Talati
model paper and Junior Clerk model paper 7
The variety
and range of English teaching in India
While these examples suggest a rough correlation between type of
school management and the variables of teacher proficiency and environmental
English, wide variation also obtains within
each of these school types. Private English-medium schools may differ in the
learning opportunities they offer, and this may be reflected in differential
language attainment (Nag-Arulmani 2005); pupils in, for example, schools with
class libraries read better than those in schools where reading is restricted
to monotonous texts and frequent routine tests of spelling lists. Mathew (1997:
41) found, in a curriculum-implementation study, that the 2,700-odd schools
affiliated to the CBSE differ in the “culture” arising from “the type of
management, funding, geographic location, salary structure, teacher motivation
and competence, the type of students they cater for and the type of parents”.
Prabhu (1987: 3) suggests that “typologies of teaching situations . . .
should thus be seen as an aid to investigating the extent of
relevance of a pedagogic proposal”, rather than as absolute categories.
ELT (English Language Teaching) in
India
Traditionally, English was taught by the grammar-translation
method. In the late 1950s, structurally graded syllabi were introduced as a
major innovation into the state systems for teaching English (Prabhu 1987: 10).
The idea was that the teaching of language could be systematised by planning
its inputs, just as the teaching of a subject such as arithmetic or physics could
be. (The structural approach was sometimes implemented as the direct method,
with an insistence on monolingual
English classrooms.) By the late 1970s, however, the
behavioural-psychological and philosophical foundations of the structural
method had yielded to the cognitive claims of Chomsky for language as a “mental
organ”.4 There was also dissatisfaction within the English-teaching profession
with the structural method, which was seen as not giving the learners language
that was “deployable” or usable in real situations, in spite of an ability to
make correct sentences in classroom situations. In hindsight, the structural
approach as practised in the classroom led to a fragmentation and
trivialisation of thought by breaking up language in two ways: into structures,
and into skills. The form-focused teaching of language aggravated the gap
between the learner’s “linguistic age” and “mental age” to the point where the
mind could no longer be engaged.5
Talatimodel peparand IMP
ReplyDelete