Photograph Courtesy the Daily News
Had we had just one language in the world, human history would have been written without many of the ugly stains caused by racial and ethnic conflicts. Of course, one may point out that variety of languages is much better and more culturally enriching than linguistic homogeneity. Yet in terms of human suffering, the price we have been paying for this diversity, which is misinterpreted as a biological difference, cannot be easily overlooked. In such a context, the importance of gaining speech fluency in a link language is conducive for bridging the language gap between people in a community.
In our country, English has the potential to bring together those of us speaking only one of two different languages, i.e., either Sinhala or Tamil, that we have acquired in childhood that we call the mother tongue, a term that wrongly makes us feel that the language a child picks up from his parents and family is something hereditary, that it is genetically transferred to the child. However, the language one acquires as a child has nothing to do with any blood relationship between the child and parents; it’s just a circumstantial factor. Every child is hardwired to acquire any language or languages spoken in his immediate linguistic environment.
Decades of Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) in our country has nothing much to show for it although considerable effort has been made to upgrade its methodology. A learner’s speech fluency being the most noticeable aspect of her language proficiency, not many of students can impress people with their poor spoken skills. It is unfortunate that the lack of fluency is blamed on the teachers, particularly on those in government schools. The problem goes beyond the teachers’ inadequate competency to areas such as lack of facilities, unequal distribution of funds to schools, lack of teachers in schools of remote areas, want of motivation, mismatch between learning objectives, teaching methods and testing methods. Of course, insufficient fluency of most teachers of English makes them easy targets of criticism.
The poor language proficiency of students, among other things, is the result of treating English as another subject in the syllabus. English taught as a second language is different from most other subjects in the school curriculum in that it is a means of communication; it is not at all learning about English but a process of allowing the students to acquire it as they have already acquired their first language.
Although most children are exposed to only one language due to being confined to a single language environment at home and in the neighborhood, monolingualism should be regarded as a lack of opportunities. One way of bringing about better social cohesion is to allow children to be exposed to as many languages as possible – Sinhala, Tamil and English – as early as possible. Only a low percentage of children are lucky enough to get this opportunity. Whereas monolingualism may help segregation on the basis of language, bilingualism and multilingualism can significantly diminish the division of people along language lines.
For English to neutralize the language based social estrangement, there should be a game changing shift in approach to teaching English. Of the four language skills – speaking, listening, reading and writing – we have been, both wittingly and unwittingly, placing emphasis on the last two because they best fit the scheme of cutting methodology according to classroom limitations. The result is that fluency, which is the most socially unifying element of TESL in the Sri Lankan context, has been allowed to fall by the wayside. What is sad is that even writing, which is the most marketable commodity in the traditional classroom, where students are supposed to be silent so as to avoid disturbing the neighboring classes, leaves a lot to be desired.
If English is to be an effective link language for promoting fellowship among people who are mostly monolinguals, the teaching of English has to be taken beyond the narrow confines of the classroom. For this to happen, priority should be given to improving fluency at the right time which, according to linguists and language teaching experts, is the early years of a child’s life. It is agreed by almost all linguists that after 18, there begins a steady decline in children’s capacity for acquiring a new language. But unfortunately, it is often at around this age that most students begin to think of improving their fluency in English, mostly to secure employment. However, this is an irretrievable loss of opportunity and a substandard illustration of the better late than never policy.
All these years, the teaching of English in schools hasn’t had as one of its primary targets the promotion of fluency to enable communication between the Tamil speaking and Sinhala speaking monolinguals of the country. Of the four language skills, only writing has been tested at term ends and at public exams, the marks of which hardly reflect the speech fluency of the students. This is a major reason why students as well as teachers pay little attention to fluency improvement. And speech being the most natural and irreplaceable medium of immediate human communication, reading and writing skills can hardly compensate for the lack of spoken skills. Thus, TESL can contribute towards the promotion of the understanding between different linguistic groups by specifically focusing on fluency from the primary grades. It will also unburden the students from a writing centered English language teaching that has proved to be top heavy.
Although writing can be a most liberating and cathartic language experience for mature students, to thrust writing on the beginners of a second language can be counterproductive as it would thwart the most human and socializing aspect of any language, which is speaking. Unfortunately, the writing oriented approach to teaching English is appealing to many students who are programed to believe that the highpoint in learning a language is mastering its grammar rules.
Many private tutors who are not trained teachers do a roaring business teaching grammar to unsuspecting students who end up learning about English but without gaining even the basic competencies of fluency. It’s little wonder that such students insist on more and more grammar even when they enter universities because most of them are too self-conscious to speak “bad English” in the class. The end result is that every year, schools send out to a multilingual society tens of thousands of young citizens whose speaking skills of the only common language are abysmally poor after more than 12 years of instruction. Such a colossal waste of time and resources hardly helps avoid the culturally constructed seclusion of communities resulting from monolingualism. Sadly, these artificially separated groups are wrongly and also dangerously labeled as racial or ethnic groups implying biological differences.
The bottom line is that we need to adopt a more communally friendly approach to teaching English in the country. One may perhaps suggest that we replace TESL with TEPSC, meaning, Teaching English for Promoting Social Cohesion to give the whole exercise a more pragmatic and constructive flavor. It will certainly make the teaching of English a more dynamic and far reaching sociocultural program, which has the potential to create generations of young people who will not only be proficient in an international language but also have much more empathy with those whom they have been culturally trained to treat as “other” due to the want of fluency of a common language.