Jobs, Businesses, and Professions

Jobs, Businesses, and Professions
(First published in The Island/17 December 2010)

“The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.” - John Ruskin (1819-1900), English writer, art critic and social reformer

The three words job, business, and profession all relate to work done in expectation of payment or income, but mean different things in terms of the main motive that drives each. A job is what you do to earn a living, a business involves work relating to the production, buying or selling of goods or services, and a profession is work which requires specialized knowledge and rigorous training, and which is considered to be more a form of honourable service to the society than simple labour to be appropriately remunerated. Disciplined performance on all these three forms of employment is essential for a country’s wellbeing. However, in the society today, one is often struck by the way traditionally hallowed professions such as the medical and the teaching professions are losing their aura of nobility, and degenerating into mere jobs or businesses, though there’s no reason to despair that old values are totally gone.
Professionalism, that is, the practice of skills combined with high standards, while intrinsic to professions by definition, is also expected of jobs and businesses. However, we don’t talk about ‘noble’ jobs or businesses, while we do apply that adjective to a profession. What makes a profession noble is the sense of compassion, generosity, and service that characterizes it. There is nothing very exalted about doing a piece of work to make a living, or exchanging goods or services for money to make a profit. But if your work involves, as in the case of the medical profession, saving people from physical and mental pain, or even death, or, as in the case of the teaching profession, fashioning the character of an individual for life, and if you do that out of compassion for fellow beings rather than covetousness, such ‘service’ should be considered noble.
A job is the least complicated of the three forms of employment. It is a regular occupation, and is nothing more than just a means of making a living. The worker is expected to work a regular number of hours each day, and is paid a regular salary. Usually the type of work the person is expected to do is routine, and allows little room for innovation. There may not be much of an opportunity or need to reveal one’s altruistic spirit, once the duties connected with the job are conscientiously performed.
A business makes an initial investment to produce goods or services for a target customer base. The main purpose of a business is to ensure a return for the money that is invested. Though businesses are usually for-profit organizations, occasionally, there are non-profit making businesses too, such as cooperative establishments, where the income earned is distributed among the members, who are themselves the investors, in the form of enhanced services and other benefits. A non-profit making business may sometimes raise money for a special cause, for example, charity. But, in the case of a business, the overriding concern is to augment returns on the capital resources deployed. Perhaps, moral standards seem to be irrelevant to business. This may be why American author Jim Tully (1886-1947) was prompted to say: “The lawyer and the doctor and other professional men have often a touch of civilization. The banker and the merchant seldom”, something borne out by the recent scams and scandals in the financial investment field in Sri Lanka.
A profession is different from both. The only common feature a profession shares with jobs and businesses is that it is practiced in expectation of some income. But, in reality, the purpose of earning some money becomes incidental to its main motive of providing a vitally important public service. A profession is no profession if it allows itself to become a mere job or business.
A number of special attributes of a profession (and by implication, of a professional) have been identified by different writers. Following are the most frequently stressed ones: a profession is based on a systematic body of scientific knowledge, and practical skills acquired through a formally assessed period of serious study and hard training; it should reflect authority and credibility in the relevant knowledge field, and also a widening of the knowledge field through research; a profession should be informed by compassion and a sense of dedication for public service; it should conform to a culture of values and standards; a profession must be committed to a special code of ethics; and it should demonstrate efficiency and competence in the performance of specific, socially useful, tasks which are challenging. These attributes give status and prestige to those engaged in the professions. Professionals generally enjoy more respect and recognition in society than other workers, and their work is regarded as a service. They are usually better paid than others, though people believe that the important work they do using their advanced knowledge and expertise cannot be valued in terms of money.
In the past, only a few forms of employment were included in the category of professions, such as the careers of doctors, educators, lawyers, engineers, or the (Christian) clergy. In modern times, however, the term is used more inclusively. It is extended to any field (such as business management, journalism, and communication) in which the practitioner performs an important task in a spirit of public service, based on his or her advanced scientific knowledge and hard training acquired over a period of time.
This western concept of profession is quite compatible with our own indigenous cultural attitudes, strongly evident in the medical and teaching fields. The (material) poverty of the ‘vedaralas’ (native physicians) who looked after the health of particularly the rural villagers, the vast majority of the population, almost single-handed until perhaps the beginning of the last century before the western system of medical care spread throughout the country is the theme of the following Sinhalese verse (I learned this verse from my late mother who herself had learnt it in her childhood. I regret my inability to relate it to a source):

Saththare denagath vedaralalata
Neththare nidinatha rae thun yamata
Goththare natha kusagini welawata
Paththare mai vedakama hingamanata

“Physicians who have mastered the art of healing have no rest even at night. You forget about your caste when you are hungry. Truly, this occupation of a physician makes a beggar out of you”.

The verse suggests that the local healers of that bygone era expected and got very little material benefit from practicing their profession. They engaged in it as a duty they owed to society. It seems that they believed that those who had gained medical knowledge were morally obliged to serve the community. They considered it a religious duty, a meritorious act. The society also relied on them to behave in that manner, and accorded them great respect and recognition.
In our knowledge-loving society teachers have always been similarly respected. It was only in the 1970’s that the private tuition centres started in earnest. Before that time, students depended entirely on classroom teaching. Sometimes, teachers offered extra teaching free of charge after school hours. We find no evidence to suggest that teachers of those less modernist times wanted to use their teaching to get materially rich.
This is only a neutral reflection on the past. No implied criticism of the highly commercialised medical and educational spheres that one finds nowadays is intended. Today we live in much more complicated times. We are materially and socially more advanced than before. We have more expectations in life and more opportunities to realize them. If private medical practitioners, and private tutors flourish by plying their trade, that is because there is a great demand for their services. Answering the vital needs of the society is no crime. But, even in the highly commercialized world of today, it is not impossible for them to infuse a sense of professionalism and humanity into their activities.
There are many who do, and enjoy the highest reward they can get for their toil as conceived by Ruskin in my quote at the beginning. That is why any indiscriminate condemnation of private practitioners in the medical or education fields as unconscionable profiteers would not be proper. We have many specialist doctors engaged in private practice who maintain high ethical standards by focusing on their profession rather than profit. The same applies to teachers; in both urban and rural schools some teachers who may be adding to their income by doing some moonlighting often provide free tuition to their needy students after school hours. This must be recognized and those professionals duly honoured for their service.

The Ten Year Master Plan for a Trilingual Sri Lanka

The Ten Year Master Plan for a Trilingual Sri Lanka
(Previously published in The Island/3rd December 2010)

The 10 year National Master Plan for a Trilingual Sri Lanka (2011-2020) to be launched as a presidential initiative is going to be a massive implementation-oriented language management exercise, probably the most ambitious ever of its kind. A survey carried out by an independent research organization for the Public Survey and Research Unit of the Presidential Secretariat has revealed a clear perception among Sri Lanka’s major ethnic communities of the desirability of a three language system for strengthening national harmony. This is a good trend that should be encouraged and exploited, for the success of any language planning enterprise will ultimately depend on its acceptance by the people.
The Coordinator of the programme, Senior Presidential Advisor Mr Sunimal Fernando, describes the language dimension of the ethnic issue as a chronic wound that has been left untouched in the wishful hope that it would heal by itself in the course of time, for fear of causing pain to the afflicted by probing in it in an attempt to effect a permanent cure. From that perspective, the current undertaking is a bold attempt to bring about a change in the status quo in Sri Lanka’s language planning arena, which, it is hoped, will eventually enhance the prospects of peaceful coexistence among its diverse communities, while opening new vistas of national development. As Professor Rajiva Wijesinghe MP stated in Parliament during the Budget debate recently, “…. multilingualism … is the part of the human resources development that this government alone had the courage to embark on…” (His speech was featured in The Island/28th Monday, November 2010).
Language Planning is a professional activity which is subsumed under Applied Linguistics. It basically involves the participation of three kinds of “language professionals”: politicians, lawyers, and language specialists. These three categories of persons are language professionals in the sense that they use language, in their careers, in a distinctive way, as a weapon, a medium, or an object of study respectively. Language planning is concerned with decision-making about the status, content, teaching and use of languages, especially in volatile contexts where they come into contact, or even to into conflict, involving different groups of people, and where policies and laws must be formulated and implemented. Language planning, therefore, comprises a gamut of activities, which can be broadly grouped into three types: status planning, corpus planning, and acquisition planning.
Status planning is about the determination of the status or standing of a language in relation to other languages in a multilingual society. So it refers to language planning at the macro-sociolinguistic level. Status planning involves decisions about the selection, and the functional allocation or reallocation of a language or language variety (that is, deciding which language/variety should be used for which function, purpose, etc.). In our situation, status planning assumes a conspicuous inter-language character as it involves three distinct languages, in addition to its nature as an intra-language activity when applied to dialects/varieties of a single language. Decisions about which language or language variety should be made a national or official language, or a medium of education, or a link language etc., come within the purview of status planning. Deliberate governmental participation in policy making in this activity is often the case.
Corpus planning is not essentially connected with a corpus (i.e. a computerized collection of language data in the form of written texts and transcripts of recorded speech) though it may use corpora as tools in the process. This is language planning at the micro-sociolinguistic level. It involves selecting and codifying norms in a language, as when it writes grammars, or standardizes spelling, etc.
Acquisition planning is the type of language planning in which a government intervenes in order to influence the status, literacy, distribution, etc. of a language through education. Though nongovernmental organizations may sometimes carry out acquisition planning, government involvement in the process is more common. It is this type of language planning which we are most concerned with on the ten year trilingual master plan.
There are usually five stages to language planning. Accordingly, the proposed trilingual project will involve 1) selection (choosing the standard forms of the three languages), 2) codification (compiling the basic grammars, dictionaries, and textbooks to establish the standard varieties), 3) elaboration (developing these varieties for use in different domains of community life, and encouraging the production of literature written in the standard forms), 4) implementation (the government encouraging the use of the languages), and 5) acceptance (the majority of the population agreeing to use all the three languages in appropriate situations, and to recognize them as a normal part of their social and national identity).
Serious study of language planning as an academic concept started in the 1960’s. Harvard University professor Einar Haugen (1906-1994) is regarded as the pioneer of modern language planning. His 1966 book “Language Conflict and Language Planning, the Case of Modern Norwegian” is still a source of reference for language planners. Our involvement with language planning (though probably it was not described as such at the time) predated the advent of the linguistics of language planning by at least two decades. The change of the medium of education (from English to native tongues) along with the introduction of free education in the mid-1940’s may perhaps be described as a case of acquisition planning because of its connection with education. 1956 marked a watershed in language management. The various amendments brought to the Official Languages Policy under the present Presidential Constitution (1978) since its inception to date represent phases of status planning which have constitutionally guaranteed parity of status to Sinhala and Tamil as national and official languages, while English is recognized as the link language. According to the Official Languages Policy, a person is entitled to be educated through the medium of either of the National Languages; recently, English has rejoined Sinhala and Tamil languages as a medium of education; both Sinhala and Tamil are the languages of administration throughout Sri Lanka; the maintenance of public records and the transaction of business in public institutions are done in Sinhala in all the provinces of Sri Lanka other than the Northern and Eastern Provinces where Tamil shall be used; however, the Sinhala or Tamil linguistic minorities of the Northern and Eastern Provinces, or of all the other Provinces respectively are enabled to have their business attended to through the medium of their own native language, or another language of their choice; the language of legislation and that of the courts, too, are both Sinhala and Tamil; all laws and subordinate legislation are enacted or made and published in Sinhala and Tamil, together with a translation in English. When citizens feel that their language-related rights are being violated, there is provision for legal redress.
If constitutionally and legally there is no room for any citizen to suffer discrimination on the basis of language or ethnicity, then why is that there appears to be a persistent (though usually unexpressed) impression that ethnic harmony is going to remain as much a chimera as ever into the foreseeable future?
From my point of view, a number of answers can be suggested to explain such a pessimistic view. But here I will only write about what I consider the most immediate one among the different causes of the apparent malaise: our failure to implement fully the Official Languages Policy at the grassroots administrative level, where ordinary citizens transact business with the state/government. This failure has a simple cause, and that is the fact that a considerable number of government servants lack acceptable proficiency in more than one language. However, this is a situation that successive governments have been trying to remedy through language training programmes.
The trilingual initiative of the government is a timely one in this context. The idea is to turn Sri Lanka into a trilingual nation within the next ten years. The current peaceful atmosphere, and the growing popular awareness of the usefulness of the scheme would encourage the architects of the plan to hold out hope that it will succeed if properly implemented.
The successful completion of the ten year plan will depend on a number of factors. The commitment of those who are entrusted with the tasks involved in the five stages of the language planning enterprise will be foremost. Hardly less important will be the purposeful mobilization and exemplary professionalism of the educational authorities including teachers. The positive response of the target population is the next essential condition. Here the most important ingredient will be motivation. The students must be made to see a legitimate reason for undergoing the hassle of learning three languages where one or at the most two would appear to be sufficient. In addition to convincing them of the necessity of an English knowledge for a decent education, it will be necessary to inculcate them with an attitude of mutual respect and fellow feeling among the different communities.
In working towards that goal, the colonial origin of the language or ethnic problem should not be overlooked, nor a myth substituted instead. 1956 was not the beginning of our troubles, rather it was the successful conclusion of one stage of our emergence from the incubus of imperial domination, as later 1972 was. During their occupation the imperialists sought to strengthen and perpetuate their predatory stranglehold on our diverse nation by deliberately dividing it along ethnic lines. The privileged status that they conferred on sections of the population which had embraced the English language and the Christian religion was not to the advantage or the liking of the dispossessed masses of all communities. However, even among the privileged who enjoyed imperial patronage there was discrimination against representatives of the majority ethnic community paralleled by preferential treatment meted out to those of the minorities. Since the emancipation of the downtrodden of all the communities ushering in democratic rule meant the end of the perks and privileges that they were enjoying under the occupiers, naturally those elements were opposed to the fulfilment of the legitimate aspirations of the majority. We must come to terms with this past instead of demonising the majority community and blaming them for every problem that the country faces. Mutual hatred and recrimination fed by myths will take us nowhere.
Before independence, the ordinary masses belonging to all communities suffered as third class citizens in their own country except the thin upper crust of the population that collaborated with them. The supremacy of English and the undue privileged status of the small minority (the so-called elite) which benefited from that lingering colonial afterglow was significantly attenuated, if not completely eliminated, by the changes introduced in 1956. The real or perceived linguistic anomalies following from ‘Sinhala only’ (which was no worse than ‘English only’ in multilingual America or ‘Hindi only’ in multilingual India as ‘national’ languages) have been constitutionally resolved since. Today we live in a country where we are all equal citizens, enjoying the same linguistic and other rights. Just as we share equal rights, we must shoulder equal responsibilities.
It is said that divisive tendencies based on the language issue eventually led to the separatist terror which ravaged the country for thirty years. We have now successfully put behind us both of those problems. If the language problem put us in trouble in the past, this time around a trebly powerful language factor has come to our help. We are on the threshold of a new era of national unity and economic development, neither of which is possible without the other. No more propitious time has ever emerged for such a bright prospect for development since Independence. The key to economic and social advancement is a developed human resource base, for which high quality education is a sine qua non. The three language treasure that we have inherited or acquired must be utilized to the full for human resource development in pushing for the goal of Sri Lanka being eventually hailed as the Wonder of Asia.

Technology-mediated Language Teaching

Technology-mediated Language Teaching
(First published in The Island/Friday 26th November 2010)
Any teaching-learning situation involves a dynamic interrelationship between three components: the learner, the subject, and the teacher. The role of the teacher in this relationship is to initiate and maintain effective learner engagement with the subject. Pedagogy is about how this can be done efficiently. A handy tool that modern teachers can use in their teaching is found in the form of Information and Communications Technology (ICT).
Incidentally, the word ‘pedagogy’ has an interesting etymology: According to the Chambers Dictionary, it derives from ‘pedagogue’, (‘teacher’), which itself entered the English language partly through French and Latin from the Greek ‘paidagogos’ (‘a slave who led a boy to school’). Considering the ‘slaving’ (working hard, usually for someone else) that conscientious teaching involves today, ‘pedagogy’ is an appropriate term for a teacher’s strategic role in the instruction process. The technology tool has the potential to ease a teacher’s burden considerably. But, how does this apply to an English language teaching situation?
Each English teacher, whether a novice or an expert, confronts a unique set of pupils in a unique setting (place, time and circumstances), and faces the unavoidable challenge of determining their own classroom practice to suit the pupils. A novice teacher may be required to rely on their own (perhaps totally uninformed) devices or, luckily, on guidance where it is available, while an expert practitioner usually draws on personal knowledge and experience in doing this.
A teacher’s classroom practice consists of the specific teaching and learning activities that are designed. Individual decisions about these are based on the teacher’s ideas, beliefs, or assumptions about the nature of language, and the psychology of language learning on the one hand, and on the other, on their knowledge of English, and their understanding of the pupils’ learning styles. In other words, a teacher’s understanding of how learners learn English in terms of a particular pedagogic ideology will determine their decisions about the overall classroom procedure to be adopted.
According to available information, already about 84% of the households in Sri Lanka enjoy the electricity facility; computer literacy is at 30%, and is fast spreading; English and IT are being promoted as related subjects. (The level of computer literacy that is required in the English language classroom is not high, and is limited.) In this context, using ICT would prove a popular strategy for enhancing language teaching and learning. This shouldn’t be interpreted as a proposal to provide a few computers for each class, and hand over all the teaching to them while the teachers sit back and idle. ICT will only be a tool. It will be used sometimes for part of a lesson with one group of students, while the others are engaged with other activities. ICT use in the class can also be expected to train the pupils to do self-access work with a computer at home.
Today, ICT is in common use, particularly in administration and business spheres. There is no important office, shop, bank, hospital, factory, or firm that doesn’t use it. Not using ICT where the routine work involves communicating and computing would be deemed primitive. School children would love innovations that put them in contact with modern technology which is now a normal feature everywhere else. English language learners do not enjoy being left behind in this general movement towards technological modernity. Young people will quickly embrace ICT integration into English language instruction because it is trendy, in addition to being attractive in other ways.
If ICT use can be ‘normalized’ in our schools (in the sense that the computer becomes as normal a feature in every classroom as the black- or whiteboard has been to date), then it will prove to be an effective leveller between urban and rural schools. The need to attend expensive urban centres for educational support will be greatly reduced for rural students, because they will be able to access the necessary sources of information online. We already have a number of government and private sector-sponsored online education programmes. Technology-based education in Sri Lanka has a promising future. (Ref. my column for 27th August and 3rd September 2010)
In terms of pedagogy, the two most important advantages of technology-based English language instruction will be: 1) it will be highly motivational, and 2) it will create a highly productive context for effective language learning. Of these, the second advantage may be elaborated thus: ICT provides multimodal interaction, that is, communicative activities involving all the four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing; it will allow differentiated instruction, which is a strategy in which students of mixed ability levels are helped to proceed at their own rates while learning the same concepts; ICT also encourages autonomous learning. The first advantage, the valuable motivational factor, is due to the novelty and the variety that modern technology constantly brings into the language learning experience.
Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) first appeared in the early 1980’s. CALL programmes required learners to respond to cues on the computer screen, and involved tasks such as matching sentence halves, filling in gapped texts, and doing multiple-choice activities. CALL materials of the present day are more sophisticated than these. Access to ICT has enabled both teachers and students to go beyond the use of computer programmes to the use of the Internet and web-based resources. In view of this, the term Technology Enhanced Language Learning (TELL) was coined in the 1990’s. In an attempt to reflect the growing possibilities offered by the Internet and ICT, other terms have been suggested to replace CALL and TELL such as Web-enhanced Language Learning (WELL), Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL). Since the use of the computer remains relevant to all of these, experts in the field still prefer to stick to the original term, namely, CALL.
Teachers can use CALL materials prepared by the authorities, or those that they compile by themselves in an institution. The Internet offers a wide variety of CALL materials. These can be used to supplement a course that is already being delivered. The language teaching professionals who develop such materials subscribe to a particular philosophy. For example, assumptions about the three components of a teaching-learning situation mentioned at the beginning of this essay are implicit in most CALL materials. One assumption is that, in order to become independent learners, students need teachers to guide them in choosing what to learn and how to learn it, and the specific language (that is, the style of English: formal, informal, etc.) that they should focus on. An assumption relating to the subject (English) is that the English language represents a variety of styles that serve different purposes. For instance, the language needed to ask someone you know for a favour differs in grammar and vocabulary from that needed to request a similar favour from a stranger or a social superior. Teachers guide pupils not only by selecting appropriate materials, but by structuring the activities for learning, and for monitoring their progress; teacher guidance helps the learners to continue learning English and to expand their knowledge of the language.
It is now generally accepted that second language learners learn a language by specific stages, as Tony Erben et al (Teaching English Language Learners through Technology. Routledge, 2009) point out. Teachers can’t force it on them all at once. Learners will acquire new language structures only when they are cognitively and psychologically ready to do so. For example, learners listen and respond non-verbally to simple commands, and become able to say short formulaic structures such as “yes”, “no”, “Good morning”, “Thank you”, and develop a receptive vocabulary of a few hundred words, before they begin to manage one or two-word answers or short utterances. These two phases of language acquisition represent the first two of four such stages that Krashen and Terrel (1983) described (viz. preproduction, and early production stages; the other two are the speech emergence stage, and the intermediate fluency stage). Incidentally, according to Tony Erben and his co-authors, in spite of there being various other taxonomies (ways of classifying and naming) to categorize stages of language development, many education systems in the US adopt the four-tier model proposed by Krashen and Terrel that I have just mentioned. Later researchers (e.g. Pienemann, 1989, 2007) have confirmed that there is an immutable language acquisition order.
A teacher cannot alter this natural process. But they can definitely quicken the pace of language development. The multimodal resources made available through ICT are an ideal way for activating the natural phases of second language acquisition. Technology enables the teacher to create an ‘acquisition-rich classroom’ via interactive pedagogic activities. The authors of the above-mentioned book summarize ‘useful research generalizations’ provided by Ellis (2005) among others into five principles for generating such an acquisition-rich language learning environment.
The first of these is that the English language learners should be provided with many opportunities to read, to write, to listen to and to discuss oral and written English texts expressed in a variety of ways. This involves not only the ability to listen to a spoken text or read a written text, and learn what is there to learn, but also the ability to communicate the information acquired to another person (who wants to learn it ). Academic literacy is today defined as the ability to use speaking, listening, reading, writing, and critical thinking to learn what they want to learn, and to communicate or demonstrate that learning to others who need it.
The second principle is that the learners need to focus their attention on patterns of English language structure. To become efficient communicators, they must learn the language structures that help them express themselves clearly, and the rules that govern the appropriateness of language for a particular context. The assumption that there is a natural order or sequence of language acquisition implies that grammatical structures emerge in the communicative utterances of the learners in a fixed, regular order. The teacher’s responsibility is to create a language-rich environment which induces them to use grammar relevant to the acquisition stage they have reached.
The third principle says that the language learners need to be given classroom time to use their English productively. This is based on the assumption that the interaction that takes place when second language learners, engaged in talk with their colleagues, ‘negotiate’ for meaning. That is, conversation is not usually a straightforward matter of exchanging ready-made pieces of information between the interlocutors; the messages get clarified, or even modified, the meaning more defined through questioning, agreeing with what is said but with reservations, or totally disagreeing, or asking for clarifications, and so on; this is supported by other forms of feedback including non-verbal clues such as facial expressions revealing incomprehension, confusion, or disagreement, etc; thus meaning is newly created in the course of a ‘negotiating’ process. Interaction through such negotiation for meaning is assumed to facilitate language learning. In the domain of second language acquisition (SLA) theory, this is known as the interaction hypothesis, which has been primarily developed by M. Long (1996, 2006). The availability of input of the right quality and quantity, together with provision for output (i.e. opportunities for using the second language) advances language development.
According to the fourth principle, students need to be given the opportunities to spot their errors, and to correct them. Teachers should encourage learners to reflect on their language, on ‘correct’ forms of language. This must happen at least in the English classroom. For most of the time that children spend at school, they engage in activities which focus on their understanding of subject matter; rarely do they have an opportunity to notice the contribution language makes towards communicating the content of the lessons clearly without misrepresenting it. Wrong grammar is a problem where there is a need for clarity and precision of presentation. It is only when students are aware of this, and make a conscious effort to discover their errors, and correct them that they can become efficient communicators. Teachers should help them in this. Ideally, every teacher must be a language teacher.
The fifth and final principle in our list is based on all that preceded. It advises the teacher to design activities that maximize interaction among the learners in English. Students’ active involvement in linguistic communication in the class is the main factor that ensures successful language learning.
The five principles delineated above provide parameters for a curriculum that addresses the language acquisition needs of the learners. Sensitivity to the four stages of language development should be an essential feature of such a curriculum.
Of course, technology can be used in English teaching within the classroom without having to constantly go online. For example, teachers and learners can work offline with pre-downloaded instruction materials, or with such materials photocopied, which would be safer in places where there are frequent power and connectivity breakdown problems.

Teaching Language through Literature

Teaching Language through Literature
(First published in The Island/Friday 12th November, 2010)
Children love to play with language. Toddlers sometimes coin their own non-sense musical phrases and enjoy singing them repeatedly. Older children play games in which singing is an essential accompaniment to physical movements. They like to listen to stories and relate ones which they already know or which they make up. Children display a natural dramatic talent. They enjoy reciting poetry. The love of using their language creatively for the sheer joy of it is natural to humans, and is at the root of the creation of, and the engagement with, literature. This situation can be exploited to promote the learning of English as a second language by including a literary element in the English curriculum from the beginning.
Some educators in the past rejected the use of literary texts as ‘drill materials’ for the development of the four basic language skills on the grounds that in such a situation students would learn neither language nor literature sufficiently well. Therefore they preferred to defer the introduction of literature to a later stage when the students would be expected to have gained enough mastery of the language to respond to literature without difficulty. However, with the communicative language teaching approach steadily gaining currency, and the ‘drill’ aspect of language practice becoming less emphasized, this attitude changed. Today it is normal to incorporate literary pieces in English language textbooks.
Literature provides interesting language practice materials. It affords a chance for the learners to be aware of the creative possibilities of language that enable them to communicate ideas and states of mind beyond the merely routine, utilitarian level. Behind its apparent triviality, literature hides that which makes us human in a profound sense. It has its birth in the human passion for creating beautiful forms by drawing on the resources of language, such as the sound and sense of words, rhythm, rhyme, etc. Words are the raw material that literary artists shape into formal beauty. There is pleasure in creating literature, and in reacting to it. In spite of the pleasure element that literature is ordinarily associated with, it is nevertheless serious business, for it is concerned with intensely felt experience. Through its formal beauty literature helps us to reflect on the deeply sorrowful aspect of our existence (bereavement, betrayal, loss, and endless other eventualities) which all humans share, and just as well, to celebrate the most cherished things in life (love, marriage, birth of a baby, fulfilment of hopes, discovery of beauty, and the rest). In the end, we experience the “serene joy” of coming to terms with the bitter-sweet nature of our existence. Thus literature increases our capacity for making sense of our world, for expressing it, and for sharing it with our fellow humans, which enriches our humanity.
In literature, therefore, language is used for exploring a level of experience that goes beyond the merely physical to encompass our emotional life in which we actually ‘live’, in the sense that we are concerned with such things as the ultimate meaning, the frustrations and the fulfilments, and the agonies and the ecstasies of our existence, and above all with the ultimate joy of living in the face of these contradictions. It is not that these abstract notions about the value of literature should be conveyed to the students verbally; in reality, it would be after many years of familiarity with literature that generalisations such as those come within their powers of comprehension. But children have an instinctive fascination with the mysterious power of language to transport them to a different plane of experience.
Literature usually involves four forms: essay, poetry, fiction, and drama; but now we also include film in this list. Though both drama and film are primarily for watching, the manuscripts of plays and the shooting scripts of films can be read and enjoyed as literature. All these literary forms represent language being used for interpreting the world of experience, and communicating it to others through the engagement of their aesthetic sense (= ability to enjoy things of beauty).
The prevalent communicative language teaching principles would suggest that literature is an easily exploitable resource for language instruction. The great potential of literature as a context for pleasurable as well as useful language practice lies in its intrinsic appeal to youthful creativity, its inclusion of all the four basic language skills and more, and its wide scope for collaborative engagement among the students, in addition to individual interaction with the texts.
My comments here relate to the teaching of English as a second language to Sri Lankan students. Of course, no such thing as teaching the language exclusively through literature is intended. Literature is viewed here as one important way of using language. Language teaching and learning should involve more than literature. The important thing is that when specimens of literature are presented as components of an English teaching course they should be subordinated to the actual purpose of using literature in that situation, which is providing an interesting context for authentic language use. But the value of the texts as literature should not be discounted. Otherwise, there will be no difference between the other forms of texts included in the same course and the literature pieces in their treatment, rendering the latter redundant.
However, it is obvious that we cannot initiate our students to all the intricacies of the literary experience from the word go, although its essence is nascent in the crudest form of their contact with literature. Just as an insistence on perfect grammar, pronunciation, and accent, etc tends to frighten students out of a purposeful attempt to learn English, so a perceptibly rigid concern on the part of teachers to deal with literary texts exclusively as literature will kill the second language learners’ interest in them. What the teachers can exploit, particularly at the beginning level, is literature’s appeal to the children’s native love of using language creatively for the pleasure it generates.
In the language teaching context, therefore, the value of literature lies in its potential for providing a context for authentic linguistic communication in a unique aspect of language use. Creative literature uses language for exploring the world of imagination, thought, and values, as distinct from using it to deal with merely factual and utilitarian information. The usual English language textbooks contain a few examples of literature such as simple poems, short stories, extracts from longer fiction, or drama, and essays among a majority of non-literary texts. The way that student interaction with non-literary texts is stage-managed (that is, the way non-literary texts are taught, in traditional terms) is not suitable for stimulating interaction with literary texts.
The sort of literature presented to students for engagement and enjoyment should be graded according to their age and their level of attainment in English language proficiency. Thus at the primary level, singing nursery rhymes would be a good introduction to the literary experience through the delightful music of the words, and the visual images that the rhymes conjure. Children may be given the opportunity to draw pictures to illustrate their songs as an additional activity.
At the same time, the amount of contribution that they make towards the real purpose of the lesson – linguistic development – should be the determinant criterion in the selection and assignment of learning tasks. For example, what useful purpose will learning and singing nursery rhymes serve apart from the delightfulness of the activity itself? It will serve to teach the children the pronunciation of English sounds; when they memorise the verses, they remember some chunks of English which they can repeat later in appropriate contexts, and this would increase their familiarity with English, and also give them a sense of confidence about their ability to learn the language. It would also be good for students to be asked to compose their own poems.
There are other criteria to be taken into consideration in the selection of samples of English literature for the English curriculum.
Since our real focus is teaching English as a second language, and not teaching English literature for its own sake, the specimens chosen should necessarily exemplify contemporary English, English from around the world as well as what we are familiar with in Sri Lanka. English literature is being produced in many countries and cultures, and there is an inexhaustible literary commonwealth for curriculum makers to draw on. So there probably is no vacancy for Chaucer or Shakespeare in an English language course book except in a modernised version. Selections may be from any number of English using countries around the world including our own.
The selections should be appropriate for the age, the interests, the proficiency level and the cultural background of the students. The literariness of the texts can be increasingly emphasized as the students’ language proficiency grows. Since unconventional use of language is normal in literature, especially in poetry, sophisticated literary texts are not suitable for beginning language students. These should be introduced at the higher levels where the learners know what the conventional forms are well enough to identify deliberate deviations from the norm that writers use to create special literary effects.
The purpose of including literature in the English curriculum is to exploit the potential it has for generating interesting classroom interaction and discussion in the language. A story, a poem, an essay, or a piece of drama can lead to lively discussion among the students, when it is well handled by a knowledgeable teacher. Usually, there are two kinds of questions that are asked to guide the students: specific and general. To illustrate these, I’ll refer to James Thurber’s (1894-1961) short humorous essay “The Moth and the Star”. If teacher guidance is limited to asking such specific comprehension questions as “Who did the young moth tell about his love of the star?”, “What was her reply?”, “What did she ask him to set his heart on instead?”, or “Was his father happy about the moth’s behaviour?” etc, these will get ready answers from the students, but lead to limited classroom discussion. An exclusive general question like “Whose point of view, in your opinion, is the author supportive of, the young moth’s or his parents’?” should naturally invite a variety of responses, and hence create more discussion, but may be a bit too challenging for the majority of the students to tackle. (Readers may visit my literature blog heli29.wordpress.com for the text of Thurber’s essay) A more sensible approach would be to first ensure the students’ understanding of the facts of the story through specific questioning, and then to enable them grasp what interesting point of view or argument or theme the separate facts build up to.
If, for the sake of asserting our common humanity, we want English to bring the peoples of the world to us, and to take us to them across all kinds of cultural, political, social, and other barriers, reading English literature from around the world and adding our own share to the ever expanding literary commonwealth will prove the surest way to do that. By incorporating good specimens of English literature in the second language textbook materials for developing language facility through maximising communication and interaction among the students in the literary use of the language, we can take our first steps towards that lofty ideal.

Launching into the English Medium through an Integrative Approach

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

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

END

Teachers as Nation-builders

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

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

Letting the genie out of the bottle

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

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

Concluded