Chintan Girish Modi When a colleague of mine introduced me to a little story book called Mr Forgetful, I read it with great delight and amusement. It seemed like the perfect thing to share with children, both for its simplicity and its capacity to induce laughter. On my second reading, I was struck by the idea that one story could inspire many different stories. This led to a project for students of Standard VI at Muktangan as part of their continuous and comprehensive evaluation. Here are some pointers to help you try out the same project in your school. Read out the title of the story to your students – Mr Forgetful. Ask them to think about the title and guess what the story might be about. The objective is to get them to reflect on how a title can often throw light on the plot. Elicit answers and put them up on the blackboard in the form of a mind map. If something sounds silly or weird, do not reject it outright. You have offered students an opportunity to use their imagination, and they might want to let it run wild as they predict what lies in store. It is often great fun to hear the amazing range of things students come up with. There is a lot of scope for laughter in the classroom as they share their thoughts. And there’s just so much more material for stories of different kinds to take shape! Having sparked off your students’ curiosity, read out the story slowly and carefully, pausing wherever required, modulating your voice in keeping with the emotions being expressed. This will help them appreciate the nuances of the story, the little details that create impact and hold them captive as listeners. Do not explain anything at this point. As a teacher, this is a difficult urge to resist – the urge to explain, for fear that the student may not understand. And in the bargain, we sometimes over-explain, and foreclose the possibility of any surprise. It’s true that not all students may challenge themselves to listen between the lines, make meaning on their own, and trust their individual interpretations. However, there is no harm in beginning to challenge everyone a little bit so that they are nudged outside their comfort zone to learn. Just read with expression. Questions, if any, can be answered later. Ask them to listen carefully, to not get stuck if they don’t understand the meaning of a particular

S Upendran I began using songs in the English language classroom over twenty years ago, and I have found them useful not only in teaching the four skills of language – reading, writing, speaking and listening – but also grammar; a subject that is often loathed by both students and teachers alike! I must confess that the idea of using songs was not something that suddenly dawned on me. Though as a child growing up, I did learn a lot of English by listening to songs, I never considered using them as a tool that could be used in the classroom. My curiosity was aroused when I came across a few articles advocating the use of songs. The articles seemed to suggest that songs were a fun way of learning English, and that students, whether they were adults or children, always welcomed them with a great deal of enthusiasm. The first time I used songs was when the university I was working in ran a proficiency level course for students who had completed their Bachelor’s degree and who desired to hone their communication skills. The 30 or so students who had been admitted to the “Certificate of Proficiency in Oral Communication” course were a mixed lot – some whose medium of instruction in school and college had been English, and others who had been taught through the medium of English only when they had joined the undergraduate programme. Armed with the ideas that I had gathered from the various articles I had read, I selected a song, which I thought the students would like (Air Supply’s “Every Woman in the World”) and stepped into the classroom. The articles that I had read were unanimous in their opinion that students generally welcomed songs with unbridled enthusiasm. What I had failed to take into account was the fact that the authors of these articles were all teaching English in Europe. I hadn’t come across any article written by someone who was teaching in a Third World country. Perhaps if I had, I would have been prepared for the ‘shock and awe’ that the students had in store for me. The author teaches at The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. He can be reached at supendran@gmail.com. This is an article for subscribers only. You may request the complete article by writing to us at editorial@gamart.in.

Usha Chandrasekaran In one of my postgraduate classes in English I came across Kayalvizhi who was zealous about learning. She displayed a remarkable understanding of English Literature. With all her flair for fresh thinking, Kayalvizhi stammered a lot while speaking; her writing was intermittent and jerky. During one of our ever-lengthening seminar sessions I learnt that Kayalvizhi reproduced facts collected from her classmates as she was not able to read lengthy material independently. Her remarkable grasp of the unknown and the new and her quest for knowledge kept her on par with the benchmarks we set for assessing performance for college classes. When I probed into her learning history she told me that she had come up to this level by listening to what was taught in the class. She must be an aural learner who receives maximum information through listening. I looked at her with reverence. She added saying that even today she cannot read a novel or short story as the print marks on the page are continuous. She is comfortable if written materials are presented with sub-heads or in short graphs or in bullet forms. Though I am an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher, I did not forget to find out how she reads texts in her mother tongue, Tamil. It was the same story again. She could reproduce facts from a text when I read out the material. It was another story when a team of teachers tried to goad her into reading a page of information written in the novelistic tradition. She is pursuing her M.Phil in English, wherein she has to process a number of texts on her own. She is able to manage because her comprehension is ahead of her text processing skills. What we need to think about in this context is that Kayalvizhi is only one of the unknown and unsung warriors who are fighting their way through the portals of higher education in spite of their learning difficulties related to language processing. What is lamentable about her situation is that she did not have anyone at the high school to tell her that if she had problems with reading continuous narrative discourse, then she could opt for subjects that are taxonomic like botany, or subjects that involve deciphering symbols and equations like chemistry. There are problems in making such decisions also. One had to find out if she had had the aptitude for subjects that involve deciphering symbols. ESL teachers in the high

Mini Joseph “I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.” – Lily Tomlin This is exactly the kind of teacher I would appreciate because he or she would enable the student to think creatively and critically beyond the textbook, in other words ‘beyond chalk and talk.’ It is a fact that homework is a vital link between home and school. Teachers give homework to help children understand and review class work. Parents find out what their child is studying by being involved in homework. However, it is unfortunate that the dividing line between a child’s involvement in the homework and the adult’s involvement in the child’s homework is fast disappearing. Today, as in the last three decades or so, in most cases it is the adult who helps a child out with almost 80 per cent of his/her homework. This is true in developing Asian countries such as in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Thailand, China, Malaysia and others. Homework help comes in many forms. Finding the right kind of help will depend on one’s child’s needs, schedule and the budget . However, in most Asian countries, neither the child nor the parents have the right to choose the homework appropriate for the child. Despite the fact that educationists are leaning towards progressive education, where the child’s needs are the focus, parents, teachers and children are in a dilemma when it comes to choosing the right kind of English homework. Actually, there is no ideal kind of English homework. All written and reference work done at home is absolutely okay if it suits the child’s needs. Nevertheless, I will provide a few suggestions. The author is a teacher of English at St. Xavier’s Collegiate School, Kolkata. She can be reached at minijosep@rediffmail.com. This is an article for subscribers only. You may request the complete article by writing to us at editorial@gamart.in.

Kamakshi Balasubramanian What is an argument? When we hear the word ‘argument’, we think of heated debates, courtroom battles between highly articulate and clever lawyers, and just plain noisy disagreements between people who hold different opinions and viewpoints. There’s more to an argument than that. When we present an argument, we advance facts and reasons intended to challenge or disagree with a viewpoint that differs from the one we hold. In this way, a sound argument is different from a dispute or a conflict. If anything, valid arguments, when presented clearly, help find resolutions to conflicts. How do we develop an argument? In many real life situations, whether it is in solving community issues or explaining political developments, we are called upon to justify our belief, conviction, or even an opinion. To establish our position on something, we need to justify it. This justification is achieved mainly through effective use of evidence. Evidence is often factual, but it is more frequently based on good, sound logical reasoning. Anyone who puts forward an argument is ready and willing to acknowledge that other viewpoints and positions on issues are not only possible but worthy of consideration. Your argument at best underlines the superiority of your reasoning and evidence without dismissing or ridiculing others. The author is an educator and writer with significant experience teaching at secondary and tertiary levels. This is an article for subscribers only. You may request the complete article by writing to us at editorial@gamart.in.

Ratna Rao The teaching and learning process needs at least three domains – the teacher, the learner and the curriculum. This process can either be teacher-centred or learner-centred. Child-centred learning is not as easy as it is made out to be. One needs to pursue methods and strategies to develop creativity and thinking skills, such as analysing, synthesising, critical, logical, problem solving, decision-making, etc., in a child. Benjamin Bloom (an American educational psychologist) has proposed a set of skills, which are now famously known as Bloom’s taxonomy. The simple meaning of taxonomy is classification of phenomena or ideas. Bloom’s taxonomy, visually represented by a pyramid, tries to identify, define, classify and organise a comprehensive range of educational objectives into a compact and meaningful structure. The skills towards the lower and broader end of the pyramid are called Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS) and the three skills at the peak of the pyramid are called the Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS). It is a multilayered model of classifying thinking according to six cognitive levels of complexity. The highest three levels are: analysing, evaluating and creating. The taxonomy is based on the staircase model, meaning that to climb up to the higher levels one has to first master the lower levels. The lower levels being – remembering, understanding and applying. The first skill in HOTS as proposed by Bloom is Analysing. Analysing means to break down a problem into smaller parts and examine each part carefully. It may also help in interpreting and looking at the given text (data) in a different way. Evaluation is to make a judgment on the basis of the data or text provided. The development of this skill may lead to judging the value of a given data for a specific purpose. The sixth and final domain is Creating. This skill is highest in the hierarchy because to create or make something new one needs to involve all the other skills. The author is a teacher at the Calorx Teachers’ University. She can be reached at ratnar_p@yahoo.co.in. This is an article for subscribers only. You may request the complete article by writing to us at editorial@gamart.in.

Usha Raman This headline is a corrupted version of the popular rule – Keep it simple, stupid*. It is changed here because I did not want to run the risk of offending readers right from the first line! This is a basic rule of good writing that we tend to disregard in practice. So, in the composition classroom, the myths take over and lead us to create overweight, obtuse pieces of text that confuse the reader and tire our already overworked brains. We’ve seen the extreme results of this learned tendency to “obfuscation” in government documents, legal notices, application forms. Its critics call it “gobbledygook” – confusing, complicated phrases that don’t seem to mean anything. Most of us have puzzled over such texts and torn our hair in frustration as we struggled to deal with them. So why do we still subscribe to the idea that good writing is about big words, flowery sentences, and phrases that can’t be understood without referring to a dictionary? And worse still, why do we inflict the same expectations on our students? Of course, there is room for complex language, and there are readers who delight in it. But that belongs in the realm of literature, where the reader may take pleasure in mulling over the words and sentences and puzzling over different interpretations. What we are talking about here is the kind of language that is used to communicate, where the interest is in getting the message across. If we expect readers to engage with our message, stick with it long enough to understand it, and process it efficiently so that they can use it in some way, then we must use language as a tool to clarify and explain, rather than as a decoration for our thoughts. So if we want answers to questions, the questions must be worded so clearly that they fetch the answers we are looking for. If we want instructions to be followed, we need to construct those instructions in a way that there is no doubt in the readers’ mind about what has to be done. If we want an explanation to be understood and accepted, it must be crafted in such a way that only one meaning is possible – the one you intend. This is an article for subscribers only. You may request the complete article by writing to us at editorial@gamart.in.

Dharani Kothandapani English is not foreign to most Indians. It is so common to hear English words interspersed with the local tongue so much so, that they do not seem like English words any more. They have become part of the local languages of our country. In Chennai, pedestrians when asked for directions tell us: ‘Right-ikku turn pannunga.” If one were to ask them to use the Tamil equivalents for ‘right’ and ‘turn’, they would find it difficult to think of the correct Tamil words to replace them. And even if they did manage to, the listener probably wouldn’t understand the instructions given in chaste Tamil! For generations, ‘English’ has been synonymous with ‘education’. First generation learners feel immense pride in being able to converse in the language. It is also important for those herding their children into the portals of education for the first time that their children go to ‘an English medium school’. An existing knowledge base and pride in learning the language should make it easier for the teacher and the learner to deal with the language. But this is not always the case. While those who were educated in days of the Raj, spoke a variety of English that was closer to the British Standard and was ‘pucca’, in that sense, succeeding generations have moved away from this Standard, to an Indian Standard and related forms of the language. At the same time, we also perceive the emergence of a tendency to make a little English go a long way. Local pride has led to the rise of local variants of the English language. The most recent of these is the rise of Tanglish, a mixture of Tamil and English, made popular by the recent hit, Kolaveri di’. The ‘kolaveri’ phenomenon lends substance to the argument that Standard English continues to remain important. Terms like ‘soup song,’ used in it, foxed even a Tamilian like me! Apparently ‘a soup song’, is a song about failure in love! This then is the problem that has to be dealt with if Standard English is not used. Communication becomes difficult and at times, impossible; more so, when youngsters of the kolaveri kind are employed in droves by software companies and BPOs. Given the importance of English as the main language of communication in a globalised world, there is a greater need to hold up the Standard form, if only to be able to communicate effectively with the rest of the world. The language has

Latha Vasu The Oxford English Dictionary defines language as “human communication through the use of spoken or written words” and “a particular system or style of spoken or written communication”. English, or any other language for that matter, in my view, has to be handled differently from other subjects such as science and mathematics. While teaching these other subjects, attention should be paid to the exposition of various concepts and theories. Language teaching should focus on communication (as highlighted in the definitions above) in the formative years. Communication forms the essence and purpose of learning any language and this purpose gains main importance when the language also happens to be the medium of instruction. So in brief, my expectation from the English language class is that my child should be able to communicate comfortably and confidently in English, which is the medium of instruction at her school. As she learns the other subjects through this medium, such skill will help her a great deal in learning and interpreting the contents of all other subjects. I shall try to record my views, based on my observations of the six years of my daughter’s schooling. Language skills By communication, I refer to the following broad skill sets, which would enhance and supplement each other: Speaking Comprehension Reading Writing Listening Thinking Speaking My daughter is now in Class IV. She can memorise and repeat flawlessly a lesson even running into a couple of pages, but at times, she gets her English wrong while speaking in general. Here, I am referring to the simple enquiries that she makes or answers that she gives in the course of a classroom talk, or with friends, or at home. The teachers do encourage children to speak in English while at school, However, the children are not trained in informal conversational English. From the lower K.G., children should be taught to speak simple sentences, ask and answer questions concerning themselves, their surroundings, etc., in a natural way. They should be tactfully corrected wherever they go wrong. While teaching the letters of the English alphabet, there is no focus on the phonetics and pronunciation aspects of the language. As speaking skills are not given due importance, even children in higher classes cannot appreciate the reasons as to why a letter sounds different in different words, or why and where a letter remains silent. They do not learn the correct usage and end up with spelling errors or mispronunciation. Comprehension Comprehension is a key skill