There was a newspaper report from Ronhat in Sirmaur district of Himachal Pradesh. The item’s main character is a school teacher who wrote the amount on a bank cheque leaf in words. The total amount involved was Rs. 7,616.00. He also had to write the amount in words on the cheque,which he presented to the headmaster for signing, and the latter signed it in a hurry. However, the bank refused to cash the cheque. It was a simple problem of writing the total amount in words. This teacher wrote ‘Saven Thursday six harendra sixty rupees only’. His structure was correct but the bank official, indeed justifiably, could not understand that it was intended to mean ‘seven thousand six hundred and sixteen only’. No doubt, the teacher was suspended because the cheque bounced. The headmaster was asked for an explanation by the Director of School Education. One wonders what explanation the headmaster would give!
After Mohanlal received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, quite a lot of writings on him were published not only in Malayalam newspapers but also in English ones. There was a reference to a character role he played in his initial years as a dissembling school teacher. He went to a class where mischievous students heckled him and the teacher-actor did not know how to answer many of their questions. When a question was asked, about the English word for ‘Uppumavau’ which is the Malayalam word for ‘Uppittu’ in Kannada, the teacher-actor, versatile indeed, was rather confused but did not want to disappoint the students. So, he quickly thought of possible translations. ‘Uppu’ should be ‘salt’ in all South Indian languages; ‘Mavu’ is the Malayalam word for Mango tree. So, he told the students without spending any time that the English word for ‘Uppumavau’ is ‘Salt Mango Tree’. In the theatres, there was loud laughter in praise of this performance of Mohanlal even though the credit should go to the script writer.
Many years ago, in the first year of my teaching, in a class of ninety students, I asked one student what his name was. He answered it in a single word. As it was a class for teaching English, I asked the student to answer me in a complete sentence, I also gave him the frame of the sentence, so that he could repeat. I said, ‘you have to say, my name is, and then pronounce your name.’ This student looked at me and looked at other students and did not answer me at all. After a lot of persuasion, in the presence of fellow students who were eagerly waiting, he said ‘ny, name piece’ and he pronounced his name correctly. He was the best teacher then for me because I learnt that that was not the way to teach English as a language to those who speak a vernacular language regularly. I remembered him, just as I remember him now, several times when I had to offer learning and development interventions in Spoken English for different situations, for batches of students and teachers, the latter, of course, as remedial work.
It took more than two decades and leaving teaching before I undertook an Action Research Project with the intention of producing a book on Spoken English for the use of teachers. I worked with five hundred students from different pre-university colleges in the then South Kanara and two hundred and fifty students each from Assumption College, Changanacherry, Kerala and Holy Cross College, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu. I selected lecturers from both the colleges and the pre-university colleges and offered them a training programme to become Facilitators in Spoken English. There was no teaching; instead there was a lot of training because language was a skill that had to be developed. These lecturers conducted learning and development interventions in Spoken English for their students and achieved very good results. A total of fifty hours each was spent by these lecturers on each of the batches of students who were not more than twenty in each batch.
In a chance occurrence, I met Mr Ramamurthy who was then the Chairman of the Corporation Bank. He had signed an agreement with the bank’s Class Four employees that they could be promoted to the clerical cadre provided they could speak English. He told me that he had not found any method of developing Spoken English in these employees, as they would need to be employed anywhere in the country once they were promoted to the clerical cadre. I thought that it was a good challenge, and I organised training interventions in Spoken English for thirty-six Class Four employees of the Corporation Bank who were, at that time, going through a training programme for other areas of clerical services. I worked with them and on the final day, Mr Ramamurthy came over and interviewed these participants in English and was very satisfied.
Subsequently, I published a book of two hundred and nineteen exercises for teachers and lecturers to use to develop Spoken English skills in students. In a couple of years, around two thousand copies were collected by teachers. Large numbers of them succeeded in getting their Kannada medium students speak in English by working with them for about fifty hours. Excellence in the skill was developed with about ninety hours of work.
Making people speak any language cannot be done through teaching grammar or syntax, it can only be done by helping them learn and develop the skill. Teaching grammatical correctness is not what is needed; instead, opportunities to speak are to be created which requires repeated skill drills by the individual learners.
Considering the fact that a large number of higher grade opportunities, particularly in the corporate sector, and more particularly in getting work abroad, demands skills in Spoken English, it is necessary that students from Kannada medium schools be trained to speak English well, without making them lose their interest in their mother tongue.
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Prof. Sunney Tharappan, is Director of College for Leadership and HRD, Mangaluru. He trains and writes and lives in Mangaluru. Email: tharappans@gmail.com