By Vijaya Jayasuriya
After thirteen years at school my child cannot speak a word of English’ lamented a frustrated parent. Hence speaking English with a passable fluency has become an almost unattainable goal for most people. This indeed is not a grouse aimed at state schools alone but even prestigious private academies often fail to achieve this end unless, of course, a child attends such a school right from the kinder garden getting exposed to a kind of curriculum in the English medium that often tends to produce individuals without roots.
The problem is acute with students reaching youth after completing their studies in state schools. Many of them attend classes with the pressing need to learn ‘Spoken English’ even after finishing a course of study in private institutes and equipped with a certain amount of ‘knowledge’ of literature etc. Of course the objective of these courses being introducing students to literature etc, it is not surprising when they become only able to mumble a few utterances, even that with little confidence and fluency.
This indeed is a tragic situation that makes our younger generation full of inhibitions vis-à-vis the job market that holds the potential for their success in life fluency in English being a vital factor that holds they key to success for the youth who fail to get a university education, a sure-fire way to gain that ability is at a premium’… a battery of grammatical rules and a vocabulary book produced a teaching method (called) grammer-translation method (which) for so many years produced generations of non-communicators. The later structural theory of language described the syntax of English as a limited number of patterns into which the lexis or vocabulary could be fitted. In its extreme from, the structural approach enabled many learners to use ‘language-like behaviour’ reflecting one dimentional, and essentially non-communicative view of the nature of language.
(Broughton, G.et al: 1978-39)
This scathing criticism of the olden methodologies of teaching English is indeed justified as the common goal of communication using that language has rarely been achieved by them. While grammar-translation method concentrated on purely the grammatical system of the language, the direct method used the technique of the full use of the target language subjecting the student to ‘total immersion’ of it. Since little tangible advance was made by means of these ventures in regard to students’ acquisition of language, the structural method with variations like oral-aural situational structural method was introduced into the English classroom Though this method concentrated on getting students to learn a selected repertoire of sentence structures mainly by oral-drills and explanations, this too failed to deliver the goods as anticipated.
Communicative approach was the next innovative language teaching philosophy postulated by a broad hierarchy of applied linguists making an unprecedented impact on the English teaching enterprise. Rather than sentence structures this methodology took as its point of departure, as it were, the communicative functions – oral acts we perform in communication such as excusing, thanking, introducing, explaining, describing etc etc. Another trailblazing innovation introduced in the meantime by the leading American applied linguist Stephan D. Krashen was the dichotomy between learning and acquisition.
‘… we often see acquisition in cases where learning never occurred. There are many performers who can use complex structures in a second language who do not know the rule consciously and never did. There have been several case histories in the second language acquisition literature that illustrate this phenomenon, one which I think is quite common. The existence of such cases shows that previous conscious learning is not necessary for language acquisition…’
Krashen, S.D: 1982:84-85 communicative language teaching (CLT) gained some popularity among teachers yet its effect on students proved to be much less than was expected. Whether it is CLT or any other approach aiming at teaching language in bits and pieces either deductively (from rule to practice) or inductively (from practice to rule) is destined to fail for two reasons. Firstly the structures or the communicative functions taken as items to be taught are extremely inexhaustible so that only a limited number of them can be mastered by a student during his schooling career. Secondly, the capacity for adequate practice of these items is hardly available in the schools where the whole curriculum is taught in the first language medium.
There are two essential requirements for a student of language to acquire the ability to speak in that language. One, a fair amount of language structures and the lexis (vocabulary) and two, chances of active practice of those items with an interlocutor. I would like at this point to draw an analogy between language learning for active interaction and a water supply system.
The supply of water to a building mainly needs a network of pipes as well as a source of water such as a storage tank. Both the tank and the pipeline are indispensable for a continuous supply of water and the level of water stored in the tank invariably determines the quality of water pressure through the taps. In the case of a speaker of a language the network of pipes can be compared to his knowledge of grammar while the storage tank is equal to the amount of sentence patterns and the words he has mastered. While the accuracy of his speech is ensured by his knowledge of grammar his fluency of delivery is determined by the amount of sentence structures he has mastered.
From this example it is clear that a speaker’s ability to speak fluently in a language largely depends on the repertoire of words and sentence patterns he has acquired. Assuming that a student has already mastered the grammatical system of a language, how then does he proceed to amass a passable amount of sentence patterns in order to express himself in his day to day exchanges with the others? It is in this context that we are confronted with the sheer number of structural patterns available in a language.
No teacher or school system is ever able to finish during the schooling career of a student – that is around thirteen years – to teach him the whole gamut of patterns available in a language. Even if a teacher manages to achieve this extremely arduous end in her professional career, the amount of practice required for students to internalize a fair amount of it can hardly be provided within a curriculum packed with a load of other subjects requiring a major share of time in a class time table.
The process of a student gaining them astery of a language is twofold – accuracy and fluency. While a thorough knowledge of the grammar and other sentence patterns ensures accuracy, the fluency of speech or in other words the spontaneity of speech requires thorough oral practice done with others who speak the same language.
These are two very important tasks that an industrious student of a language should somehow or other perform in order to achieve his goal of becoming a fluent speaker. To gain a fair share of sentence patterns (syntax) the most effective way is nothing but reading – reading newspapers and books as widely as possible. It is only by wide reading that sentence patterns miraculously get inculcated in the reader’s brains by repeatedly confronting them in the text. The more one reads the more will be the amount of patterns that get accumulated in one’s mind so that they stand in good stead for subsequent use in expression either in speech or writing. Lack of this is unfortunately the root cause of being tongue-tied even when one is surrounded by peers aspiring to speak in English.
Just as the store of these language patterns help expression, the spontaneity of speech surefire interaction engaged in with others who speak the same language. What a student can do in this context is to take part in active speech with his peers quite regardless of the errors or mistakes made in the process. It is profitable at this point to remember a popular catch phrase made by a genius in the field that the fact that you are making errors in speech is a sign of success.
The process described above is exactly what I myself did without having enjoyed English medium schooling nor having a target language community round. I constantly practiced reading two daily English newspapers for nearly five hours a day plus books – mostly fiction – from the Ambalangoda public library to which I am immensely grateful. While reading I also used to put down in exercise books the new words and structures I happened to meet in the process. Likewise I generally learnt minimum thirty to forty words a day.
At the end of two years I was able even to get little pieces published in English newspapers by boldly speaking with friends mostly in wrong English at the beginning (which is called ‘transitional competence’ in applied linguistics) I improved my oral skills too. It is by these efforts that I succeeded in gaining entrance to the Peradeniya English Teachers Training College passing a highly competitive entrance exam plus a tough interview too at the Ministry which proved to be my stepping stone to dizzy heights in an unparalleled academic career in English.
Courtesy - The Island
