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by Camillus Fernando

Language has both social and non social functions. Socially for expression and communication that is the evocation of a response, its non social use is in the inner life of each person as individual, purely for the sustenance of thought. Language expresses feelings and striving. It is the full current of mental life: reason, desire, impulse, stirrings of emotion and directions to the energies of the will.

Child should listen and read with discrimination and understanding and to write and speak with effect. The teacher's task is to bridge the gap between the language of the child (Childhood and the language of education)

Language is social and communicative in function. The poet is successful when he causes to imagine and to feel. The scientist when he causes us to observe and reason the teacher is successful when the helps the writer to achieve is end. There are three things to be discovered about every piece of writing (a) writer's intention (b) attempt to achieve it (c) link between his intention and language. In science a much higher standard of exactness is necessary both in theorising and observing. Language is the instrument of social intercourse - goal of education could only be reached through language.

The teacher in the school is in "in loco parentis" - he transforms the mother tongue into the language of eduction. The child becomes more receptive to what is novel, a little more curious, a little more eager to explore the unknown. The whole process of education in the home is vague and sporadic in the school it is brought to a sharper focus and more clearly directed to its ends.

English language is a living language. It permeates the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of millions of living men and women. The teacher attempts to bring the child into a world of imagination and thought, a universe of images and abstraction which cannot be reached at all except through the medium of some symbolic representation. Unlike the historian the novelist is concerned with the future of the human beings true to life they need not be true to history. Historian records - novelist relive them. In a novel it is the experience of the individual man which forms the theme and all else is subordinated to this. The mind of the novelist permeates his work and he expresses his mind in his own fashion.

Words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study. Words have power to mould men's thinking, to canalize their feeling to direct their willing and acting. Where there is no language behaviour is non human. If it were not for the descriptive and justificatory words with which we bind our days to together, we should live like the animals in a series of discrete and separate spirits of impulse.

Deprived of language we should be as dogs or monkeys. Possessing language, we are men and women able to persevere in crime no less then in heroic virtue, capable of intellectual achievements beyond the scope of any animals, but at the same time capable of systematic silliness and stupidity such as no dumb beast could ever dream of the proper use of language in an important moral discipline.

Language is the key to concept formation and complex habits of thought. Words become useful in thinking and in communication only as experience give them meaning. Language is the most important tool in the learning process.

"A word without meaning is an empty sound no longer part of human speech" - Vigotsky. Concepts do not arise spontaneously. They are formed out of the child's experience of grappling with different aspects of his environment. The child concepts have been formed in the process of instruction in collaboration with an adult.

The teacher' task will certainly involve his seeking to improve the quality of the children's language, and here it should be stressed that speech is of very great importance. Children lacking speech, lack the instruments of abstraction and conceptualization. A child lacking language will probably have little power for conceptual thinking and will be unable to plan his activity. The teacher has to build up the complex relationship and conceptual forms through guided experience in the use of language.

Finally, educationist Brindley states that, "Learning a language consists of learning the structural rules of the language and the vocabulary through such activities as memorization, reading and writing.

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