In which medium?

FAISAL BARI
Published 2013-06-21 07:18:43

PARENTS want their children to be proficient in the use of English, and rightly so: there is a significant premium on English proficiency. But there is evidence that children learn concepts better, especially at an early age and given a certain quality of teaching, if they are taught in their mother tongue. The previous government of Punjab addressed the issue by declaring that all public-sector schools in Punjab would use English as the medium of instruction. Emerging evidence from work being conducted by Abbas Rasheed (who heads the Society for the Advancement of Higher Education), in the form of interviews with teachers, head teachers and bureaucrats suggests that the policy has encouraged enrolment in public schools, and that parental perceptions of public schools and the quality of education imparted there have indeed improved. Though it is too early to evaluate if the policy will improve the quality of learning and education, given the reports from the above source, it seems unlikely that there will be quality improvement. The policy decision of using English as the medium of instruction seems to be designed to address three separate issues, and it seems it is not suited for any of them. If the objective is for children to learn English as a language, using English to teach mathematics and science is not going to facilitate the learning of English. The evidence seems to be quite the opposite. Teachers, used to teaching in Urdu or the vernacular, are doing a poor job of teaching even mathematics and science let alone helping students learn

English. Students who should be learning mathematics and science in mathematics and science classes are being forced to grapple with a new language at the same time. This is not the optimal environment for explaining difficult concepts of division and multiplication to seven- and eight-year-olds. There is evidence that children learn difficult concepts best in their mother tongue. For most children in Punjab this happens to be a dialect of Punjabi or Urdu. Even in countries where having textbooks in the mother tongue is not possible and a second language is important to acquire, a better policy option seems to be to have textbooks in the second language but with teachers explaining concepts in the mother tongue so that children can understand what is being taught. This language switching, sometimes referred to as code switching, is quite a developed concept. This happens often even at the college and university level in Pakistan. But by switching to English as the medium of instruction, and trying to enforce it, the government seems to be discouraging or rejecting this option. For our environment, this might be a better option to explore. The quality of teaching is not related to the medium of instruction issue. In fact, if teachers are not comfortable in English, and the majority of the primary school teachers in the country are not, then forcing them to teach in English is going to have a negative impact on the quality of teaching/learning. Many of the teachers have been given trainings for teaching in English. But these trainings are of a few days duration only. Can we expect teachers to pick up a new language and teach in it with a few days of training?

On the other hand, parents do want their children to learn English. Proficiency in English is considered to be necessary for having opportunities to advance in life. And there is a lot of truth to this impression. This is what made the government policy shift popular. But when the results come in and parents realise that their children are not learning English what will happen then? This seems inevitable with this policy. The medium of instruction policy does not address the objectives of improving the learning of English and improving the quality of learning and education for children. If we want to ensure that students in our schools acquire proficiency in the use of English we have to improve the teaching of English as a language. This can only be done by improving the standard of teachers of the English language. There are many companies and programmes that specialise in language teaching. Maybe we need to see if they can teach our Englishlanguage teachers and improve their standards. If we want to improve the quality of teaching in our schools, it will not happen by switching to English as the medium of instruction. It could happen by using code switching much more adroitly. Teachers should be able to explain concepts to students in a language the students understand, and use relevant examples and concepts that are suited to a childs level of learning. A head teacher told me that some of her mathematics and science teachers are trying to get out of teaching these subjects and want to switch to Urdu or Islamiyat. They are not comfortable teaching in English and are afraid of taking up mathematics/ science teaching. This is no way to treat teachers. But it will happen and continue to happen as long as we impose policy

changes without adequate preparation or without going through the relevant evidence. Acquisition of language skills should be separated from the medium of instruction debate. The two are separate issues. In addition, the policy can have a negative impact on the quality of learning and education. And the medium of instruction cannot be used to address quality issues. These have to be addressed directly through teacher training and a design for better teacher monitoring and support mechanisms. Now that the provinces have become responsible for this issue after the 18th Amendment, it will be interesting to see how each province handles language-related questions. The writer is senior adviser, Pakistan, at Open Society Foundations, associate professor of economics, LUMS, and a visiting fellow at IDEAS, Lahore.

Giridhar Rao This Gift of English

Book Review

Alok K. Mukherjee This Gift of English: English Education and the Formation of Alternative Hegemonies in India Hyderabad. Orient Blackswan, 2009, Pp. 374, Price- Rs. 795. ISBN: 978-81-250-3601-2 English: A Gift Imposed and Sought India's battles for emancipation and social justice are being fought on many fronts, and at many levels of this deeply unequal society. Education is among the most important of these locations, and language policies and politics are important tools and weapons in these battles. In (British-)colonial and postcolonial India, English has been a critical "social and symbolic capital" in consolidating and challenging "hegemonies" - in arguing this, Alok Mukherjee's new book joins the already quite substantial body of writing on the place and role of English in India. Mukherjee draws extensively on the work of Gramsci and Bourdieu - indeed, his chapters on these writers serve as primers on the theories of these writers. But before he "performs a Bordeauxian analysis within the framework of Gramsci's theory of hegemony" (81), he gives us a substantial and autobiographical "Introduction" where he situates himself and his career in networks of class and caste relations in postIndependence India - elements and themes that are to recur often throughout this study. Chapters 2 and 3 "set the stage" by tracing "certain key early moments in the history... of English education" to show that the "gift" of the title "was both imposed and sought" (84). Chapter 2 draws upon texts as varied as Bankimchandra's Anandamath and Charles Grant's Observations to show an emerging convergence between theories of common Aryan ancestry, introducing Christianity, reviving the glories of an ancient civilization, and the role of English in "improving" the colonial subjects. Chapter 3 moves, among others, to Raja Rammohun Roy's Address, James Mill's History of British India, and Macaulay's Minute, and demonstrates that, "an array of colonial intellectuals, working both in England and in India, developed the 'conceptual or categorical framework' that went hand in hand with coercion to establish the legitimacy of the hegemonic idea that the raj has a civilizing mission and that an English education was a critical component of that mission" (164). Chapter 4 examines the early curricula of four institutions - Hindu College, the Free Church Institution of Calcutta, Dacca College and University of Madras. The curricula are listed in one of the seven Appendices to this study. As the list shows, "there was a near complete absence of topics, texts and authors from India, contemporary Europe outside Britain and religious traditions other than Protestantism. Study of Greek and Roman history provided the classical basis for the highest contemporary manifestation of civilization, which was Anglo-Saxon Protestant" (189). The next chapter continues this history of "texts, examination and hegemony". Mukherjee demonstrates in some detail how curricula of literature and English-language teaching, and the examination answer papers of "Senior Scholarship students" were "site[s] for reproducing hegemony" (233). And not just in English: "Not only did these early developments set the course of English literature teaching in India, they also affected developments in contemporary Indian languages. For example, histories of Hindi literature have adopted the periodization of English literature, while language and grammar texts in languages such as Bengali and Hindi have followed the English grammarians' practice of using Greek and Latin models. As these mass languages became literate, grammars were derived from Sanskrit and organized around categories very similar to the ones used by English grammarians" (246).

Chapter 6 begins by sketching the "contest for control over the disciplinary space that emerged in the later part of the nineteenth century as a result of the rise of nationalism and the colonial government's response to it on the educational front" (247). This contextualization leads Mukherjee to discuss two "bridge documents", as he calls them in the Introduction: "the diary of Amar Singh, a Rajput aristocrat and one of the first Indians to hold a King's Commission in the British Army, and the autobiography of C D Narasimhaiah, one of the first Indian professors of English, who was a key player in the postindependence developments in the field" (3). Mukherjee sees these two narratives as "powerful examples of the sensibility produced by English education within the conservative context of a Hindu nationalism that emerged in the later part of the nineteenth century" (265). He argues that it is insufficient "to explain the hold of English on post-independence India exclusively in terms of internalized colonialism. There is an equal, if not greater, need to recognize the hegemonic role of nationalism, and to examine the ways in which English education helped in the exercise of this hegemony and its project of developing the disciplined citizen" (265-6). It is this account of "alternative hegemonies" that leads Mukherjee to declare in the Conclusion that "the hegemonic contest continues": "While English was initially sought by 'high' caste Hindus as an instrument of revival, and while in postindependence India it was expected to serve the dominant group as a pipeline for communication within and a window without, now, groups that have been historically oppressed and disenfranchised, in particular, the Dalits, are looking to English as a means for emancipation and empowerment" (312). Mukherjee sees this demand for English both in the pronouncements of prominent Dalit intellectuals as well in interactions with students and scholars in Indian universities (Appendix G gives details). But "the fate of various proposals for far-reaching transformation of the field of English Studies in India, made in the past twenty-five or so years, does not give cause for optimism" (289). Probal Dasgupta (1993) has memorably called English "a piece of real estate. Its owners... enforce normative spelling, punctuation, grammar, and phonological and lexical limits.... These screening devices effectively distinguish the few insiders... from the many outsiders excluded from the fold. This massive fact... undermines the naturalistic and equalitarian rhetoric associated with the discourse that the English language carries" (203). Mukherjee continues this conversation (although his bibliography does not include Dasgupta's study, nor indeed does it any of the critical sociolinguists mentioned below). He calls for a "national engagement" with eight interrelated questions on the rationale and curricula for English in India: "Given the demand of Dalit intelligentsia for an English education that is emancipatory and empowering, examination of these other similar questions cannot be avoided" (307). Two other frames of reference would have enriched Mukherjee's study even more. The first is a broadening of the debates on language hegemonies in a globalizing world. The writings of Robert Phillipson (2009) and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (2008) do much in that direction, and E. Annamalai (2004) is insightful on the impact of English on the "linguistic ecology" of India. The other context for English in India is the extensive research evidence worldwide that mother-tongue medium education not only improves educational outcomes in all subjects, but also enables more effective learning of the second and subsequent languages. Thus, whether we see English as a livelihood skill, or as a tool to deepen democracy, India's mother-tongue skills are a necessary foundation. A recent overview of this research is Ajit Mohanty et al. Multilingual Education for Social Justice (2009). These two "glocal" frames have an important role to play in revisioning English in India. References

Annamalai, E. 2004. "Nativization of English in India and its eect on multilingualism", Journal of Language and Politics 3:1 (2004): 151-162. Dasgupta, Probal. 1993. The Otherness of English: India's Auntie Tongue Syndrome (Language and Development series). Delhi: Sage. Mohanty, Ajit; Panda, Minati; Phillipson, Robert; and Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (eds). 2009. Multilingual Education for Social Justice. Globalising the Local. Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Phillipson, Robert. 2009. Linguistic Imperialism Continued. Routledge. Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove. 2008 (2000). Linguistic Genocide in Education - or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights? Delhi: Orient Blackswan.