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If these four parameters appear significant to you, we may briefly examine
their implications for the work that is normally undertaken at CIIL. It
is at this institute that sociolinguistic and applied linguistic issues
including literacy, lexicography, bilingualism, second language acquisition,
language planning, language pedagogy, teacher training, materials production,
language assessment, language disorders etc., acquire overwhelming importance;
these are also the issues where we can perhaps make a most fruitful beginning
for the kind of new agenda I have been trying to suggest. However, I strongly
feel that unless we keep the debate on the overall nature of language and
society alive, we may not make much progress in any of these areas. With
the parameters of university, equality, multilinguality and inequality,
we may eventually work towards a theory of language, which will keep the
human condition articulated primarily in exploiter-exploited relationship
at the centre of its exposition. It may also eventually convince linguists
to play the social role they have long been shirking and participate actively
in affirmative social action. Language sensitisation is integral to social
change. And as suggested by Prof. Pabitra Sarkar also, I think, language
sensitisation among the masses including professionals of all kinds should
be CIIL's first priority. There is indeed a lot CIIL can do for general
language sensitisation by preparing booklets and organizing regular workshops
and seminars. The CIIL could conceive of creating State and District level
Resource Teams that would travel from school to school, engaging teachers
and parents in a dialogue about language. The need for such awareness campaigns
becomes apparent, when we notice that even some of our best 'intellectuals
and opinion builders' are so ill informed about language. Recently Khushwant
Singh (Hindustan Times, Sept 1, 2001) said: I am all for Sanskrit as an
optional subject, because it is the mother of all our languages. |
We may, next, turn to the case of the measurement of language proficiency.
First of all, most of the measurement techniques have come to us from sources,
which do not define language as multilinguality. Secondly, most of these
measures view language as a set of discrete skills constituting a code ignoring
all the individual and social aspects we have discussed. Even when language
proficiency is conceived in terms of BICS and CALP (a la Cummins and Swain)
we are still not free from the ghost of a language and indeed nowhere close
to the parameters suggested above. The total linguistic repertoire of an
individual consists of several languages, varieties and styles used in different
domains of activity with relatively fluid movement across these discrete
objects created largely by the linguist. Unless we can synchronize a vision
of society with a vision of language, we may not make any progress towards
a linguistic theory that would meaningfully link language pedagogy and language
assessment. We may, perhaps, like to do away with all our contemporary approaches
to evaluation and decide in favour of an approach that renders evaluation
indistinguishable from learning. Critical language awareness (Fairclough
1992) and the relationship between language and power (Kress and Hodge 1979)
should be at the heart of both language learning and language evaluation. |
Let's consider two more areas in which I have some experience - the areas
of teacher training and materials production. Teacher training is generally
conceived of in terms of resource persons who come equipped with a schedule,
a module and a set of tasks and activities to train a group of participants,
who, at least in the cascade model, will train more teachers in the same
way. It is very rare that participants, observers and trainers work as equals
and collectively explore questions centring around learning language, mathematics
and environment. In fact, social issues are forbidden in such training camps
as they are presumed to function in a socio-politically neutral zone. Even
when participants raise some fundamental social issues, e.g., the time they
get for teaching or the infra-structural facilities at school or the reasons
for the high drop-out rate or the problems that are located in the classroom
manifestations of socially entrenched caste hierarchy or some fundamental
conceptual issue, e.g., differences between speech and writing systems,
they are brushed aside. Teachers are located in schools and in a certain
community but these issues never form a part of the training workshops.
If we really wish any breakthrough in our teacher training programmes, it
should be clear from the beginning that a workshop is not an event in isolation
and is not located in a socio-political vacuum. It has a very clear agenda
of creating social awareness, achieving conceptual clarity, encouraging
peer discussion and promoting autonomous ways of constructing knowledge.
Apparently naïve questions, e.g., what is a good school? what is the aim
of education? etc., may need to be examined in detail every time participants
get together. The debate in such workshops indeed becomes feverish when
issues get really problematized, e.g., 'imitation does not play any significant
role in learning' or participants seriously ponder over the contradiction
between 'being a good citizen and being a good human being' as the aim of
education or the relationship between language and thought. CIIL can really
take the lead in planning completely innovative teacher training workshops. |
The area of materials production is central to the pedagogy project and
many of the scholars here are far more experienced than I am in this area.
Yet, let me briefly share with you Eklavya's experience of producing Khushi-Khushi
textbooks for primary school children in Madhya Pradesh. Though we were
not working with any shared, clearly articulated sociological theory, all
of us felt that education might inspire children to ask questions and initiate
some positive processes of social change. We felt that these books should
be informed by children's multilinguality and their universal cognitive
potential. These books we felt should make sense to children, not just be
pleasant and comprehensible (a la Krashen et al) but also challenging. We
developed these books in close collaboration with children and teachers.
We also tried, with some success, at least for classes II, to produce and
I integrated teaching materials. The books were also accompanied with a
variety of innovative classroom activities and intensive teacher training
programmes. As usual, there was great enthusiasm in the beginning and we
had a sense of joy as we tasted some success. But very soon we started giving
in to the pressures from parents and teachers and from the directorate of
education. We could no longer respect the multilinguality of children, nor
could we keep them consistent with their cognitive potential and on the
inequality front, one that I regard most central, we could not even scratch
the surface. We learnt a lot from this experience and the experiment is
still going on. But, I think it had two disastrous consequences; one, Khushi-
Khushi books became increasingly stereotypical; second, teaching-learning
materials across the country reproduced distorted versions of Khushi-Khushi
books. |
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