KOCHI: “English language teachers in the country are creating more of an English phobia among students rather than a liking for the language,” observed K. Elango, national secretary of the English Language Teachers Association of India (ELTAI).
Speaking to The Hindu on the sidelines of the three-day Annual ELTAI Conference held here on Friday, Mr. Elango said a sudden exposure of children to English in schools created in them a hatred towards the language.
“Most children from rural areas have no exposure to English. They are enrolled in English medium schools, and from day one, it is English. It’s absolute nonsense,” he added.
The issue is that teachers do not adopt the right approach and strategy, and the method being followed in schools in India has been imported from the UK or the US.
Owing to this flawed approach, learners fail to communicate in English despite using the language, he observed.
“We seem to be focussing more on grammar and pronunciation, which are the least important aspects. Grammar is knowledge about the language and not the language. If we look at the curriculum right from the primary stage, grammar and pronunciation are introduced at the same time, and it is a wrong approach to teaching English,” said Mr. Elango. He felt that a flawed approach was being adopted even in teaching vocabulary where the focus is on individual words.
“Though learners know 2,000 to 3,000 words each, which, theoreticians say, is enough for conversing in English, they are not able to string them together. In learning any language, the focus has to be on expressions rather than individual words,” he said.
Mr. Elango also found fault with the teaching material, which was mostly produced in the UK or the US.
Making it relevant
“Learners should have command of the language to express their emotions and experiences in a particular context.
“Language teaching has to be localised. It has to be Indianised too. Such an approach will evolve when we start giving importance to realities and contexts. We need to have a language relevant to our day-to-day realities,” he suggested.
Language teaching fails mainly because it is taught as a subject and not as a skill. “In language teaching, use and learning should go simultaneously. That alone will enable learners to internalise it. If you don’t use it, you lose it,” Mr. Elango said.
Experiments
Meanwhile, ELTAI is on a mission to bring about a change in language teaching by bringing together isolated experiments across the country towards making a coherent theory. Teachers from kindergarten to university levels are encouraged to write about their successful experiments, which are then published in the association’s University Grants Commission-recognised journal. The focus needs to be shifted from formal, academic English to informal English.
“Teaching now is highly stereotypical and de-emotionalised. A drab, dry, and unconnected language is given to a child right from the initial stage.
“We are still stuck with a few rhymes. Children may sing it very well; they get the rhyme, but they don’t make any sense out of it,” Mr. Elango said.
