READING LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION
Bacon, in the essay 'Of studies' writes 'Reading maketh a full man; conference maketh a ready man; writing maketh an exact man'. reading, intelligent conversation, and attention and comprehension are seen, for centuries, as preconditions of refined man. In the present age of explosion of knowledge and information, accelerated reading with comprehension has almost become sine qua non with an efficient man.
Reading is essentially a language related process of commuinication-unlike the oral communication which moves from the speaker to the hearer, in the case of reading, the communication is from the writer to the reader. Since speech is evanescent, writing provides for displaced communication. In modern times voice recording permits of displaced communication but this being essentially a speaker-to-hearer communication qualitatively different from writing and reading.
Both writing and reading presuppose oral mastering of sounds and speech events in a language. Even if on is acquainted with the phonemic and graphemic inventories in a languages in isolation, without the knowledge of phonemic-graphemic fit one is greatly handicapped in reading. French-fille, English-Psycho, Hindi-Kahna, Assamese-ciibach or Tamil-paam will be difficult to read without knowledge of phonemic-graphemic fit in the respective languages. As there is no one-to-one correspondence between sounds, units and letters in any natural language, it is important to know how different sounds are represented by one letter and different letters represent one sound. It is necessary to stress here that even if several languages are written using a single script, their values may be different in different in different languages. Thus j is j in English, h in Spanish, and y in German; similarly Sanskrit jn is dny in Marathi, gn in Hindi and gya in Oriya. The value of English a is different in words like fat, fate, fast, fall is different as much as the English a is expressed in spellings like fall, fought, form, etc. The divergence in English spellings and pronunciation is somewhat exaggerated in the comment, Englishmen may write ghoti and read it as 'fish'; as gh in 'rough', o in 'women', and ti in 'station', will give the appropriate sound value for such reading. Two points have clearly emerged from this discussion: (1) Phonemic-graphemic fit has to be studied in terms of each language structure; and (2) as there is no phoneme a across language, there could be no inter-lingual phonemic-graphemic fit.
Both the mother tongue who is entrusted with teaching initial reading and writing and the second language teacher who is called upon to effect an early 'transfer' of skills are blissfully unaware of all these dimensions of reading. They are unaware of the phonetic considerations inherent in the traditional ordering of the alphabet as well as of the pedagogic presentation in terms of shape similarity. As a result they let the learner fumble through the alphabet.
Vocabulary is a major factor in developing facility in reading and writing. The 500 most commonly used English words have 14,000 meanings listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. It is not enough to recognize a word in isolation in its most common meaning. It is important to know its use in context. One of the reasons of poor reading ability is the lack of emphasis on vocabulary acquisition.
As the phonetic space in different languages is filled differently by similar or different sounds, the semantic space is also organized equally differently. For example, the Semantic space occupied by Namaste or Namaskara in a Indian language is filled by 'Good morning' 'Good day', 'Good afternoon', 'Good evening', 'Good night', 'How do you do', 'Hi', 'Hallo', and 'Good bye', etc. Reading is facilitated to the extent one is familiar with the contextual and cultural meaning of words. It is not sufficient to know the isolated meaning of the tu. tum. ap, ja, jao and jaiye in Hindi. It is also not enough to know the grammatical rule combining tuja, tum jao and ap jaiye. Without knowing the social context of their use one may be handicapped. For example, tuja used for a senior, a person of higher status, may indicate insult. Similarly ap jao may either refer to a non-standard usage or a parent-child communication in certain conditions. Good reading presupposes good command over all aspects of the language.
When one says one is re-reading Shakespeare, it is with a view to increasing one's command of vocabulary and through it a better grasp of the dramatic situation. When King Lear speaks of himself as a 'fond foolish old man', the meaning of 'fond' may have escaped the reader in the first reading. On a careful second reading one may find that the word 'fond' is used in the meaning 'foolish' and this gives a better insight to the understanding of Shakespearean time and his characters. While reading, one is not only confronted with the problem of historical meaning but also with cultural complexity in current usage. Thus if one is not familiar with the cultural import of items like jhutha, sindur and pan, then one is bound to be slowed down. In the use of vocabulary there are also other dimensions which a good reader must be aware of -collocation is one such area. Assuming that language X has pairs of words such as pani, jal, and dat, danta, one must be able to anticipate their usage and the elements to follow. For example, while in Hindi one would say pineka pani, 'drinking water', one would say ganga jal 'Ganges water' (to indicate sacredness) and while one would say danta cikitsa using somewhat high style, given dat one would expect dat ka ilaj in a spoken colloquial style. The better one controls vocabulary in language in all its sociocultural nuances and its usage in different linguistic contexts, it will be seen from the above examples, that one is likely to be a better reader.
It would be stating the obvious to say that one does neither speak nor read mere words. Reading letter by letter or word by word is inefficient reading as they stand as a barrier to the expression of completed sense. Since the aim of both oral and written expression is to communicate, the sentence is to be accepted as the unit of discourse. Thus it will be clear by now that phonic method, alphabetic method, syllabic method, word method, sentence method or story method is inadequate by itself. First of all, the first three of the above methods have no reference to meaning. Secondly, no one of these methods is adequate to teach reading to children, adults, bright, slow, dialect speakers and the speech handicapped. An eclectic method which combines different approaches to reach the stated goal of communication most efficiently in the least possible time is to be sought.
Punctuation is relatively new to Indian languages. In the olden days whole discourses were written without a comma or a full stop. What intonation is to the spoken language, punctuation is to the written. 'What do you have for dinner mother ?' 'What do you have for dinner, mother ?' would mean two different things. It need not be pointed out that the second sentence is absurd. How wrong punctuation can change meaning can be seen from the following Bengali hoarding:
Ekhana prisr?a kariben. na krile pancas aka jorimana.
The full stop was intended to be given after na, but by mistake, it was put before the word and conveyed exactly the opposite of what was intended. It must however, be understood that whether it was in olden days or in the present time people did and do use linguistic cues such as positioning of verbs, collocational restrictions, etc., for purpose of reading with comprehension without reference to punctuation.
Another aspect of the reading situation needs attention here. Tradition has made textbook a master in the classroom. The teacher concerns himself to get the children to read textbooks, where reading is confined to the verballeves. Transmutation of the book knowledge to be part of one's living experience is lacking in the process. A Reader instead of giving practice to the child of elements already learnt, acts as something to be read without any reference either to the formal structure and content or to the home language experience. In the absence of any material other than the textbook to be read and in face of the conviction that there is everything in the textbook, the teacher remains firmly rooted to the prescribed textbook and the whole purpose of language learning is frustrated. In one of my exploratory trips in Jenu Kuruba areas of Karnataka, children of Classes II, III and IV when asked to read a page from their Kannada textbook in turn asked whether thy should read with the books open or books closed. When asked to read with the book closed, the child went on reciting the page. They said that they had 'byhearted' all the pages. In ancient times there was great emphasis on memorisation and memory training as word of mouth was the only means of transmitting texts in the absence of faculty of reproduction of written texts and their wider distribution. That in the present time when printing has revolutionised communication, the teachers would equate memorisation with reading is strange. Such experiences are common almost in all parts of the country and stand as examples of faulty primary education.
Reading also presupposes compatibility between the variety of language known and the variety of language read. This is particularly a problem for those whose home language is different from the school language. Research has shown that black English speakers in America when confronted with English material written primarily in standard white American English tend to ignore features not present in their variety. In India the speakers of dialects, while reading material in the standard language, tend to bring in dialect features at the time of initial reading. The most well known example of diverse reading is provided by Chinese, where any written material is read diversely by different dialect speakers following their own norm. It will thus be seen that the problem of compatibility has been sought to be resolved either by forcing the standard without reference to immediate development and communicational problems or by maintaining unity through the written symbol in the face of diversity of spoken forms. Both of these have their educational problem. What is being argued here is a conscious bilingual bidialectal transfer model for those whose home language is different from the school language, which will exploit the resources of their home language, ensure instant communication, and will ensure a smooth transition to the standard without creating an identity crisis.
Very little research has been conducted in India about aspects of reading. Although Kannada is read from right to left and Urdu from left to right and there is a sizable population reading both the languages in Karnataka, very little information is available about the difficulty encountered by them. It is also not known to what extent the reversal of eye movement affects the speed of reading. There are no national studies giving silent vs. oral reading indices for various levels of education. There is no training to eliminate vocalisation, sub-vocalisation, body movement and such other factors which are barriers to accelerated reading. In a multilingual country like India, reading competence in a number of supplementary languages will be needed. Efficient reading in the first language can make a person a good reader in other languages. However, unless language curriculums are modified to teach languages on a scientific basis and reading as a skill is emphasized, the purposes for which languages are taught and learnt are not likely to be attained.