language. The various language practice activities are of the kind that generates confidence in the learners, and a relaxed classroom atmosphere.

It would be so compiled that the explicit focus would be on the content or subject-matter of each unit, that is, information about some topic that generally appeals to the students; the language that is being presented becomes almost an unnoticed tool in their collaborative interaction or engagement with the text. The various tasks set engage the learners’ creativity; they give the students a legitimate reason to use the language they are learning. Such a textbook provides for the use of audiovisuals and realia for eliciting language from the students.

This kind of creative response from the teachers and students can be expected only if the textbook is based on a consistent ideology or philosophy of teaching and learning, as well as a clear view of the nature of human language. Every activity that is designed, every decision that is implied regarding the selection, sequencing, and gradation, and the intensity of coverage of language items, should be explainable in terms of this rationale.

Yet another criterion that should be observed in the production of a textbook is to ensure that the activities designed integrate all the four major language skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and that they cater for all cognitive strategies, i.e. those that involve thinking, or knowing (strategies that, for example, enable the students to understand the rules of grammar implicit in a piece of language); the activities set need to involve problem-solving, and reflection (careful thought) using the target language.

Since the main purpose of a language teaching textbook is to bring about sufficient practice in the communicative use of the relevant language, the linguistic ‘input’ ( the language that is presented by the teacher) and the ‘output’ (the language that is produced by the learners) ‘should be correct, natural and standard’ in terms of the core elements of currently accepted global usage.

The same principle of accuracy applies to the cultural information provided about Sri Lanka, and other countries where English is used. Evidently this cultural aspect is more complex today than it was in the past. Before the emergence of English as a widespread international language and the advent of communicative language teaching it was usually considered necessary for foreign learners of English to be familiar with the culture of the native users of the language, i.e. particularly, the British and the Americans. But today in many countries around the world those who want to learn English are required not only to experience their own native cultures, but also to comprehend a composite ‘world’ culture through English, as members of one global linguistic community (the majority using it as a second language).

But it is good to remember that our ideologies regarding teaching and learning English are still, more or less, dominated by western attitudes. Developing theories and practices that amalgamate better with the truly liberal, cosmopolitan, humane, age-old local culture (which is traditionally misunderstood and misrepresented by the culturally uprooted few who choose to believe that English is still their exclusive patrimony) is a necessity that is yet to be addressed. Our choice of materials, the ways they are presented and practiced, assumptions about what is culturally acceptable, for example, in the matter of student-teacher relationships, ideas about the importance of a knowledge of English among the students, their parents, and the general public – all these are interrelated, and need to be recognized as such.

Having said this, however, it is my conviction that ultimately there is an essential condition that must be fulfilled for the successful and efficient learning of a language (as stated earlier): an abundance of meaningful use of the target language both in the classroom and outside it, accompanied by a steady development of the learners’ cognitive abilities. And the textbooks that are intended to be the mainspring of the whole machinery of the English language teaching programme must be composed of material that provides for that kind of language use catering to an essentially varied population of learners.

Students differ in their interests, levels of motivation, rates of progress, and attitudes towards learning English. Usually teachers are asked to teach mixed-ability groups. A textbook must give them (teachers) sufficient flexibility to deal with these differences. The subject-matter content and the activities based on them should appeal to a variety of students. The difficulty level of the tasks should be so varied as to allow even the weakest students to tackle at least some of them with confidence; but the general level of difficulty should be slightly above the level of achievement expected of any particular (school) grade.

Creation of textbook materials is a very exacting job, to say the least, with so many complicated issues to be looked into. This is easier said than done. Yes, it is difficult, but not impossible.

The textbooks that we need had better be authored by local specialists (or foreigners with comparable empathy with, and understanding of, the Sri Lankan community) in view of the pragmatic assumption that meaningful use of the target language is the surest way to learn a language. Using English for meaningful communication refers to the process by which the learners perceive, interpret and construct their own typical experiences through English.

There were in the past very competent writers of English language teaching textbooks. Mr W.H.Samaranayake was one of the best. His ‘English with a Smile’ series written around the time of Independence was wonderfully responsive to the contemporary political and social transition that was sweeping the country. For this reason his textbooks were far superior (for Sri Lanka) to the adapted versions of foreign textbooks normally used at that time. And, in fact, nothing as good has been produced to date since textbook-writing was ‘indigenized’ in the late sixties. (Obviously, Samaranayake’s books would not stand comparison with the best modern ELT textbooks that someone of the present generation might produce; they are excellent in terms of traditional principles of textbook writing obtaining at that time, and they demonstrate the high levels of creativity achievable in that endeavour in the changed local context today.)

True, Mr Samaranayake was much less encumbered by the mass of bewilderingly complicated and convoluted theories about language, and language pedagogy, among numerous other issues that textbook compilers must contend with nowadays. But, as a textbook writer he was not totally free from challenges. One such challenge was to make English intelligible to students from outside the privileged classes. He met those challenges successfully. There is no doubt that he kept abreast of contemporary trends and developments in the field of language teaching. He was a master of the English language, and he knew his students and his country. He made use of good specimens of writing from native and foreign authors dealing with Sri Lankan themes, which made his books appealing to the students they were intended for. Mr Samaranayake’s books were, and still are, eminently teachable, too. The ‘English with a Smile’ series, though outside the official textbook system, is popular even today in this country.

At the time Mr Samaranayake created his English textbooks the ‘reproduction’ view of language learning (i.e. rote learning) had not yet been seriously challenged, and the more creative view of language learning as ‘problem-solving’ was still a few decades ahead in the future. Yet, the language tasks he devised were imaginative enough to engage the students’ thinking power.

Of course, I am not advocating a return to ‘English with a Smile’. But it would be useful to appreciate why the series has become a classic in textbook writing history.

I wonder whether at least a few of the English textbooks used in Sri Lankan schools today could claim such a high level of excellence (as Mr Samaranayake’s) as teaching materials. This is something worth investigating for reasons that need not be reiterated.

Rohana R. Wasala

Language Matters

Previously published in The Island on Wednesday 29^th April 2009

I believe that reinvigorating language instruction in our education system is one of the most vital themes that we, as a newly resurgent nation, must treat with unstinted attention and commitment. This is because, if education is assumed to aim at the overall development of the individual, and thereby that of the society, no other subject on the educational curriculum may be thought to affect such development as potently as language training does.

The view expressed here may be at odds with the traditionally popular notions about the relative importance of subjects or subject streams in our formal education system, such as that mathematics is more important than drawing, or that ‘science’ subjects are superior to ‘arts subjects’, or that subjects involving manual skills (carpentry, bricklaying, motor mechanism, etc.) are lowly. However, these attitudes are fast becoming obsolete today, thanks to the growing awareness among our people of the fact that the value of whatever one learns does not depend on whether or not it qualifies one for a sedentary job deemed important, but on whether or not it equips one with a useful skill to provide an essential service to the society, in addition to contributing to one’s intellectual and moral development. If the last mentioned criterion is accepted as the measure of the importance of any subject on offer, then all subjects will be considered equally important.

Yet, in view of its unique nature, language should be treated as ‘primus inter pares’ among educational disciplines! The most obvious characteristic that distinguishes language from other subjects is that language , unlike the rest, is indispensable for the study of all subjects including language itself, because language constitutes the vital medium for the construction and communication of thoughts and ideas within any conceptual area.

Education is generally a matter of acquiring knowledge and skills. Language is the vehicle through which this is done. Acquisition of knowledge involves precise thinking, and language is the principal tool by means of which humans are able to do it. Clear thinking is impossible without language. In short, language is knowledge.

Although for my present purpose I have chosen to stress the importance of language as a tool for the formulation and communication of concepts, and the gaining of received knowledge in any field of intellectual engagement, the usefulness of language goes far beyond that. Social interaction, for example, needs language. When a number of human beings get together, especially if they are known to each other, the most natural thing they do is talk, much of the time not for the purpose of exchanging any important information, but for the purpose of socializing. Another function that language performs is forming and maintaining cultural bonds among people of the same community. Language also reinforces intra- and inter-community cultural, economic, and political relationships. These are just a few examples of the functions of language.

Up to this point I have been talking about language as an abstraction, and using the word ‘language’ in its generic sense (meaning natural human language). There are over 4000 different realizations of this uniquely human, basically vocal, signaling system (i.e. more than 4000 different languages) in the world today. In addition to these there are artificially constructed ‘languages’ like computer language, sign languages, Esperanto, etc. They are all signaling systems.

None of the over 4000 languages of the world can be described as linguistically superior or inferior to any other. But we know that a few of the world’s languages do stand out, and appear intrinsically of a higher order than others. The reason that explains the relative ‘super power’ status of certain countries or blocs can be used to explain the apparently inherent ‘excellence’ of some languages such as English, French, German, Russian or Chinese: this is a matter of the balance of power – economic, technological, political , and military - between the countries whose peoples speak these languages as their first or native languages, and other countries where the linguistic communities use other languages. World or international languages mentioned above are among the most powerful languages in the contemporary world. So it is not a problem of the relative intrinsic superiority or inferiority of any particular human language/s, but a matter of ‘power’ which is neither right nor wrong. And this has been the case throughout the linguistic history of the world.

All languages serve equally well and equally efficiently the communities which use them for their purposes. When the speakers of one language find it too inadequate a medium to express the new concepts that come from foreign sources, or the new thoughts and feelings that they themselves generate in their own naturally evolving cultural milieu, they either borrow elements from the languages of those foreign sources or learn those languages as additional linguistic mediums (i.e. as second or foreign languages).

We in Sri Lanka, though ours is a small island, have two of the world’s oldest languages spoken by the majority of its population, with well authenticated literary histories of thousands of years. This is a claim that no one can challenge. Yet, I am afraid, we appear to be moving towards the position of one of the most inarticulate societies of the world (!), judging by the very obvious regressive trend of utter ignorance and indifference especially on the part of the mass media and government authorities where the absolute need for the serious study and use of language is concerned. It goes without saying that this is an educational matter.

Probably I need not emphasize that I am thinking of the present linguistic situation in our country where mainly three languages are in use. The observations made here are based on my experience of Sinhalese and English as they are in circulation particularly among media people, and persons of authority. My Tamil speaking friends, who share my concerns, say that the situation in Tamil also reflects the same attitudes of neglect and indifference.

What I have often seen is that actual or affected failure to speak in intelligible Sinhala using a commonly accepted idiom is an affliction found particularly among the educated urban elite (something which is, unfortunately, percolating to the villages). Some important persons (including, for example, government ministers, university dons, department heads, corporate bosses, even diplomats) seem inarticulate both in their own mother tongue and in their supposed lingua franca, English, something that is coming to public notice at this time of national crisis when an authentic representation of what is actually happening here is of vital importance to the country in the face of the overwhelmingly adverse publicity we are being subjected to by the enemies of the Sri Lankan state.

A relevant but paradoxical phenomenon that I have observed is the admirable language savvy of the rural peasants (monolingual with their average level of literacy) revealed in TV programmes on agricultural matters, as opposed to the tongue-tied awkwardness that often inhibits the expressive power of the highly educated consultants or bigwigs in corresponding situations. Should we conclude that this is attributable to some defect of our education system? It certainly looks as if we should. It may be that those peasants escaped from that system before their expressive power suffered any damage?

Having said this, however, I must hasten to add some qualifications to the foregoing. First, there are many media professionals, government officials, and members of the general public who evince a healthy level of linguistic awareness and concern (and I say ‘May their tribe increase!’). Then, I am not under the spell of some puritanical spirit that seeks to defy the natural phenomenon of continuous language change. (In fact, such change is a factor that helps maintain the ever renewing sharpness and power of the tool that language is.) A third reservation that I would like to make explicit is that I do not necessarily condemn the excessive ‘code switching’ (mixing of elements of one language in another in the same sentence, or in a longer text) that our young and old alike indulge in in the course of common conversation (often repeated in teledramas) so long as it does not permanently harm the identity of what is accepted as a distinct language by its users, be it English, Sinhalese or Tamil. Most such mixings are almost always limited to vocabulary, and are ephemeral. But some words, in the course of time, seem to earn ‘permanent resident’ status in the borrowing language, and get assimilated into the general word stock of the host language. No language in the world is free from such migrant populations; long residence in the host language renders them indistinguishable from the original inhabitants of that particular linguistic landscape. It is a (natural) process that has always enriched the vocabulary of languages, and has enhanced their powers of expression. This is true of Sinhalese, Tamil, English, and other languages. English perhaps has the most hybrid lexicon of the three. (‘Nelumbium’, a kind of water-lily must be from the Sinhalese ‘nelum’; ‘tourmaline’ is thought to have been derived from the Sinhalese? word ‘thoramalli’, carnelian or cornelian, a precious stone; the English word ‘cash’ meaning coin or money is said to be from Tamil ‘kasu’; ‘Koinmanike’ used to be a very common name for a female in the Kandyan areas until a few decades ago with its ‘koin’ part being a ‘Sinhalised’ version of the English word ‘queen’; the rate of mutual borrowing between Tamil and Sinhalese is naturally higher than that between one of them and English; there are probably hundreds of such borrowings scattered among our three main languages). Finally, I am not saying that any one of the three languages Sinhalese, Tamil, and English which are of vital importance for us must be forced down the throats of all Sri Lankans with or without any apparent justification. The desire to learn an additional language must be spontaneous. This happens when there is a genuinely desired goal to achieve by learning that language.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s inspiring example of addressing Tamil audiences in Tamil without any sign of condescension or patronage is something to be emulated. He uses his knowledge of the language as a second language to reach out to those Tamil citizens who have felt alienated from the rest of the Sri Lankan polity due to three decades of separatist war; his growing popularity among them is a clear demonstration of his success.

My plea is for language training to be given more attention in our school and higher education systems, and for raising awareness of the importance of learning and using languages properly as essential resources for individual and social development, and also of the inestimable value of our own native languages (Sinhalese and Tamil) as inalienable cultural treasures.

The talk we frequently hear these days about a trilingual system (English, Tamil, Sinhalese) would not be without sense if it was given a realistic interpretation. All three languages figure in our national consciousness as important. In general, one can say that Sinhalese is the naturally handy linguistic tool that the Sinhalese speakers have and that it is part of their cherished cultural heritage; Tamil stands in a similar relationship to the Tamil speakers. Now English may be said to possess dual significance: it is the mother tongue of a section of the Sri Lankan population, however small that community may be; at the same time, it qualifies for the status of an indispensable second language for both the Sinhalese and Tamil speakers.

In my opinion, while trilingual proficiency could be a desirable goal for some individuals, bilingual proficiency (meaning proficiency in English and one of the two

native languages) is an absolute national need.

My own experience is that language is not, and has never been, a divisive factor in our country, just as religion is not a divisive factor, unless of course wily politicians and certain anti-national elements decide for their own purposes to use language and religion as issues to wreck the unity among the different communities. The linguistic scenario that has always prevailed among the ordinary people is this: in any region of the country the minority community learn to speak the language of the majority in that area irrespective of ethnicity, which means that the Sinhalese living in the Tamil majority areas learn Tamil, and vice versa. The elite of both communities who had enjoyed a privileged status under the British at the expense of the dispossessed common masses, and somehow got ensconced in the same privileged position decades into the post-Independence era, had always adopted English as their mother tongue, and cut themselves off from their historical and cultural roots. They were/are actually a minuscule minority, though invested with much power over the rest of the population through their association with the foreign rulers in pre-Independence times. In their case, of course, in one sense at least, language was a uniting factor: it held them united within their own elite cabal; in another sense, English kept them alienated from the oppressed majority of their own kind. The long desired changes in the education sphere that took place during the period 1944 to 1961 including the change of the medium of instruction from English to Sinhala and Tamil vastly benefited this deprived majority by opening to them educational opportunities earlier confined to the privileged few, while it might have a little inconvenienced the elite minority without actually harming them in any serious way other than threatening to evict them from their undue privileged position..

Fortunately for the country, the ‘English only’ class (to borrow a phrase from a recent contributor to The Island) is today a moribund species. It is they who make the unrealistic (and in an important sense, philistine) proposal that English should again replace Sinhalese and Tamil as the medium of instruction in our school system. These people can pontificate from their individual English utopias, but no government can ignore the fact that the vast majority of our people (about 72% of the population) still live in rural villages without a chance to receive a decent education even in their own mother tongue, Sinhalese or Tamil, let alone English. (This is not to deny that basic educational facilities have reached the remotest parts of the country. The problem is that these still remain too rudimentary to be described as fair.)

Educational reforms such as the scrapping of the teaching of history in schools, and the reintroduction of the English medium mainly proposed as solutions to the ‘ethnic’ crisis are now proving to be irrelevant answers to a non-existent problem. The first ‘historical’ mistake – the cancellation of history lessons in schools- has now been corrected. The reintroduction of the English medium is perhaps an irreversible step, and it should not be retracted; it must remain as one of the mediums of instruction available to whoever needs or wants to use it as such. What I would object to is English being made the only medium of education in our country on the pretext that this will lead to national unity. The adoption of a common language by itself will not achieve communal harmony unless certain more important issues are settled first.

The main reason why I would object to making English the only medium of instruction is that there is no need for that, for the majority of our people Sinhalese and Tamil are adequate as mediums for school education, and these are easily accessible. We have enough teachers to teach in these mediums. The fact that most of our children come from Sinhalese and Tamil speaking homes should not be ignored. If English is made the sole medium of education, there will be many problems besetting such a scheme. We don’t have enough teachers capable of teaching the various subjects in English. Then there is the problem of textbooks, and other resources. True, all such needs could be supplied to a few schools in towns, but the majority of our 10,000 schools are in rural areas with few infra-structure facilities. How can we continue to hope to guarantee equality of opportunity to all in these circumstances? (Even now when nearly all school-goers except a small number who have opted to join the English stream available in a few government schools study in Sinhala or Tamil, it is difficult to ensure equality of opportunity. Won’t the introduction of English as the only medium of education further complicate this matter?)

In a country where over half a century of teaching English as a second language is deemed to have been a failure to date in view of the poor exam results at the O/L, the low proficiency in English that the average fresh university entrant shows, the less than desirable competence level of the majority of school English teachers, the inferior quality of the government English textbooks prepared by experts, and many other related factors, to make English the sole medium of education will make no sense, to say the least.

Banishing Sinhalese and Tamil from the classroom as mediums of education while only retaining them as mere subjects will stop the children from using them for creative thinking. This will be cultural suicide for the speakers of those languages. A language will survive and flourish only so long as it is employed by its users to engage in creative intellectual pursuits such as producing literary works, writing books dealing with various subjects, translating into and out of it, and so on.

What we can and should do is to make a success of our teaching of English as a second language programme using the local resources and expertise available by correctly mobilizing these. In the case of English there is no choice. Every child, while studying in his or own mother tongue, must be offered a chance to learn English as a second language and reach such a high level of competency as will enable him or her to enhance their higher education and employment prospects through that medium. Where Sinhalese and Tamil are concerned the situation is different.

No one will willingly learn another language without a good enough reason. There is a lot of motivation for acquiring a knowledge of English among both the Sinhalese and Tamil speakers, and this point needs no elaboration. The average Sinhalese speaker, on the other hand, will feel no special desire to learn Tamil; neither will the average Tamil speaker want to learn Sinhalese. This is natural and is to be expected. But if they are provided with a sound reason they will not be averse to learning each other’s language.

What generates unity among different ethnic, religious, or social groups is not necessarily a common language. A shared language can only be a concomitant of something more important – a community of interests and needs. If we can ensure this, it will provide the motivation necessary for Sinhalese and Tamils to learn each other’s language as a second language. For example, the government could stipulate that all government servants must be bilingual in Sinhala and Tamil to get promotions, salary increases, etc., the true reason for such a stipulation being the need for bilingual personnel to serve a multiethnic clientele monolingual in their own languages. Any ethnic harmony that may result from the presence of bilingual speakers will only be incidental, but ethnic harmony as a goal can rarely be used to persuade people to learn a new language. Often the problem of language does not come into play at all. If as Sri Lankans we are given a chance to enjoy equal rights as citizens of a well governed democracy, we will be united; there will be no cause for disunity then.

We Sri Lankans are fortunate in having some rich linguistic resources in the form of three highly developed languages. To make use of these unique resources for our own individual advancement and also for the development and wellbeing of our society, let us give language instruction in our education setup, be it English, Sinhala or Tamil, the high priority it deserves.

Rohana R. Wasala

The English Language Textbooks for GCE O/L

Previously published in The Island in two parts on 1st and 2nd July, 2008



As a nation we have been, more often than not, involuntarily, betraying our children for too long, not so much through any lack of good intentions as through our collective failure to properly implement courses of action designed for their realization even where much could be achieved with a little effort. Nowhere is this disastrous tradition of failure more evident than in the sphere of education. It is indisputable that education is the highest priority for the youth of a country. As far as Sri Lanka is concerned no worthwhile education is conceivable without a knowledge of English. The main source of help for the majority of our students in learning English is the government-run school English language teaching programme. The importance of good textbooks for the success of that programme need hardly be stressed. Yet the current government English language textbooks compiled for the GCE O/L, in my opinion, do not measure up to the required standards. Hence the following critique.



The English language teaching textbook issued by the Educational Publications Department for use by the students of Grade 11, the important penultimate stage of secondary education in this country, consists of eight units organized around as many themes, e.g. Relationships, Culture, Health and Safety, and so on. Each unit focuses on the teaching of English in terms of specific language functions, and the grammar underlying those functions, in addition to the presentation, practice, and production of language through a wide variety of activities involving all the four primary language skills of reading, speaking, listening and writing.



The preface to the Pupil’s Book states that eight teachers wrote the Grade 11 textbook. While admitting ‘the difficulty of producing a single textbook for the entire country, especially for the teaching of English language ’, the authorities seem to have put much of the onus of teaching onto the teachers: ‘Teachers are required to build appropriate learning situations within the students’ experiences to facilitate the internalization of language.’



‘An outline of the syllabus’ for this Grade given on pages 226-7 of the Pupil’s Book suggests that the course expects the students to achieve a high level of competency in English. However, the quality of the Grade 11 English textbook falls far short of the level of excellence required for the achievement of that goal because of a number of grave shortcomings in its actual preparation.



These defects mainly relate to the composition of those texts that have been specially written, and to the design of questions and other activities based on them. A glance at Unit I (which typifies the rest of the book) would be sufficient for illustrating this point.



The theme of Unit 1 is ‘Relationships’. The very first reading text of the unit is entitled ‘Family Bonds’. One expects any reading text like this, which is offered as teaching material, to be a model of good writing: it needs to be factually clear and authentic, grammatically standard and accurate, and structurally coherent, cohesive, and well organized. But this text doesn’t make the grade in terms of these basic criteria. It is a very poor piece of writing.



The passage opens with the sentence ‘Family bonds or ties play a major role in our lives’. The second sentence is an attempt to define ‘family bonds’: ‘It is the deep attachment between and among family members’. The prepositional phrase between and among family members is an awkward, nonstandard construction, because the prepositions between and among having identical meanings are mutually exclusive: if you choose one in a certain context you can’t also use the other along with it. (However, what the writer probably has in mind is not difficult to guess: between any two members, or two sections of the family, and among three or more of those, for example, between father and mother, between parents and children, and among three or more children, or among all the members of the family. This is what the last sentence of the opening paragraph would suggest.) Though hair-splitting argumentation would seem out of place here, since teaching language is in focus it is important to establish what the accepted usage (i.e. the standard form of the language, or the language of education) in this case is.



I think one of these prepositions should be used in this second sentence, since in normal usage today the word ‘between’, in addition to its other functions as preposition and adverb, shows ‘the result of the shared activity of several people’ as the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English tells us.



Then, the use of the colon (:) in the middle of the last sentence of the first paragraph is faulty. A colon indicates a break or a separation, as when an example or a list of things or a quote is introduced. The sentence ‘The affectionate relationships between family members: father and mother, father and children, and among children bring happiness, good fortune and success’ with its misplaced colon cuts off the subject, the noun phrase ‘The affectionate relationships between family members: father and mother, father and children, and among children’, from its predicate ‘bring happiness, good fortune and success’, which makes no sense because the colon cuts the sentence into two separate parts.



The second paragraph begins with the sentence ‘Family bonds arise out of living together in harmony with love, affection, caring and sharing’. Let’s say this is passable, though the gerundial noun phrase ‘living together in harmony with ….’, the object of the preposition ‘out of’, omits the subject of ‘living’, leaving it to be guessed. The sentence could be revised as: ‘Family bonds arise out of members of a family living together in harmony with love, affection, caring and sharing’. ( This is because I think that a subject such as ‘members of a family’ or ‘people of a household’ is to be understood here. Readers could perhaps understand the intended sense without bothering too much about such fine points as I am drawing attention to here; but a higher level of clarity is not too much to demand from a language teaching textbook.)



The next sentence is ‘No matter how rich or poor, family bonds are the same’. Here the two clauses separated with a comma are not in apposition. The universal conditional-concessive clause ‘No matter how rich or poor’ hangs loose here because the adjectival phrase ‘rich or poor’ does not apply to ‘family bonds’. Probably the writer had in mind something like ‘no matter how rich or poor people are, or a family is, family bonds are the same’ (The meaning of ‘family bonds are the same’ is not clear, though).



Another sentence is ‘A child becomes a teenager, an adolescent and a grown up’. This would imply that an adolescent is older than a teenager. However, we know that the word ‘adolescent’ is applied to a young person who is roughly between 13 and 16 years of age. The informal noun ‘grown up’ from the adjective ‘grown-up’ is usually hyphenated: grown-up. The sentence could be recast as ‘ A child becomes an adolescent and then an adult’.



The third and final paragraph of the first reading text of Unit 1 begins with the sentence ‘In the modern world family bonds are drifting apart’. Of course, the sentence is to be read figuratively. It would then mean that ‘family bonds’, like boats, get blown about in the sea by the wind, i.e. get separated from each other; but this would suggest that the bonds get scattered, though still remaining intact. Yet, this is obviously not what the authors want to say. They mean to say that family bonds become weak. The rest of the paragraph makes the vague assertion that people are more mercenary today than they were in the past, and are consequently competitive, rather than cooperative among themselves, and that when we learn to care for our family, we learn to care for our society, and ultimately for the whole country.



The text is for reading/writing according to the instructions. This is not clear . Anyway let’s allow that it’s for reading, but what are the students expected to write? Should they copy the text, or write down the new words, or what? Why aren’t there pre-reading tasks, or other preliminary activities such as skimming and scanning, which would facilitate the process of reading comprehension?



The ten questions in Activity 1.1 seem to focus on extension, rather than on basic comprehension. The basis of dividing the ten questions into a 1 –7 and b 8 -10 is not clear. But it is possible that the students are required to discuss answers to the questions in pairs or groups, and write them down later.



Activity 1.2 is a further speaking and writing task. This appears to recommend collaborative engagement among the students in a kind of brainstorming activity in preparation for the task of writing a paragraph on the topic ‘How can we make this world a better place?’ Such a task would be appropriate if the students have already been introduced to paragraph writing, and hence have a clear idea about what a paragraph is. However, the required length of the student paragraph is 150 words: Isn’t this too long, considering the fact that all the three paragraphs that constitute the reading passage put together consist of less than 200 words?



Activity 1.3 concerns vocabulary, and presents some deductive grammar on the formation of new words (nouns from verbs, and negative forms of adjectives from positive ones) through affixation (adding prefixes and suffixes to bases). Lists of verbs and adjectives are given with some suffixes and prefixes (with a few unchecked spelling errors). The instruction ‘Underline the nouns that get changed’ is followed by

eg. Create – creation

which obviously is an error because e is not a noun in the English language! The instruction should perhaps be worded thus: ‘Underline the parts of the verbs that get changed’ or ‘Underline the parts of the nouns that have been newly added’. (The first alternative will confront the student with the problem of some exceptions, such as ‘move – movement’, ‘collect – collection’, and so on.)



Activity 1.4 is pair work involving discussion followed by writing. The hints supplied for the activity are couched in faulty English (which correct punctuation would have saved): ‘What is responsibility? Responsibility means a duty to deal with or take care of’. Since this is supposed to be a definition of the word ‘responsibility’ that fact should be made more explicit in some way, for example, ‘What is responsibility ?’ or ‘What is the meaning of the word responsibility ?, etc. Another sentence that should be revised is ‘Responsibilities differ according to the position or the post’: it could be made more precise in its meaning by the addition of a post-modifier such as ‘that a person holds’. One of the example sentences given is ‘My main responsibility is to keep the class in control’. But ‘to be in control’ means ‘to be in charge, in command’; here the opposite is meant: the class monitor is in control of the class. Therefore the sentence should be revised: ‘My main responsibility is to have the class under control’ or ‘My main responsibility is to assist the teacher to maintain class discipline’.



Activity 1.5 contains another reading passage. It is a simplified extract from the 19th century novel by George Eliot ‘The Mill on the Floss’. (In the Grade 11 English book this name is misspelt with a double l.) Although it is only a poorly done simplification of a very small part of the original it is described to the student as ‘a part of the novel “The Mill on the Floss”.



The first paragraph of the extract has no structure; it is incoherent; there is no natural flow from one sentence to the next; there is no clear main point to which all the other sentences relate, except the vague picture that emerges of an unkempt little girl of nine, who is not very pretty, and about whose appearance and manner her mother is worried. The illustration that accompanies the text, however, quite inappropriately, shows a carefully made-up young woman of 18 – 20 sitting on a tree reading a book.



The opening sentence is ‘Maggie, the daughter of Mr and Mrs Tulliver is nine and tall for her age’. There must be a comma after Mrs Tulliver to separate the noun phrase ‘the daughter of Mr and Mrs Tulliver which is in apposition to ‘ Maggie’ . (She) is nine and (she) is tall for her age are two disparate ideas that cannot be coordinated with the conjunction and in this particular context. It would be better to have two sentences here: ‘Maggie, the daughter of Mr and Mrs Tulliver, is nine. She is tall for her age’.



(But see the following sentences from an exchange between Mr Tulliver and Mrs Tulliver in the same scene about their daughter Maggie in the retold version of ‘The Mill on the Floss’ p.9 by E.F.Dodd in the Macmillan Stories to Remember – Senior Series - where the ‘and’ conjunction is appropriately used:



‘How can you talk so, Mr Tulliver? She’s too big a girl to have her hair cut short. Why, she’s nine, and tall for her age. …. .’



Here, Mrs Tulliver’s opinion is that Maggie, who is already nine years of age, is too grown-up a girl to have her hair cut short, and that, besides, she is taller than the average girls of her age. In other words Mrs Tulliver adduces the girl’s age and her unusual height for her age, not as disparate ideas in themselves, but as mutually supportive reasons for her strictures on her daughter (however mock-serious her manner is or however fond her maternal concern for the welfare of her child is.)



To return to the Grade 11 English textbook, there is no indication of the setting of the story, nor any hint of the scene of the present events. The word ‘patchwork’ is consistently, but erroneously, printed as two words; so is the word ‘ladylike’. In the sentence ‘Mr Tulliver always thought about his son, Tom’s education’, no comma should be inserted between ‘his son’ and its non-restrictive appositive ‘Tom’, (for Mr Tulliver has only one son by the name of Tom).



The writer uses the dramatic present in the first few sentences, and soon switches to the narrative past. This inconsistency could be ignored, or even treated as a literary deviation, a stylistic device, in creative writing. Here, however, it does not appear to be due to any conscious artistry; it is more likely to be due to carelessness. Even if someone wants to defend it as the former, I feel that such license is too much of a luxury, and hence inadvisable to adopt in a language teaching textbook for the given level.



There is hardly a page in this book which is free from errors. Let me take a few more examples at random from the book. Look at the dialogue under the title ‘True Friends’ given for role play on page 14. One of the sentences is ‘We have met each other when her father was living’. The adverbial clause of time ‘when her father was living’ makes it obligatory that the finite verb in the principal clause be in the past simple: ‘We met…’, not ‘We have met…’ . We may also take a glance at the reading text ‘Kalidasa – the great poet’ on page 17. The first sentence of the introductory note is: ‘Kalidasa, the world famous Indian poet lived during the first half of the fifth century’. Isn’t the description ‘world-famous’ too cheap an epithet to be applied to a celebrated ancient poet? Wouldn’t it be better if we had instead the following?



‘Kalidasa, the renowned classical Indian poet, lived during the first half of the fifth century CE’.



Another instance of error ( once again due to erroneous choice of tense) is the following sentence in the same text: ‘The most emotional moment of the play emerges when Shakuntala bade farewell to her beloved companions, who had been with her, and all the animate and inanimate things,’ where the second and third underlined verbs should be replaced with ‘bids’ and ‘have been’. On page 31 you find the following ‘example’ showing a Main clause and a Subordinate clause: ‘She came to the throne in 1837,(Main clause) after the death of her uncle. (Subordinate clause)’. Isn’t ‘after the death of her uncle’ a prepositional phrase? Who says it’s a subordinate or any other kind of clause? A clause is ‘a group of words containing a verb’; where is the verb in ‘after the death of her uncle’ ? (Of course, this phrase can be treated as equivalent to a time clause; but it is not a clause per se. The word ‘after’ is a preposition in this context, not a subordinator ( subordinating conjunction).



(However,I think, we need not burden the students of this level with explanations of clauses with finite verbs, clauses with non-finite verbs, verbless clauses with ellipsis of be, and so on).



Similar shortcomings are evident in the English textbook for Grade 10 in the same series. Unit 1 of the Pupil’s Book deals with the theme ‘Environment’ in terms of subject-matter, and aims to present and practice the language functions of emphasizing, expressing likes, and presenting facts, together with the grammar items of prepositional phrases expressing cause/reason, purpose, manner, and place, plus Direct and Indirect Speech.



The introductory reading text, which is about the Sinharaja Rain Forest, is a poor piece of writing. It is full of structural, lexical, grammatical and other errors. The clumsy first paragraph is just passable as the introduction of the essay. The second is probably meant to better define its subject; but it does nothing of the kind. It only vaguely refers to the present and the past of the Sinharaja Forest Reserve. Its geographical location is completely overlooked. Then, in terms of grammar this piece of writing leaves much to be desired. For example, the mandatory definite article ‘the’ before the name ‘Sinharaja’ is left out in certain instances, e.g. ‘In 1840 Sinharaja became a crown property’, and this is followed by ‘In 1988 the Sinharaja was made a National Wilderness area’. An example of lexical errors is: ‘The Sinharaja forest is home to many rare animals, birds, butterflies, insects, reptiles and trees.’ Aren’t butterflies included in the category of ‘insects’?



Activity 1.1 which is ‘Reading’ is ‘pair work’. Does this mean that the students are required to read the text in pairs? How can they do that? Does it mean that they should discuss the meaning of each sentence as they read? That won’t be reading. Reading should be silent reading, an individual activity. The students may tackle comprehension tasks if any, in pairs. So, unless the teacher is given clear instructions regarding how this very first activity should be handled, s/he will be confused about the applicability of the suggested ‘pair work’ technique. (My comments on the Activities are subject to the following caveat: I have been unable to look at the Work Book that accompanies the Pupil’s Book, something I regret.)



Activity 1.2 is a vocabulary check in the form of five sentences with gaps to be filled in with appropriate words from the text. This could be done as pair work perhaps, though no suggestion to that effect is given. I think this task is in the wrong place. Shouldn’t some comprehension exercises be assigned before any writing is attempted?



I may be wrongly accused of nitpicking, which I don’t mind. That is a small price to pay in this instance. I sincerely believe that textbooks must be of the highest standards. As the Commissioner General of the Department of Educational Publications has pointed out in the department’s website, 315 textbook titles provided free for all government schools cost Rs 2398,398,719 for the year 2008 alone. The English language teaching textbooks could be said to account for a substantial share of this sum. It is the national duty of those responsible to give the country the best they are capable of. That is in order to take care of, among other things, the accountability principle in materials preparation (in other words, giving the public value for their money).





Education is big business today. It is also well-known that in our country English teaching accounts for a large portion of this business. That is partly the reason why I titled the first of my triad of articles on the subject “This business of teaching English” carried in The Island of 21st and 22nd May 2008. My second article on another aspect of the same subject under the title “The problem of writing textbooks for ELT” was published in The Island of 4th June 2008. This present one is the third and last. All three have been written in the national interest.



By failing to do their work properly those responsible for education, in addition to other deleterious consequences, drive the children of poor parents (the majority of the population) to the clutches of businesspeople. We must do everything possible to stop this. Hence this attempt to draw the attention of the authorities to a vital problem, that could be easily dealt with provided the will is there.



The departmental objective of providing textbooks of high pedagogical and educational standards (to repeat a phrase often mouthed by those at the helm, which seems to express merely a pious wish) cannot be achieved in the field of English teaching unless the English textbooks for the GCE O/L classes are thoroughly revised or replaced altogether.



These are my personal views. I would be glad to be proved wrong in my negative beliefs. Therefore constructive counter-criticisms are welcome.





Rohana R. Wasala