TEACHING ENGLISH

Bhaskar Roy Barman Even today we cannot deny the necessity of English as a medium of teaching and communication and the growing importance of English, as is evident in the growing number of writers and poets having resorted to English in writing their works. Besides, many writers and poets are intent on getting their works translated into English to gain for their works a wider readership. Hence the importance of teaching English at different learning stages, at schools and colleges. At Universities students start specializing in particular branches of English as language and as literature they choose. Emphasis is given to teaching of English at the learning stage at schools where the students just start learning literature and poetry. The main problem English teachers generally face is how to inculcate into their students interest in literature and poetry. This anxiety English teachers feel reveals itself in keeping the attention of their students riveted on their teaching. To camouflage their anxiety they often have to have recourse to the tactic they have inherited from the predecessors of frightening their students of English as a language and telling them to their faces they are poor in English. To bring home this maxim to the students. majority of the teachers are relying upon note books presented to them by their publishers for recommendation to teach literature and poetry. Majority of the note-book writers are not regrettably proficient in English as a language. I cite an example in this connexion to illustrate this point. In question papers students are asked to give a antonym for the word poor in the oft-quoted sentence, The poor children had no where to play (from The Selfish Giant). The note-books say that the antonym for the poor is rich and the teachers go on telling their students, parrot-fashion, the antonym for the word poor is rich; but the true answer is fortunate. Its synonym being unfortunate. You cant bring them round to the fact that they are teaching incorrect English or, rather, incorrect answer; rather than admitting to their ignorance or going to the trouble of verifying it, they will show you their muscle strength. They are not educated enough, nay, learned enough to own up to their ignorance, which has led me to think that the problem of teaching English often lies with teachers themselves. But I humbly admit that all teachers are not the type of teachers I have mentioned. I shall try to elucidate the anxiety I have just referred to in my paper. As teachers of English as a foreign or second language (EFL/ESL), all English teachers deem or should deem themselves members of a

worldwide profession. We are often reminded, while teaching English, that the current status of English turns a significant percentage of the worlds population into part-time users or learners of English. Wherever we work we share and share alike many assumptions as concerns what we do; we prepare teaching materials and classroom materials and techniques based more or less on similar principles and test them on the perceptibility of the students. But allowing for this commonality English teachers of one country feel themselves isolated from his colleagues of other countries. Even in their own countries teachers have to cope with hostile situations, working in geographical isolation. It so happens that teachers, geographically isolated, do not have access to channels of professional communication (2) such as, among others, journals, conferences and in-service training courses. The fact that different countries have widely different educational systems and philosophies accounts for the geographical isolation and subjects teachers to different expectations and pressures. This fact calls forth the necessity of organizing international conferences on English teaching to familiarize teachers with different educational systems and philosophies of different countries. But the question is: can the anxiety or, rather angst all teachers feel no matter which countries they live in be removed through conferencing? Why should there be angst in a profession that is always considered noble and rewarding? Every teacher, particularly English teacher feels this angst when entering a classroom to face a roomful of students. It is worth quoting in this connexion Elaine Showalter as saying, reference Teaching Literature, published by Blackwell Publishing, USA, We literature teachers have heard the familiar words of Chaucers Clerke of Oxford - Gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche- intoned at a hundred retirement dinners, and may even declaimed them ourselves. But Chaucers clerk did not have to face student or peer course evaluations, a tickling tenure clock, CD-ROMs, or grade inflation. Lets face it, confronting a skeptical roomful of students every morning is not always a glad pursuit. (PP 3-4) Nowadays, a literary study has become a profession subject to intellectual expansion and economical contraction which reminds one of some Spenserian snake. Teachers have, to cope with the expansion of this profession, to grapple with a vast number of books within a short time and need to participate in conferences even school teachers are not exempted from participating in conferences meant to

re-orient them to handling the students slipping out of the classes Jobs are very few. Those who do not have jobs feel angry and those who do feel angst and often dream of anxiety. The anxiety dogs them around, so to say. They are often found to release their anxiety on hapless students, particularly those who cannot afford private tuition and who are so-called poor students. These dreams are often about the existential sense of quest and vocation; they are scenarios that dramatize the questions which those teachers who have really devoted themselves to teaching cannot avoid asking themselves: Do I deserve to be called a teacher in the true sense? Am I learning something through teaching or am I teaching, parrot-fashion? In order to be a good teacher that commands the respect of the students you teach you should think of yourself as a student. It is regrettably a fact that most of us, teachers, think it beneath our dignity to consider ourselves students after we have done our master degree in English Another question that keeps haunting those teachers is: What will happen to me when I can no longer teach? These fundamental questions I have mentioned just a few are central to identity and purpose and they lie at the heart of literature, too. I shall address myself to dealing with just a few types of anxiety which are relevant to the present discussion. (3) The first type of anxiety in case of the teacher teaching at schools is non-applicability of what they have learned at teachers training. It is incumbent on every teacher to go through the in-service teachers training. Ironically, many teachers have to take the teachers training when they are nearing their retirement and have no patience to apply the techniques and methods of teaching in their classes, returning from the training. The angst they suffer is their awareness of their losing patience on the verge of retirement to apply them in their classes to make their students interested in the topics they are teaching. They tend to make this awareness up as they go along. Besides, the infrastructure of a general school does not permit of the application of these techniques and methods in classes. It is common knowledge that many teachers take up teaching as a job, not as a noble profession and wait an opportunity to opt out for a non-teaching profession with similar or higher salaries and very few talented graduate or post-graduate students enter into this profession. The myths of the born teacher and the mystiques of good teaching scare many talented graduate and post-graduate students of this profession and weaken the morale of many teachers. There are no

departmental commitments worth mentioning here to preparing particularly graduate students for teaching careers. The second type of angst is a sense of isolation. One of the best aspects of the work of teaching is that teachers need not have the trouble of being original. They borrow ideas and methods from their colleagues and their predecessors and apply them in their own way in the confidence that their students will benefit from the methods and techniques, cheap note-books supplying the gaps. In producing before the students what they have borrowed from their colleagues and predecessors, teachers willingly or unwillingly isolate themselves from one another. Though they do not close their classrooms, they dont want their colleagues to interfere in their reproductions. Alaine Showalter quotes on page 9 Parker J. Palmer, reference his book Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teachers Life (Sans Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998 : P 142)) as saying, Teaching is perhaps the most privatized of all the public professions. Though we teach in front of students we almost always teach solo, out of collegial sight as contrasted with surgeons or lawyers, who work in the presence of others who know their crafts wellWhen we walk into our workplace, the classroom, we close our doors on the colleagues. When we emerge, we rarely talk about what happened or what needs to happen next, for we have no shared experience to talk about. As for me. I would keep the doors of my classrooms closed, not to privatize my teaching but to keep the attention of the students riveted on my teaching and to be able to talk to them in an uninterrupted atmosphere about the problems they were facing in keeping their attention on listening. One daredevil boy he was then a student of class XI - confessed that he fell in love with a girl he wanted to marry by force, for he didnt know whether the girl loved him. Her parents, he added, stopped her mixing with him and even threatened him with dire consequences if he dared keep contact with their daughter any more.. He sought my advice as to what to do A horrible silence descended upon the whole class at the audacity of the boy. I knew all my colleagues avoided him and behaved as if he were non-existent. (4) He was believed to be suffering from an acute psychogenic problem which led him to harass teachers and fist his class mates on the slightest provocation. His class-mates feared him. No technique, no method came forward to help solve the problem that was flung upon me and challenged my prestige as a teacher. The whole class was waiting in tense silence to see how I would stage-manage the situation. I somehow snowballed the anger I felt rising in me and suggested to him to equip himself with a requisite qualification which would entitle

him to a job with such salary as would guarantee a smooth living, and then approach her parents with the proposal that he want to marry her. To my surprise he heeded my suggestion.( A few years later I met that boy on the road. He made obeisance to me and said. Sir, you are my god; you have saved me from being spoiled. I have embarked into a small business and married that girl I loved.) But I could not share this experience with my colleagues. No other teacher known to me faced such embarrassing situation. No colleague of mine would approve of the way I was dealing with my students in the name of teaching English. I always felt myself isolated from my colleagues, when it came to teaching English. Another type of anxiety emanates from performance. Majority of teachers at schools are not supposed to suffer the performance angst. They often get exhausted, struggling with textual triage, with deciding what is essential to teach and what is inessential, keeping in view what sorts of questions are likely to be set in the public examinations. Teaching requires performance skill. In case of all teachers it requires nerves to face the reality of standing up in front of a roomful of students to teach, and its symptoms of stage-fright and performance anxiety. Whether they acknowledge it or not, every teacher feels their anxiety level rise particularly in their early years of their career. The anxiety level rises as the time to walk into the class approaches. They are apt to feel the terrifying responsibility of maintaining control over themselves, their words, their words, Their bodies and their classes. To subdue this anxiety level majority of us, teachers, resort to dictating notes in form of answers, already prepared at home by consulting different note-books presented to us by their publishers as specimen copies. The students are themselves satisfied, getting the ready-made answers, for they need not have the trouble of reading through the texts. The last type of anxiety on my list relates to evaluation. At schools we do not evaluate the performance of students in terms of their oral performances, but in terms of how they fare in their answer papers. This process of evaluation contributes to a great extent to the overshadowing of teaching at school by private tuition. I should not linger on this topic any further, for everyone associated with teaching profession is aware of it. I think the teachers who are really keen to instill into their students interest in learning English as a language and as a literature should discuss English philosophically, I mean, from a philosophical point of view. This necessitates a short discussion on the philosophy of language.

(5) No English teacher, I think, concerns himself or herself with the philosophy of language, particularly because it is less-defined and less in possession of a clear principle of unity than most other branches of philosophy. Very few teachers teach English from a philosophical point of view. The problems associated with language that are typically dealt with by philosophers comprises loosely knit collection, because of which it is difficult to find a real criterion separating it from the problems concerning language dealt with by grammarians, psychologists and anthropologists. We can obtain an initial sense of the range of this collection through surveying some of the various points within philosophy at which emerges a concern with language. Now let us consider the ways in which crop up in various branches of philosophy problems related to language. Metaphysics is part of philosophy that can roughly be characterized as an attempt to particularize the most general and pervasive facts about the world, encompassing, as it does, an enumeration of the most basic categories to which entities belong and some depiction of their interrelations. There happen to be some philosophers who have made it a point to get at these fundamental facts by considering the fundamental features of the language we use to talk about the world. In Book X of Platos Republic, he says, Whenever a number of individuals have a common name we assume them to have also corresponding idea or thought. To spell out this rather cryptic remark, Plato is drawing our attention to a pervasive feature of language, that a given common noun or adjective, for example, tree or sharp can be truly applied in the same sense to a large number of different individual things, his position being that this is possible only if there exists some one entity named by the general term in question treeness and sharpness of which each of individuals partake. if this were not the case then it would be impossible, so to say, to apply the general term in the same sense to a number of different individuals. Now let us hear what Aristotle says in his Metaphysics: one might even raise the question whether the words to walk, to be healthy, to sit lmply that each of these things is existent, and similarly in other cases of this sort; for none of them is either self-subsistent or capable of being separated from substance, but, rather, if anything, it is that which walks, or sits or is healthy that is an existent thing. Now these are seen to be more real because there is something definite which underlies them (i.e., the substance

or individual) which is implied in such a predicate, for we never see the word good or sitting without implying this. (Book Zeta, Ch. I) What Aristotle means to say in the passage quoted is that we do not use verbs except in connexion with subjects and that we cant express ourselves by saying Sits, Walks etc. we can make ourselves clearly understood if we say, She is walking. he is sitting..From this fact Aristotle concludes that substances, things have an independent kind of existence in a way that actions do not, that substances are ontologically more fundamental than actions. (6) The nineteenth century German philosopher, Meinong provided a more outr example by assuming that every meaningful expression in a sentence (at least any meaningful expression having the function of referring to something) must have a referent; otherwise there would be nothing for it to mean. When we get hold on an obvious meaningful expression that refers to nothing real in the world, such as, for instance the Fountain of Youth, as in the sentence, Mr X is searching for the Fountain of Youth, we must take it for granted that it refers to a subsistent entity which does not exist, but has some other mode of being. This doctrine, as does the Platonic position presented above, is based upon a confused assimilation of meaning and referent. The assumption that governs the formation of these patters of metaphysical argumentation finds itself explicated in the twentiethcentury philosophical movement known as logical atomism and the most distinguished exponents of this philosophical movement have been Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. In Russells series of articles The Philosophy Logical Atomism, he makes quite clear the principle, as in the following passage, reference Logic and Knowledge, edited by R. C. Marsh ( London, George Allen & Unwin, Ltd, 1995) : in a logically correct symbolism, there will always be a certain fundamental identity of structure between a fact and the symbol for it; andthe complexity of the very symbol corresponds very loosely with the complexity of the facts symbolized by it. It is seen in the above passage that this identity of structure is hypothesized to operate not between any existing language and the basic metaphysical structure of the world, but only between a logically perfect language and the metaphysical structure. What we are required to do in such situation is to ascertain what different types of structures we have at our disposal in that language for asserting facts, for example simple subject-predicate sentences like This book is

heavy and existential sentences like There is a cat on the porch. By ascertaining the facts we shall be able to see how these various types of sentences are logically related. Another branch of philosophy is logic in which concern with language becomes prominent. Logic is often interpreted as an attempt at devising criteria for separating valid from invalid inferences Since reasoning is carried on in language, the analysis of inferences depends on an analysis of the statements that figure as premises and conclusions. A study of logic takes us into the fact that the validity or invalidity of an inference depends upon the forms of the statements which formulate premises and conclusion where by form is meant the kinds of terms contained in the statement and the way in which these forms are combined in the statement. Of two inferences looking superficially alike, one may be valid and the other invalid owing to a difference in the form of one or more of the statements involved. Let us consider the following pair of inferences. 1. Mr X sells insurance in our town. (7) Mr X belongs to the religious group Y. Therefore, Mr X both sells insurance in our town and belongs to the religious group Y. 2. Someone sells insurance in our town. Someone belongs to the religious group Y. Therefore, someone both sells insurance in our town and belongs to the religious group Y. Now ! is clearly valid and 2 clearly invalid, Provided with the facts that someone sells insurance in our town and someone belongs to the religious group Y, it does not at all follow that there is anyone of whom both these things are true. Since one of the sentences is valid and the other invalid, it must be that despite superficial grammatical similarities, a statement like (a) Mr X sells insurance in our town is of a different logical form from a sentence like (b) someone sells insurance in our town. There are, too, other indications of this. Sentence (b) sounds equivalent to There is someone who sells insurance in our town and to The class of persons who sell insurance is empty, but we cannot find any equivalent for someone (c). When premises and conclusion of sentence 2 get put into one of these forms,

the argument is apt to lose its superficial resemblance to inference 1 and does not look valid at all. 3. There is someone who sells insurance in our town. There is someone who belongs to the religious group Y . Therefore ,there is someone who both sells insurance in our town and belongs to the religious group Y. It has become clear to us from the examples that an important part of logic consists in a classification of statements in terms of their logical form, that is, aspects of form which are relevant to the evaluation of inference, this classification requiring a classification of the types of terms that sneaks into statements, inasmuch as, a difference in form quite often rests upon a difference in the types of terms involved. Every word, as is evident in the above discussion, is possessed of different shades of meaning, when used in different sentences, many of them lying outside the dictionary. Students should be asked to find out the meaning of a particular word with reference to the context of the sentence in which it is used, without consulting the dictionary. Before doing so, the teachers should explain to them different shades of meaning of a word used in different sentences and expressions. (8) Let me elaborate upon this proposition from a linguistic point of view. Here we shall concern ourselves with the nature of linguistic meaning. We shall take up, for example, the word mean. Many of us, teachers, stick to one or two meanings of the word that we know. But there are many other uses of the word, mean some of which are likely to be confused with our sense. I give below a few examples: 1. This is no mean accomplishment. (Here mean is used as an adjective meaning insignificant) 2. He was so mean to me. (Here mean is used as an adjective meaning cruel.)

3. I mean to help him. (Here mean is used as an intransitive verb meaning intend.) 4. The passage of the bill will mean the end of second class citizenship (Here mean Is used as a transitive verb meaning result in.) 5. Once again life has meaning for me. (Here meaning is used as a noun meaning significance.) 6. What is the meaning of this? (Here meaning used as a noun means explanation) 7. He just lost his job. That means that he will have to start writing letters of application all over again. {Here mean is used as an transitive verb, meaning imply) The meaning of the word mean, as we have seen, changes in the above seven sentences. In these cases, we are talking about people, actions, events or situations rather than about words, phrases or sentences. Rare are the cases in which we generally apply means to a linguistic expression, but where mean does not have sense that we are examining. When the teachers explain to the students different shades of meaning used in different sentences, the latter will get easily involved in the process of learning different shades of meaning. I did myself experiment with this method and succeeded to some extent in rousing in my students interest in literature, poetry and drama. Besides, instead of (9) teaching them the dramatic piece prescribed, I involved them in playing the roles of the characters and directing the play themselves. Thus the students delved deep into the text with my assistance and now and then consulted the dictionary to find out the meanings of the words unknown to them. In doing this, I helped many students to

overcome their fear of English and two or three students to do their master degrees in English. ..

REFERENCES: Jo MacDonough and Christopher Shaw: Materrials and Methods in ELT; Blackwell Publishing, USA; Indian Reprint 2004 by Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, New Delhi Elaine Showalter: Teaching of Literature, Blackwell Publishing, USA, Indian Edition, 2003 By Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, New Delhi William P. Alston: Philosophy of Language; Prentice- Hall of India Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi Agartala Address (For correspondence) Dr Bhaskar Roy Barman South Bank of Girls Bodhjung Dighi Itakhola Road, Banamalipur (Middle) Agartala 799 001, West Tripura Email: bhaskarroy_barman@yahoo.co.in Mobile: 09612154678 Kolkata Address: Dr Bhaskar Roy Barman A-3/F-2 Khadims Bidyakut Abasan bhaskarroybarman@gmail.com;

Narayanpur Battala PO: R/Gopalpur Kolkata 711 136