Teaching English continues to remain the same over the years — teachers reading out from the text and explaining in the local language; students jotting down lecture notes and reproducing them verbatim for the exam. Many teachers often resort to cheap market guides and printed tuition notes or even their old notes in order to explicate the same texts that are prescribed repeatedly. English is taught as a second language — mandatory for all students during their first two years of college, even when they specialise in any other subjects — but it is still the old, inefficient, grammar-translation method, and the explication strategy in operation. Little distinction is made in the teaching of language and the teaching of literature in English, and there is hardly any change in how teachers teach poetry,prose or drama at the specialisation level.
Short cuts don’t help
Thousands pass through the portals of every college in our state, saddled with specialised degrees diplomas, but lack quality communication skills. They would rather register with some private agency that gives them false hopes of being able to master language skills within a few hours of training. However, no amount of being equipped with technical and technological gadgets as aids to communicate English, will help half as much as the classroom with the teacher who facilitates the good old situational approach. Perhaps the age-old chalk and talk is much better than a smart classroom with an ill-equipped teacher.
Language, by nature, is a lived experience and nothing can be better than when the learner and the teacher constantly interact. Here, the question of correctness and accent and intonation hardly matter. There are many among us who pretend that their English is something that has been directly exported from overseas because of their artificially put-on heavy accent. There are others whose pretentious nature also provides them with an affected manner of speaking in their native tongues.
The English teacher and the classroom have much to offer society rather than churn out mere self pretentious students. English today, is just like any other language — nothing to be glorified or denigrated. If its efficient use can be of some aid to professionals and thinkers, there is nothing stopping one from acquiring it systematically and creatively. English teachers and ardent learners ought to realise this. If this happens, the English classroom could once again become meaningful and enterprising.
The writer is Professor and former Chair, Department of English, Pondicherry University
