METHODS AND PRINCIPLES OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING

                                                         METHODS AND PRINCIPLES 

    ELT in India today That is one side of the picture. The other side is that in educationally backward families, success in learning English has been elusive. Every year, thousands of students fail at examinations in English. In spite of years spent learning English, fluency and accuracy elude the learner. This has adversely affected the morale of many learners and their dissatisfaction with the official sector in ELT has given rise to a huge private industry. That the private sector has also failed is a different story. In a community where success in life depends upon success in learning English, here is a challenge for ELT. 

    Several studies, for example, Sawhney (1980), Parashar (1979) and Chaudhary (1981) have found that many factors contribute to the learning of English in India. Of these, the more important appears to be motivation and the extent of availability of the language around the learner. In the early years of English in India, a limited amount of language was available to the learner. 

    There were few native speakers and they did not always use English with their Indian interlocutors. There were few books and most of these were ill-suited to the needs of the learners. So the learners of that early period used special word lists. 

     Their needs were limited and these lists served them well. By the end of the eighteenth century, more detailed books in grammar, pronunciation and other areas of English appeared. With the transfer of judicial and revenue powers to the British, new occasions arose for more frequent use of English. Anglo-Indian and servants in British households are likely to have spoken some English

. Even while the British were here in India, and Indians could be expected to have had the exposure to standard British varieties, few people could use standard accents and varieties of English. In some schools and colleges, however, there was some emphasis on recitation or elocution, but that was hardly enough. Indians, therefore, had to depend upon books and journals. English literature became a part of the curriculum.

    Habits of reading were encouraged. Libraries and book societies were created and the book trade flourished in India. But this made Indian English bookish. Even in their private conversation and correspondence, Indians could not keep the formal and frozen style away. Among Indians, the motivation to learn English has mostly been of the instrumental kind-to learn it, so as to earn a living and some social standing, and for extending the horizon of one‟s awareness. Until about the decade of the 1960s, one could not pass the school final examination in India unless one passed in English. Now, this motivation is also becoming integrative. 

    Many Indians wish to identify themselves with the global culture. India has a long tradition of language teaching. It has successfully used the direct method, the bilingual method, the structural method, language through literature and the reading method. The communicative approach to language teaching is also being tried out. The following section gives a brief overview of India‟s experience with these methods. Bilingual Method 

        The bilingual method and special „wordlists‟ were used mostly in the early years of English in India and became obsolete by the middle of the eighteenth century. For its limited objective, it became quite successful. It was like the holophrastic stage in child language acquisition. Extended conversation or communication was not possible, but the act of communication was accomplished. It created a feel for the language, besides a minimum functional vocabulary on which the extended language could be built. Most wordlists were prepared before the mid-eighteenth century. 

        By then, learners were moving to dictionaries and grammar books and were attempting a translation of longer texts. After the successful completion of an experiment with the bilingual method of teaching English to a group of Kannada-speaking children at Mysore, Sastri reports: I pointed out to them the contrast in the structure of the mother tongue and English. This gave them an insight into the form of the interrogatives in English. Then I gave them intensive drills. We moved progressively from what was a bilingual situation in the beginning to a monolingual one in the end. So far as comprehension is concerned, I have no doubt at all that the bilingual method is superior to the direct method. It refers directly to the concept already known to the children and then introduces the foreign language terms to them. This ensures quick comprehension. The bilingual method combines accuracy and fluency. 

        At the common half-yearly examination for all students, Sastri found that whereas children from the control group who had been taught English through English had an average score of 60.3% only, those from the experimental group who had been taught English through their mother tongue had an average score of 75.2%. The success of such experiments at the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad and elsewhere has revived interest in the bilingual method. Grammar-translation Method Few methods in ELT have been as successful and yet as maligned as the grammar translation method. Even now, the syllabi of non-English medium institutions in India include grammar translation exercises. So do those of many English medium institutions. Much emphasis is given to parsing, sentence construction and transformation rules. The ability to translate into English is thought important. Grammar teaching usually begins with the teaching of the parts of speech followed by syntax.

     This is reinforced with graded exercises in translation. This method had two advantages and a disadvantage. It taught vocabulary and the essentials of sentence structure very quickly. It used the existing knowledge of the learners, so it was easy for them to remember similarities and differences between the language(s) known to them and English. But it ignored speech and pragmatics. Learners would learn words and sentence types, spelling and rules of writing, but they would not know what to say or write and when and where. 

    In other words, they acquired linguistic competence of some kind, but communicative competence eluded them. Direct Method The direct method used English for teaching English. This method succeeded with efficient and enthusiastic teachers. But such teachers were rare and beyond the means of many schools and colleges. Only elite institutions could afford them. The „reading method‟, or language through literature method has also had considerable success in India. On the basis of his work in Bengal, Michael West has written in some detail about this method. 

    The best advantage of this method has rested in the autonomy of selection it gives the learner, with regard to material and pace. West produced a series of simplified readers and encouraged teachers in India to use them. Most Indians, even now, learn more English from books than from other sources. The other, more recent methods and approaches will be dealt with in a later chapter. Computers today give the learner as much autonomy, though not as much flexibility, as some of the other methods. 

    But computers are expensive, and the infrastructure and technological culture facilitating their use on a significant scale may be quite some time away in India. Yet, limited experiments with Computer Assisted Language Learning have shown good results. With multimedia and the internet, computers afford unlimited autonomy and increased exposure to learners. „Authoring Systems‟ have made it possible for teachers to create „student specific‟ teaching and testing material, and for students to go through learning and tests at their own pace, with or without help from the teacher. India is geographically distant from English-speaking nations of what Kachru calls the „inner circle‟, in other words, the „native speakers‟. 

    This factor has implications for the learning and teaching of English in India. The religious beliefs, cultural patterns and political system are quite different from the countries where English is a primary language. The sociolinguistic context of many languages and many dialects affords students learning English, the advantage of approaching the language on the basis of their experience with different languages and varied exposure in their own environment, but the diversity of language backgrounds complicates the teaching task in the classroom. Linguistic and cultural disparities between the mother tongue and the second language, English, present some learning problems. It may be argued that asking one to learn too many languages may not help in learning any language. We are yet to investigate these problems and find answers. There are, however, children who learn many languages simultaneously. BhayaNayar presents data from a child growing up in Delhi, to show how this manages up to six languages. Since the introduction of the „Three-language formula‟, most school-going children in India have to learn up to three languages. The child may learn these languages simultaneously.

CONCLUSION 

    In phonology, for instance, there is a large body of opinion which claims that the „core features‟ of English include a relatively slow tempo of speech, with pauses and stress as in many standard varieties. Because English has a relatively large number of fricative consonants and long and short vowels, some attention in specific cases may be desirable there. Exact realisation of each segment as given in a pronouncing dictionary, intonation, juncture and pause are „peripheral features‟ of English phonology.