Is this a fish market?” teachers yell as they enter classrooms filled with animated chatter. Though teachers may frown upon students chit-chatting during a free period, students talking to each other is an essential feature of language development. Language pedagogy in India, however, seems to downplay the communicative aspect of language as we focus more on kids becoming biliterate as opposed to bilingual.
The new National Education Policy introduced by the Union Government has a number of laudable features like mitigating the stakes of board exams and discouraging rote learning.
One particular point, that is stirring up a hornet’s nest, is the recommendation regarding the use of a child’s mother tongue as the medium of instruction. Regardless of which language is used, language pedagogy in our country has to be upended if we truly want our kids to be fluent in multiple languages.
Currently, kids become fluent in languages spoken at home. A Hindi-speaking family where parents are educated and fluent in English as well, will produce offspring who speak both languages seamlessly. However, if a language is not spoken at home, kids don’t acquire the same level of ease despite learning it at school, as a first- or second-language, for over ten years.
A child who attends an English-medium school but whose parents aren’t conversant with the language doesn’t end up acquiring the language proficiently. Likewise, children from English-speaking families may fail to acquire fluency in Hindi or a state language, unless the language is spoken at home.
Need to flip our priorities
Though India is a polyglot nation, our schooling system doesn’t seem to bestow linguistic riches on our kids. Why is oral language proficiency eluding our kids? The main reason is that we emphasise literacy, in a very narrow sense, over oral proficiency. Reading and writing are prized over understanding and speaking. For language instruction to be effective, we need to flip our priorities.
Children should first be able to understand and converse in a language. For this, they need ample opportunities to communicate orally, both with the teacher and with their peers.
Role plays and activity-based learning are ideal to promote spoken language. Audio-visual aids may be utilised so children see and hear native speakers use language in context. To enhance vocabulary, teachers may use objects and plaster the room with pictures and their names.
But passive learning should be the exception rather than the norm. As neurolinguistic researcher Albert Costa writes, “social interaction is fundamental for language acquisition.”
Students need to speak the language, preferably in different contexts that are meaningful and relatable. Classrooms may morph into markets, streets, restaurants and doctor’s clinics where students are required to trade goods, ask for directions, order a meal, or list their symptoms in the target language. Students may chat about a cricket match, argue over the ending of a movie, narrate an anecdote, discuss why they shouldn’t be given homework, question the utility of board exams, explain why they are late, interview a teacher and resolve disputes among themselves in a given language. Students’ voices need to be heard as often as, if not more frequently, than the teacher’s.
In most classrooms today, kids start printing letters with stubby, little fingers even before they can have a casual conversation. The textbook model of reading passages and answering questions still dominates. Kids may learn to read a passage fairly smoothly but don’t necessarily exhibit comprehension of it if they are assessed on questions they haven’t encountered before.
And, even fewer can orally discuss what they have read in their own words.
Language acquisition involves listening, speaking, reading and writing. Each of these skills make different demands on the learner. Oral speech involves a continuous stream, whereas written language demarcates word boundaries clearly. Thus, children need to listen and speak a language instead of merely reading text. Ultimately, learning a language involves being able to discern and convey meaning. As linguist and author, Stephen Krashen says, “Language is best taught when it is being used to transmit messages.”