LANGUAGE
ACROSS
THE CURRICULUM-BEd Notes
Unit 2 – Understanding language across the curriculum
Prepared by
Sabarish P
Contents
Theory of Agnihotri –Implications in Kerala classrooms
Multilingualism as a resource
Language education in Kerala (KCF 2009)
Multilingualism as a resource
Most teachers and several language professionals believe that languages of students are an obstacle in the process of learning another language. Many actually believe that they cause major interference and therefore students should not even be allowed to use their languages in the class and the school. The typical paradigm in which they work could be defined as ‘a class, a teacher, a text and a language’. All classes are by default multilingual.
Examine your own and examine your own language profile and that of your friends.
Secondly, languages student bring with them are and can be used as a resource rather than dismissed as an obstacle. Languages always flourish in each other’s company; they suffocate in prisons of isolation and purity. English today is rich because it keeps its doors open; so were Sanskrit and Hindi till they started closing their doors.
Thirdly, it is not at all difficult for all teachers and students to appreciate that all languages are equally rule governed and rich. This is something which is so effortlessly achieved if the strengths of a multilingual class are recognized. Languages like Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Persian etc. were once very powerful; the power of English is only a few decades old and there is no reason to believe that it would stay like that.
If you leave out china, Russia, Africa, India etc., the English speaking world is actually very small. For example, all languages will have some technique to indicate the relationship between the subject and the verbal elements. That some languages may look more powerful than others is NOT a linguistic matter but one of history, sociology and politics and these aspects can also be easily demonstrated if the teachers are open to such a discourse. What teachers don’t realize is that errors are necessary stages in the process of learning and what is being dismissed as interference may actually be a part of the UG driven way of acquiring a language or a milestone in the process of learning. Let’s consider some typical examples.
Let’s start with syntax.
The fact of the matter is that there is actually no major difference between the basic syntactic structure of say Indian English and British or American English.
All children, including those from the so-called native English communities, will make such errors as ‘he go to school’; the structural pressure of English syntax dictates that it should be so.
imagine everybody including ‘I, we, you, you plural, they’ ‘go’, why should poor ‘he, she, it’ ‘goes’!!! But if we stop comparing the behaviour of school or undergraduate learners with fluent speakers of ‘standard’ English, we will realize that all speakers of English, whether they acquire it as L 1 or L 2, learn to say ‘goes’ in due course.
Consider morphology.
It is well attested that all children irrespective of whether they learn English as L 1 or L 2, go through a stage of using first ‘go, went, gone’ (as unrelated items) and then ‘go, goed, goed’ (as morphologically demanded items) and finally acquiring the exception ‘go, went, gone’.
Imagine that all learners go through this stage and the set of irregular English verbs is rather large including such commonly used verbs as ‘come, cut, dig, do, eat, get, give, make…’ etc. Word formation strategies have nothing to do with interference.
Take phonology.
Do all the so-called native speakers of English speak the same way?
Will any one of you, unless she belongs to north of England, claim to understand a word of Yorkshire English? Or
do you all understand rural Texan English? I don’t.
I don’t even understand my grand-daughter studying in Malone in New York State.
We today know that multilingualism is a default human situation and is constitutive of being human.
Every classroom by default is inherently multilingual. Further, in a variety of ways, recent research has established how this multilingualism can be used not only as a resource but also as a teaching strategy and a goal. It correlates positively with language proficiency, cognitive growth, scholastic achievement, divergent thinking and social tolerance. It is also now well-established that levels of language proficiency enhance significantly with metalinguistic awareness which would tend to grow if we allow children to reflect on their languages.
What kind of strategies would be most useful in such situations?
Freedom from the bondage of script is the first step.
With very small effort on the part of learners and teachers, it becomes evident that all languages can be written in the same script, with some modifications. What we do need to understand is that all children and all their languages need to be involved and the teachers need to create situations in which children can work in groups collecting data from their languages, classifying it into different categories, examine the relationships among different parts and arrive at conclusions and hypotheses that would account for their data.
Consider for example, the making of nouns from adjectives in English.
Adjectives like ‘dark, lazy, rough, kind, small, rich, soft etc’ can be turned into nouns by adding ‘-ness’.
However, this is not where teachers would start; they would instead start by talking informally about adjectives and nouns for a few minutes.
Then leave it to groups of children who share some languages to make list of adjectives and related nouns in different languages available in the class.
With very limited guidance children will themselves work out the problems of saying that the plural in English is made not by adding ‘-s, -es or –ies’; once it is explained to them that they should focus on the sounds with which a plural ends, they work out that significance of ‘-s, -z and –iz’ in making plural, themselves pointing that the plural of say ‘dog and baby’ is made by adding the same sound.
Consider the case of making ‘negatives’ in different languages.
It is possible that children would themselves (and so would the teacher) discover that negatives in all languages are made by putting the negative element close to the verb of the main clause and if a rule is discovered in this way, it is rather unlikely that children would make mistakes in speaking or writing negative sentences.
Take the case of translation.
Nothing enhances language proficiency more than peer-group attempts at translation, not the traditional type of ‘literally and accurately translating from language X to language Y’.
A small poem for example could be taken from any language.
Notice that the power structures in the classroom at once start getting democratised; teacher is at the back of the classroom listening like others to a poem in an unknown language which is then written and explained by children in the script they are already using. The poem is then translated into several languages in small groups. Stories, plays, cultural events, social issues etc. could also be treated in a similar way.
The kind of phonological, syntactic, semantic and semiotic issues such an exercise raises is overwhelming. The idea is to go through the process, not to arrive at a final, perfect translation.
Language education in Kerala (KCF 2009)
Language is not a mere medium of communication. It is also the social and cultural reflection of a society. We express our thoughts and ideas through our language. One also engages in creative activities and enjoys works of art with the help of language. Language is also essential to weave the threads of social life and to understand and analyse the ways of the world. Thus language has had a crucial role in the evolution and development of human kind.
Instead of banking on the behavioural psychology, the new curriculum aims at utilizing the innate competency of the child to use the language. This method makes use of the child's ability to use the linguistic skills he/she already has and enables him/her to engage in daily activities and express his/her ideas creatively. The experiences gained in learner centric situations in and outside Kerala assume meaning in this context. The idea of Social Constructivism put forward by Vygotsky and Bruner and the findings by Noam Chomsky in Linguistics form the foundation of this curriculum. Besides the ideas emerging from Gestalt psychology and humanism also helped in shaping the perspective of language learning.
Prepared by
Sabarish P
