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by Wilfrid Jayasuriya

The dialogic mode - introduction to the form of presentation

The panel discussion is a well known method of airing points of view. It allows the panelists to try to persuade the audience to their respective points of view. The views they voice are their own. What I propose to do is to allow writers and speakers on the peace process and allied subjects to air their views by quoting them and by not putting words in their mouths to misrepresent them.

This will hopefully enable readers to judge them on their own merits. There is however a compere or mediator in this imaginary dialogue who will direct the discussion. That will be as if Socrates is reborn in 2002 in Colombo. Socrates will have the benefit of knowing much more than he knew, when he lived in Athens long ago.

Socrates: Welcome to this chat room friends. Let me introduce myself as well as the others in this room. You know me don't you? The guy who preferred to die than recant. I wasn't as bad as they made me out in the ancient Greek books.

The accusation was that Socrates is an evil doer and a curious person, who searches into things under the earth, and in heaven, and he makes the worse appear the better. But I got over it by simply agreeing to die when they expected me to deny.

So here I am in cyberspace and I have with me Professor John Carrol, a famous American psychologist, Professor Donald Bowen, an equally famous American linguist and Professor Perkins, an American university teacher in linguistics.

To give meat and weight to our discussions of methods and theories of learning a language we have two well-known practitioners of the art of "spoken English" Mr. Percy Senanayake and Mr. S. D. F. Quintin as well as a parent who tries to teach English to his kids, Mr. Nimal Willarden. English competence will be a crucial aspect of consolidating the peace initiative and that is why I chose this theme. Is there one best way of teaching and learning a language? We begin with John B. Carrol, the psychologist, one of the pioneers of the cognitive code.

John Carroll: Our field has been afflicted with many false dichotomies, irrelevant oppositions, weak conceptualisations and neglect of the really critical issues and variables. ("Current Issues in Psycholinguistics and Second Language Teaching." TESOL 1971).

Socrates: One might almost think that Carrol was talking about the Sri Lankan ethnic problem, with its talk of unitary government versus separatism, sovereignty versus devolution and so on. They are also irrelevant oppositions aren't they? When we talk of the translation method or the audio lingual method or the communicative method these are all aspects of the truth but not the whole truth. Let's ask an American university teacher, Perkins, to explain the cognitive code.

Perkins: The learner of language comes to the learning process with a genetically transmitted ability to learn.

Socrates: A human child has the natural ability to speak unlike an animal. That is the difference between an animal and a human being. Is that what you mean, Dr. Perkins?

Perkins: The human child or any learner of a language does not arrive with a blank sheet on which the teacher can write.

Socrates: Was the blank sheet or tabula rasa the assumption of the behavioural psychologists who pioneered the audio lingual method? Did the behavioural psychologists think that human learning could be stimulated in the same way that Pavlov's dogs were stimulated to salivate, by the ringing the dinner bell? The dinner bell was rung, when food was placed in front of them, but even when the food was not there they would still salivate.

Perkins: Language was viewed by audio linguists as a set of habits. Learning was defined as the acquisition of a new set of habits.

Sentence patterns were formed and pattern practice or choral repetition took place until the habit became automatic: "The sky is blue, The sky is grey; The sky is green." There is a slot at the end of the sentence for the colour of the sky. The slot is filled with suitable words. This is the slot and filler method.

Socrates: Like the form, fill and seal machine of the food packaging industry? But that's the way we learnt English in the baby class. Isn't that the same technique that recent Sri Lankans presidents used, to teach their followers to toe the line? "I give a luxury vehicle I consolidate my support.

I give a house I consolidate my support. I give a ministership I consolidate my support." The mind of any other citizen is a tabula rasa, a blank sheet, in the view of anyone who has the misfortune to become the president of Sri Lanka.

Perkins: With exposure the learner begins to make hypotheses about the language, which he is learning, which are either confirmed or not confirmed. This was called the "creative construction hypothesis." A learner in English, a child or any other, will figure out that to make the plural form he has to add "S" to the singular form. This ability to understand and learn was called the "language acquisition device," or LAD.

Socrates: Boy becomes "boys", as the Sri Lankan cricket captain has learned to refer to his team. Why doesn't he call them "lads" for a change? I'm learning to speak Tamil now but I haven't acquired the LAD yet.

So the difference between the cognitive code and the audio lingual was that the former said the language learning was a creative act while the latter said it was more mechanical. But aren't they both, two sides of a many sided subject? So why did people adopt the audio lingual method? Let's ask Professor Bowen.

Donald Bowen: What was the source of audiolingual success? Detractors attributed it to novelty and the supposed gimmickry of tape recorders in language labs. A great many felt it was emphasis on oral activity that made it popular. The linguists thought that it was 'scientific'. The method was accompanied by carefully prepared materials. And it employed a variety of historically proven teaching practices. (TESOL Techniques and Practices - Bowen, Madsen and Hilferty, Newbury House, 1985)

Socrates:Isn't the audio lingual method the basis of a lot of the stuff in The World Through English series, now used in schools from Year 6 to 11? Isn't it also mixed with the cognitive code to provide a decent menu?

Perkins:The audio linguists broke up or analysed language into small units. Their work was based on a study of Red Indian languages.

They applied the method to teach the privates in the US Army how to speak a minimum of a foreign language e.g. Urdu which they had never heard before.

Audio linguists identified a phoneme as the smallest meaningful unit of sound. They identified sounds called minimal pairs like "bin" and "pin" which differed only in the absence of one phoneme, B or P. They also identified a morpheme as the basic meaning-bearing unit of language.

Thus "in" and "ex" are morphemes in the two words "introvert" and "extrovert" which give different meanings to the word. With these bricks linguists were able to build an edifice, which they called "scientific".

Socrates:Taylor, an American engineer introduced, in the early nineteen hundreds, what he called "scientific management" by breaking up a work process e.g. building a wall, into its smallest parts, and by employing workers to perform such small parts, repetitively, he facilitated mass production. Isn't the audio lingual method, with its repetitive practice of patterns, also a similar product, suitable for mass learning? Perkins:There were abundant drills.

Practising sentence patterns is a teacher centred activity. Cognitive code learning is a learner centred activity. The learner develops communicative competence - when, where how and under what appropriate circumstances can language elements be used.

Socrates: Do the Sri Lankan school English texts have a lot of repetition and drills? Are they also not cognitive? I remember reading the General English for the A Level texts Volumes 1 and 2 written by Dr. Manique Gunesekera et al and thinking that the student is led by the text to understand the words, the phrases, the sentences, the paragraphs and finally the composition, as if he was a larner mason cum carpenter taught to build a house of language, in a meaningful way. That text uses the cognitive code. At the Year 6 level and higher, the texts are more audiolingual. But these differences are due to the nature of the task.

They are differences in emphasis. Unit one of the Year 6 text has 4 lessons in 7 pages. A lot of the activities are drills to make the child use the limited set of words in the unit, in different contexts. Most of it is audio lingual including the focus on grammar.

I understand that the English teachers don't always know how to handle the mechanics of the lessons. The "spoken English" "untrained" teachers on whom the child is dependent for help, outside class, are flummoxed by them.

Nimal Willarden: a parent - I am fairly okay in English - English at A Level - and I try to teach my two children at Years 6 and 8. The syllabus is a functional syllabus - it deals with what children do and dialogues and narratives are about things like sports meets, classes, meals, holidays, letters to pen pals. When we were children our primary school text in English had King Alfred and how he forgot the cakes in the oven and the Sinhala text had Andare and how he ate sugar.

There is nothing to arouse the child's wonder and interest in talking about everyday things.

Thank God there is nothing yet about shramadana, which was the staple of the earliest local dialogues!

Socrates: The teacher's guide for Year 6 says there is a theme for each unit presented through 3 types of texts: a dialogue, a text related to a local situation and a text related to a global situation. The World through English series is perhaps limited by its own aim of conforming to a grammar syllabus and functional syllabus, going hand in hand. But I would like to move on to discuss a very ancient and well-tried method, the grammar translation method.

It sometimes involves the extensive use of the learner's native language or first language or mother tongue (however you may call it.) Is the translation method useful when the child does not know English? Mr. Quintin and Mr. Senanayake are two well known tutors or non formal "spoken English" teachers. Lets ask them.

S. D. F. Quintin:"spoken English" teacher - The child comes to us because she does not understand the lesson taught in class. I give a list of difficult English words in the lesson with Sinhala meanings. I tell the students the story of the lesson in Sinhala. For instance I tell the story of the sports meet, which is described in the dialogue in The World Through English Year 6 Unit 1 lesson 3, in Sinhala.

Then they know what the lesson is about. Then i read the dialogue aloud many times and they repeat after me.

After that I explain the meanings of the words they have read and when they understand, I start doing the exercises given in the lesson, such as discussing in pairs or practising the dialogue in groups. But first they have to understand what it is all about before they can practise the language.

Using Sinhala is essential for that. That does not mean I am using the grammar translation method like in learning Pali or Latin.

Socrates: You forgot to say Pali, Latin or Greek! Do you feel that the lesson is all Greek to the child Mr. Senanayake?

Percy Senanayake" Private tutor - For the rural child the World through English can be Greek without the use of Sinhala. For the urban or semi urban child it may be all too easy. They will be bored. There should be many levels of English available at the O and A levels to suit these differences. Children should be allowed to choose their levels. And government texts should be not compulsory except at the lowest level.

Socrates: I think there are already English A and English B at the O level. How do you deal with literature?

Senanayake:Students want literature because it deals with feelings. I teach literature at the O Level to my students, as non formal or "spoken English" teacher. They enjoy it. I find it useful sometimes to talk about a poem in Sinhala, its theme and its story, without referring to the poem in the book. For instance, I can talk about a typical poetic experience like the one in Wordsworth's "Daffodils", as if it happened to someone in Sri Lanka, walking along a village tank.

Once the story and theme has been told, I provide a list of difficult words with Sinhala equivalents and then go on to teach "Daffodils" in the same way as Mr. Quintin, repeating quite a lot, till it sinks in.

Socrates: By the way did you note a news item in the Island 21st about Wordsworth's daffodils? The flowers not the poem. Here it is:

Island March 21:"For almost two centuries tourists have trekked to the Lake District in the spring to see a yellow carpet of flowers that stretches out "in never ending line. "But that line has been breached as members of a more common and much larger species (of daffodils) encroach from nearby woodland. Conservationists are concerned, that unless action is taken, Wordsworth's native daffodil Narcissus pseudonarcissus, will be corrupted and hastened towards extinction.

Socrates: Who would have thought that Wordsworth's "native daffodil" could have lasted that long?

Senanayake: Getting back to what Professor Carrol, Perkins and Bowen had to say I feel that using Sinhala, to make the child understand, can be characterized as a cognitive code activity. It supplements the largely audio lingual activities found in the local school texts. There are many ways of teaching, aren't there?

Socrates: Yes, many ways to skin a cat as the Americans say or to murder the queen, as the Sri Lankans put it. After all the staple of middle class Ceylonese homour for almost one and a half centuries was the English mistakes made by the hoi polloi. But now that we have renamed English as Singlish that precious source of fun has been lost. Thank you all for an entertaining and instructive session.

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