Give due space for reading, speaking in English, says VC

S. Thangasamy, Vice Chancellor of Tamil Nadu Teachers’ Education University, addressing a workshop at Ignatius College of Education (Autonomus) in Palayamkottai on Saturday.

The teachers of English, who should necessarily be strong enough in the fundamentals of the foreign language, should give an adequate space for reading and speaking in English as part of the teaching exercises so as to enable the children to communicate in English fluently, said S. Thangasamy, Vice-Chancellor, Tamil Nadu Teachers’ Education University.

Addressing a two-day interactive workshop on ‘Developing oral fluency in students by individual, pair and small group method of language teaching’ at Ignatius College of Education (Autonomus) in Palayamkottai, Dr. Thangasamy said the continuing students’ migration from the government and government-aided schools to the matriculation, Central Board of Secondary Education and international schools was primarily due to the parents’ unquenched thirst for making their children understand English better.

With the hope that their children would learn to communicate in English fluently at least in the new environment, the migration was continuing though it was not happening in most of the cases.

The children, who were being forced to write most of the time, should be given adequate space for reading and speaking in English, but it would be effective only if the teachers of English were strong enough in the fundamentals of the foreign language so that they could intervene to correct the mistakes.

At the same time, the Vice-Chancellor opined that most of the English teachers working with the government and the government-aided schools were “incapable of speaking in English” that had seriously affected the quality of teaching of English in these schools.

“If an English teacher uses effective teaching methods and gives efficient learning exercises to the children, then the attentive students divided into small groups will easily learn the language. If the students are encouraged to speak in English after teaching them the fundamentals of the language, they would get immensely benefited. Otherwise, migration from the government and the aided schools in search of communicating fluently in English would continue to happen though it needs to be checked at the earliest,” Dr. Thangasamy said.

Apart from the students of education, lecturers from 71 of the 84 colleges of education in Tirunelveli, Thoothukudi and Kanniyakumari districts participated in the workshop.