‘Huge debt owed to Presidential Initiative overlooked’

Jayantha HERATH

A rejoinder to the article ‘Towards a tri-lingual Sri Lanka: Teaching Tamil as a second language to Sinhala Students’ by Asantha U Attanayake

Never heard of the Presidential Initiative, 'English as a Life Skill'?

Attanayake's article entitled 'Towards a tri-lingual Sri Lanka: Teaching Tamil as a second language to Sinhala students' (Daily News: June 11, 2012: Page 19) is more about teaching English than about teaching Tamil to Sinhala students. Describing herself as a lecturer in English at the English Language Training Unit of the Colombo University, Attanayake takes on the subject of English teaching in Sri Lanka and its present status without as much as making a passing reference to the most important and far reaching initiative taken in this field in Sri Lanka in the past 100 years or more, namely, the Presidential Initiative, English as a Life Skill, now popularly known in the country as the 'Life Skill Programme'.

Any English teacher in the country, especially those from rural areas, will vouch for the fact that this Presidential Initiative, launched in 2009, has within a short course of three years resulted in a paradigm shift in English teaching and learning in the country.

While trying hard to wax eloquent on the history of English teaching and its apparent failure, a person reading her article is given the impression that she has not even heard of the Presidential Initiative, English as a Life Skill, despite the radical changes it has brought in the field of English teaching especially in rural schools throughout the country.

Anyone who travels widely in the country will agree that the 'Life Skill Programme' is today a household word in almost every village home that has a school going child. So it is difficult to believe that awareness of the President's Programme and its impact could have silently slipped past Attanayake.

More so as the author goes on to list several of the basic features of the President's programme, one by one, as her proposals for 'correcting the mistakes of the past', without acknowledging, even through a passing reference, the fact that these are in fact the basic features of the President's 'Life Skill' Progamme. It is hard for anyone interested in English teaching and learning in Sri Lanka to plead ignorance on this count because these features have been so clearly articulated and presented in the past three years through scores of articles and public lectures by the coordinator of the 'Life Skill Programme' Sunimal Fernando, among others, and his colleagues.

Life Skill Programme

In the interest of professional honesty, let us list some of these basic features of the programme which have resulted in a paradigm shift in English teaching and learning in the country, which Attanayake fallaciously tries to aggregate to herself. Here are some of the basic features of the President's Programme now being practised in our schools, but offered in the article as 'Attanayake Recipes' for the correct teaching of English.

-Teaching English through a central emphasis on Listening and Speaking rather than on grammar.

- Teaching English as a 'Communication Skill' rather than as a 'Subject'.

* Evolving our own home-grown models and methodologies for English teaching suited to our context.

* Eliminating the 'fear' of English from the mind of the learner

* Recognizing the making of mistakes (e.g. in pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary) as an integral part of the 'language learning process', as 'signs of learning'.

* Bringing about an attitudinal change towards English throughout the country by stripping English of the cultural baggage attached to it.

The above features are in fact the intellectual underpinnings of the President's Programme and hence not an expression of Attanayake's intellect. They have been successfully broken down into myriads of homespun tools, methodologies, teaching techniques and activities by thousands of us English school teachers and master trainers over the past three years and applied by us in our schools as a result of the inspiration and motivation provided by the Presidential Programme.

Innovative rural teachers

We must also recognize that a major reason for the success of the Life Skill Programme lies in the fact that its coordinator Sunimal Fernando did not allow sterile academics living in the world of books and theories to offer advice, but provided the freedom to us English teachers from Sinhala and Tamil speaking rural homes to create and innovate new tools, methods and activities in a spirit of freedom, motivated by an awareness of the catalytic role we English teachers are playing in the social and cultural transformation of the village.

As for the teaching of Tamil to Sinhala students, a subject to which the author pays comparatively little attention despite the title of the article, those coordinating the Presidential Initiative for a Trilingual Sri Lanka should design their policies, strategies, methods, tools and activities by drawing from the enormous fund of language planning and language teaching experience gained in the Presidential Initiative on English as a Life Skill.

Though several sterile academic approaches to Tamil teaching are suggested by Attanayake in the latter part of her article, Sunimal Fernando and his colleagues working on the President's Trilingual Initiative are best advised not to get distracted by the pompous, pretentious trivia offered by so-called academics but to be guided, as they were in the Life Skill Programme, by an earthy common sense and a well founded confidence in the innate creativity and innovativeness of the Tamil and Sinhala second language teachers working in our village schools and by guaranteeing their freedom to create new tools, methods and activities and thereby evolve a new beginning in second language Sinhala and Tamil teaching in the country, just like how a new beginning was achieved for English teaching through the President's Life Skill Programme.

The writer is an English teacher from Kandy