In this essay, I wish to review the position regarding the English Compulsory classes in the University of Karachi at the Bachelor or Arts and Bachelor of Science level.
The students come from all sorts of backgrounds, from both Urdu and English medium, and from all communities. These observations are based on direct teaching experiences followed by long interviews with a randomly selected group of students.
The situation, in a word, is grim. It is not that the time is too short for one to do any worthwhile teaching: that point has been amply brought out in the discussion here, and I shall say something on that later. Neither has it anything to do with whether or not the examination system is able to check their learning. It is that the students are NOT ANCHORED TO ANY KNOWLEDGE BASE WHATEVER AND DO NOT KNOW HOW TO GET ONE.
They haven’t the faintest idea what a library is or how it works. They do not know how to look up relevant passages in a book with the help of an index. They do not know how to read a newspaper ad, a journal article, or a dictionary entry. They do not know how to look up a word in a dictionary – and they have never heard of a thesaurus. They have no idea of ‘reference’: no concept that a dictionary, an atlas, a thesaurus, and related books are the basic study-kit of every university student – for life. They cannot relate a television announcement to its press counterpart. They do not know about Cinderella, or Snow White, or King Arthur’s knights, or Hatim Tai. One cannot count on them to know the words in the headlines in the newspaper. They do not read any English newspaper – not even just the Friday Magazine, or Daily News MAG, or Time, or Newsweek, or Herald, or the Reader’s Digest. The above is a diverse list, but it gives some idea of the meaning, for me, of what a ‘knowledge base’ is. I find it very disturbing to note the vacuum in which they live: for their perception of it is certainly an acute sense of lack – they do not know how it came about or why.
Why? Why do so many know so little of what is their own heritage – what I call the ‘heritage of innocence’. In asking them about these things, I cam upon four ‘problem areas’, and each gives a revealing insight to the problem. They are: (1) wrong notions of English, (2) useless learning of grammatical exercises, (3) pressures of milieu, and (4) psychological factors.
When I asked the students about their extracurricular reading – Time, Reader’s Digest, etc. – their first reaction was, is THAT English? They seemed to feel that English was in textbooks and dictionaries. So used were they to the English period, when one DID English, that the fact that their chemistry, social science, and psychology texts were also in English prose came as a surprise. The compartmentalization of English as a subject was the first problem, and it took some doing to disabuse them of the idea. Is it any wonder that when one comes to the university with such an embedded notion, the hostility to the English language does not quite dissolve fully? When one faces the problems of the English period in EVERY period?
It was explained to them that English was in DAWN, in Different Strokes, in Archie Andrews comics, in pop songs (when you could understand them, that is), in the instruction leaflet provided with a pocket calculator, in movies and in recordings of literary value, e.g. plays and poems, etc. There were quite a few dissenting voices at this, in spite of a large murmur of agreement.
The dissenters could not believe English could be FUN. They had a no-nonsense, humourless approach, which was not conducive to the learning process at all. And the inbuilt hostility could not be wished away.
The students did not have pen friends, so the only English letters they wrote were from the Examination Hall, to Dear ABC (or Editor), signed, yours sincerely XYZ. It is amazing that this format was their concept of letter writing, and no other. Their essays were about television or picnics; they never related the answers in other subjects to the structure of an essay: no, one was a half-memorized narrative of eating samosas at the beach, the other was an ‘answer’.
Their greatest notion of what English was, or where English resided, was grammar. They were ’experts’ on active/passive voice, direct/indirect speech, and other learnable – and to be fair, teachable – units of grammar. A few could change to negative without changing the meaning, coming up with such remarkably dexterous verbal play as ‘Akbar was not a bad king’ for ‘Akbar was a good king’. When asked how many times one gets to meaningfully use this sort of knowledge, they were touchingly right: ‘We pass the exam, don’t we?’
This brings us to the second problem area: useless learning of grammatical exercises. No grammatical skills, mind you, only the answers to the exercises, in whatever grammar text was prescribed – usually Wren & Martin’s High School Grammar and Composition. I would not have believed such a thing was possible, but this was a clue to the humourless attitude. Grammar was dull and boring. In the whole textbook there are no illustrations. But they knew the answers by heart. They were stumped the moment a substitute word was used in the same pattern.
They revealed another interesting fact. Grammar teaching was never progressive, or integrated. Every class began with ‘parts of speech’ – and articles, and prepositions. There was no way to check the overdoses; the boredom that resulted was understandable.
Yet all the students asked (over three years) about their difficulties in English wrote ‘grammar’. Their sense of knowledge about grammar was that, if one knew it, one could write and speak English. They complained of mistakes in tenses most commonly, but the most revealing insight into their frustration comes home in the following remark by a geography student (original syntax and spelling):
First, I don’t understand that how the English going in the world. We learn English in schools, colleges, and universities with grammer. Bur when I got opportunities to see some English films on cinema and on T.V. I become puzzled, because the people who were acting, speaking in wrong way, I mean, without grammer.
This is interesting in what it reveals about the entire exposure and the duration of exposure to grammar. My contention, again, is confirmed: the learning of grammatical exercises is taking place – not the learning of grammar.
The student I have quoted above must have been a tenacious learner in that he tried to correlate the classroom knowledge with the outside world. But others have not been so determined – or lucky. Going through the compositions, one finds – unanimously – a desire to speak the language and the fear of being snubbed. This is the third problem area, ‘the pressures of the milieu’.
What are they to do, these youngsters who wish to speak English, are honest about their weaknesses and wish to overcome them? In their circle of friends, there is cruel undercutting; the jokes are biting, and they hurt. Are they expected to rise one fine morning with fluent English on their lips?
Here again the problem is socio-cultural. There is an aura around a fluent speaker of the language and an envious desire to spot him stumble, falter, stammer. And the snub is not a good thing to have on one’s eighteen-year-old ego. The negative reinforcement inhibits most of the enthusiasm for the language: only the most determined keep at it.
This third problem area overlaps the fourth one: the psychological factors. And once again, there was a unanimous resentment at the arbitrary ‘kismet’ which gave so clear an edge to the English-medium students over those not so ‘blessed’. And strangely, the Urdu-medium students DID NOT want everyone to be like them – THEY WANTED ENGLISH MEDIUM THROUGHOUT, FOR EVERYONE. This sounds facetious, but it was the good speakers of the English language who favoured translations and ‘Urduizing’ however much the absurdity and impossibility was pointed out to them. Articulate hostility was present, too, and there was a political charge of ‘colonial hangover’ for all English speakers and advocates.
This is a curious phenomenon. The most articulate speakers in favour of Urdu already know their English – and too well. They are the advocates for Urdu medium, not knowing what kind of intellectual vacuum those limited to Urdu are – and will be – subjected to for life. The problem is planned deprivation. Urdu medium students are avid learners of English, not for any snobbish edge over anybody, but simply to make up for their knowledge of the world of which they are deprived. English today represents that immediacy of access to meaningful knowledge that cannot be claimed any other language. To have a generation of youngsters who do not know what the Encyclopaedia Britannica is, who had never heard of the BBC Ascent of Man or Civilisation series, or could not understand them even if they saw them, to give just two examples, is to have an impoverished youth, possibly handicapped from participating in the world forever.
What is needed now is to change this cycle of poverty into one of stimulation. I argue strongly for an extension of the duration that students learn English at University. A four-semester course, optional for those who wish to improve their skills, is a compelling alternative.
The best intellectual heritage of the world happens to be in the English language. Let us not deny our rightful share of it to our children and our future.
REFERENCES
Crofts Kenneth. 1972. Readings on English as a Second Language. Mass: Winthrop Publishers, Inc.
Finocchiaro, Mary. 1969. Teaching English as a Second Language. NewYork: Harper and Row.
Judy, S. 1979. The English Teacher’s Handbook. Winthrop, Mass.
Mackay, Barkman, and Jordan. 1979. Reading in a Second Language. Mass. Newbury House