English teaching at primary level in India–
Cultural Interference
(published in HT Lko 5-8-19)
It goes without saying that a language is
embedded in culture. Let’s take the simple examples of two very common words – pranam
and shanti. Can the whole matrix of these words be translated into
English? The English words ‘greetings’ or ‘peace’ are but poor approximations
to pranam and shanti. Even a poet-philosopher of the stature of T S Eliot
failed to get an English equivalent and used the Sanskrit word as it is – ‘Shantih shantih shantih’
in his great poem – The Waste Land. A language, thus, cannot import the
subtle connotations of another language.
The effect of cultural interference is clearly
felt in the teaching of English in a vernacular setting such as the state of U.P. The fact is that in the rural hinterlands
English is not even the second language; it is practically the third language,
as the local dialects (Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Braj…) are the first and, Khadi Hindi
(standard Hindi) is the second language. In this scenario, where even the
teacher is essentially a Hindi speaking person (though may be knowledgeable in
English); the language-reinforcement crisis for the child is so evident.
Culture and communication are intertwined and it determines
how people encode messages, the meanings they have for messages and, how they
get interpreted. For instance, as different from the West, in our
country, a teacher or elder is not addressed by his name/surname,
instead, family friends are identified through some relationship – 'Uncle',
'Aunty', 'Chacha', 'Mama' etc. and, in Hindi, there are two different ways of
addressing an elder and the younger – 'Aap' (for former) and 'Tum' (for
younger).
Associative contexts in which a word is used in a place
might evoke a different understanding of that word. The word 'darling', I
remember, raised shy smiles among us when a teacher addressed a student
lovingly by this term. As 10 years old, in the early 80s we had heard it being
used in the Hindi films in only one connotation. The various nuances of meaning
given to the word ‘sexy’, ranging from obscenity to aesthetics, are only a
matter of one’s cultural environs. Can someone in India, whose experience of a
summer’s day is of a scorching sun and hot loo, compare his beloved like
Shakespeare does in his sonnet- ‘Shall I compare thee to the summer’s day’!
All our educational philosophers have
been advocates of primary learning in our mother tongues. Tagore, in his celebrated essay “The Centre
of Indian Culture”, wrote that a foreign language makes education 'nebulously
distant and unreal, (because it is) so detached from all our associations of
life, so terribly costly to us in time, health and means, and yet so meager of
results.’
Researches all over have showed that
the second language can be best learned at an older age. Broadly speaking, different life stages give
us different advantages in language learning. As babies, we have a better ear
for different sounds and thus we don’t learn a language but we acquire it. As
adults, we have longer attention spans and crucial skills like literacy that
allow us to continually expand our vocabulary, even in our own language.
This is known as ‘explicit learning’: studying a language in a
classroom with a teacher explaining the rules. Young children are very bad at
explicit learning, because they don’t have the cognitive control and the
attention and memory capabilities while adults are much better at that.
The fact is that English teaching in
a vernacular scenario cannot be divorced from its vernacular ambience. Both our
teachers and books are to be aware of this.
We should remember Tagore’s caution -
‘The diversity of our languages should not be allowed to frighten us;
but we should be warned of the futility of borrowing the language of our
culture from a far-away land, making stagnant and shallow that which is fluid
near its source.’
Our English teaching has to go side by side
along our vernacular and the content has to be drawn as much as possible from
the children’s everyday environment. Only this can help in an effective
teaching-learning of English and also let the mother tongue thrive.
Dr Skand Shukla
(Officer of the U.P. Education
Services )
