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Why design is important

by Ranjit Weerasinghe

I learnt English as a subject at school for ten years devoting about one hour per day on all five days of the week - okay! You may calculate the total number of hours of contact with the teacher - and finally left school without being able to converse freely in English. My own fault, or was it? How many would fall into this category? On the contrary, hundreds of Chinese and Ukrainian immigrants in Canada start from ABC in a classroom and emerge within three months, quite able to live and work in the English speaking society.

Going to school was a habit when we were children. Whatever was given, each of us took with varying degrees of success. It was like moving with the current wherever it was heading. The challenge of reforming our education system, stable in its inertia, is admittedly formidable.

Yet I believe that all is not lost and incremental rather than comprehensive attempts at change could be both beneficial and pragmatic. In this brief article I attempt to highlight certain critical aspects to be considered in designing courses to upgrade the English knowledge of school-leavers in general. An underlying assumption I always rest on, is that a language is not something to be 'taught'. May be it is not even learnt in the traditional manner but acquired rather. If we view language acquisition more as a social process rather than the product of a teacher-student relationship things may fall into place. Think, for instance, of how we came to understand and speak our mother language long before we started going to school!

Simply glance through the newspapers and you'd find quite a number of institutions and individuals offering guidance and assistance in improving English. The emphasis is on spoken English; quite rightly, of course. Naturally their aim is to lure the market. Anxious students hungrily seek their services; but what's their degree of success. Perhaps no one has researched into this.

A critical issue is whether it is possible and practicable to design a course to fulfill the needs of all the students who seek such upgrading.

The level of English knowledge among school leavers varies widely, in all four basic skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. Yet the more critical factors in the design of an effective course of English learning are not sensitive to this disparity per se. Such disparity could be tackled through effective placement at commencement. Let's think of some of the more important aspects.

Firstly, one should identify the objective and purpose of the student. It may be for general social mobility and acceptance, or to pursue a university career, or for employment in the Middle East, or to emigrate to Canada or Australia.

To be more specific, could a young man aspiring to be a successful salesman in the private sector benefit equally from the same course of learning, as say, one seeking an academic education in the university? Obviously the latter would want equal emphasis on all four basic skills while the former may want emphasis on listening and speaking.

An academic will need to listen to, or read and understand subtle, sometimes ambiguous statements, interpret them, and express his or her opinions in an academically acceptable language, both spoken and written. A salesman could be effective if he or she speaks fluently, persuasively and convincingly, even in a colloquial version, slang included. Both these mean mastery; but of different versions and different aspects of the language.

Hence the central issue in course design is to identify the objective and purpose of the potential students and address such. Perhaps an academic may follow a diploma while a salesman will opt for a spoken English course. Someone due to proceed to the Middle East in three months' time may chose a crash course in spoken English. The relative emphasis in the content and methodology of each course has to vary according to the needs and demands of the student objective.

Secondly, the traditional teacher-centered approach adopted in most of our classrooms is not the conducive to second language acquisition. We have to break away from the obsolete Grammar-translation approach to language teaching and the ineffective rote learning modes of the past.

The key factor in language acquisition is the use of the target language which gets relegated when the teacher, as expert, holds the floor for 80% of the time. A model course design has to emphasise the communicative aspect of language and adopt approaches and methodologies that promote communication, group work, pair work, role-play, and other interactive situations within the classroom.

The traditional role of the teacher may then change. He'd be a facilitator (of the acquisition process). The student may interact under his or her direction and supervision. The teacher may plan and conduct the lesson, using his/her skill and experience to seize the right moments to intervene productively during the proceedings. The important consideration is to maintain the flow.

An accomplished facilitator will not normally interrupt a student when the latter is delivering. It breaks his/her flow (which may be irretrievable) causing embarrassment. Some teachers avoid correcting any mistakes when a student is delivering. Mistakes are noted without identifying who made them and dealt with, in subsequent sessions. In an overall sense, more time should be set aside for student activity than teacher activity. "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand," so said Confucious.

Third, comes the undue emphasis laid on grammar as the central component of a language along with the notion that it should be dealt with separately. My belief is that this is a traditional myth. Pure grammar when taken up in a separate class or session or module is both boring, and frustrating.

The more effective approach, as borne out in research (into all the critical areas of cognitive, affective and psychomotor acquisition of a second language) is the introduction of grammar inductively through other modes such as games, dialogues, recorded conversions, imperatives and interrogatives, role-play and the like. The course design has to be amenable to the inclusion of grammar elements in limited (such limit may vary with situation-specific circumstances) doses skillfully blended into interesting activities that maintain student enthusiasm and alertness alive through the lesson.

A fourth consideration is the creation, by design, of a relaxed, learner-friendly atmosphere in the classroom. There are so many ways of bringing this about.

The use of authentic, real life situations as background material; anything that the learners could readily relate to. Tales of Andare or a scene at the Eye Hospital junction or a village fair would fit the Sri Lankan classroom better than the Pickwick Papers or Piccadilly Circus. Warm up exercises to introduce the theme of a lesson at commencement is another way to inject receptiveness into the student. Opt for the positive approach and not the negative.

Commend and encourage participation and contribution of students in preference to punishing or criticising errors and mistakes (by and large, mistakes are inadvertent human errors such as a slip of the tongue while errors are made due to ignorance). Punishment is embarrassing and often yields negative results, particularly in the natural process of second language acquisition.

Feedback is the final issue I wish to go into. Most courses in teaching of English lack proper, built-in feedback mechanisms. Hence it's a case of delivery.

The much needed flexibility to accommodate any student responses and other changes incrementally as they get along is absent. This reduces the effectiveness of the course appreciably. Ascertaining how the students understood the previous lesson is critical to the current lesson. "Proceed from the known to the unknown". Feedback may be built into the warm up exercises of a lesson plan or to the summing up session or both. In addition, feedback sessions may come in when major subject areas are being revised.

On-going assessment (mostly qualitative) through skillful observation, periodical and impromptu tests, should precede any final examination of assessment for an award. Often participants in English courses want only to obtain some certificate as qualification for employment. Some institutions award certificates even to candidates who do not reach specified standards because denial means loss of business.

Now let me go into some of the more controversial issues even at the risk of stirring a hornet's nest. I am aware that many distinguished teachers of English are divided on some of these issues.

The first is the issue of pronunciation. What is ideal pronunciation? How good should we be in this regard? My contention is that no hard and fast rulings could be given when we deal with such an elusive and qualitative subject.

We should surely differentiate between the 'P' sound and the 'f' sound; between the 'ball' and the 'bowl'. I'd also discourage the undue emphasis on the 'r' sound common in parts of India. I'd emphasise stress and intonation in pronunciation. But in my day to day life I'd tolerate 'tomorrow', 'door', 'mango', 'gate', 'ticket' pronounced differently from that of the typical native speaker.

Frankly how many of us speak with immaculate pronunciation in our everyday lives even when we know it. Don't we use language primarily as a communication mode? I know of hundreds of Sri Lankans living very successfully in English speaking countries for decades yet retaining their Sri Lankan pronunciation.

Do we ever find fault with a native Australian for pronouncing 'railway station', or 'baby', or 'day' differently from the way an Englishman does? Don't the Americans mispronounce English words? Don't the Caribbean communities have their own versions of English pronunciation? Do all these variations affect the normative purpose of communication? It'd be very hard as a second language speaker to match the pronunciation of the native speakers of any language and such mastery may be worth the effort only for those doing it for special purposes.

If I may go into semantics, it's an issue of overall accent rather than pronunciation. My own conviction is that in practice the ideal pronunciation is limited to the elocution classrooms. The point I'm making is that emphasis on pronunciation in course design should be conditioned by such considerations.

Next, come the adoption of one's mother language as a medium of teaching a second language. A situation where the teacher knows only the target language and the students know only their mother language is a deadlock. Some form of communication is essential to start with. When all or most of the students speak a common language, it's convenient to use it to introduce a second language.

An eminent English teacher of Sri Lanka has published a very useful book on the bilingual system of teaching English. Other instructors, both national and international, advocate the practice.

(To be continued)

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