This story is from January 30, 2018

Tamil Nadu’s new English learning generation is in its villages

Tamil Nadu’s new English learning generation is in its villages
Representative Image
CHENNAI: Every evening, as Imran Satheer sits down to revise the day’s English lessons at home, resting amid his pile of homework is an English-to-Tamil dictionary — his prized go-to guide. It helps him pick up new words and recall old word meanings he may have forgotten. A Class XI student at the Manalur Government High School in Sivagangai, Imran believes this drill will come handy in his pursuit to "study medicine in a foreign country when I grow up".

Taking into account students like Imran is ‘Beyond Basics’, a recent survey Annual School Education Report (ASER) 2017, has revealed that 58% of rural teenagers can read sentences in English. In Tamil Nadu, a state that has long resisted English with its cultural and political rooting and fiery Tamil nationalism, the number stands at 74.6%. This trend among its rural youth is a defining one. It takes from the long-existent aspirational value that English in small-town India has often been associated with, and one that explains the scores of spoken English classes that have mushroomed in these towns and villages over the years.
Interestingly, pro-Tamil crusader and activist VCK general secretary D Ravikumar views this change as progressive and necessary. "English’s reach and recognition in the state is essential for Hindi to be kept at bay — a struggle that has united Tamil nationalist and Dravidian parties alike," he says. "And then, English isn’t just a language anymore; it is the key to global knowledge and development. Which is why embracing English will empower us, and boycotting it will pave way for its substitution by Hindi, and that will just enslave us," he adds.
In 2017 the survey covered 1,044 people in the 14 to 18 age-group, from 60 villages and 925 households in Madurai and the results have been encouraging, "We found 74.6% students were able to read and comprehend basic English sentences," says Oliver B, state head of Pratham Education Foundation that conducted the survey. "A natural explanation to this is that basic English words and sentences have permeated into the daily lives of these students, as they have with the rest of the country. We got this from having these children read sentences such as, ‘where is your house?’, ‘I like to play’," he says. "Also instrumental has been the state’s steady efforts to incorporate the language in Tamil medium government schools. Its primary objective through this has been to restrict the migration of students to English medium private schools. The quality of English being taught in these government schools, is however still debatable," he adds.
Ravikumar too agrees that despite the state witnessing a stronger hold of the English language, it still has little to demonstrate as far as the foundational language skill training in schools go. "In the case of Tamil too, the command over the language is not honed the way it should be. The result is a generation that is neither skilled in its mother tongue nor English. This also explains why several companies in the IT sector are arranging independent English classes for graduates after hiring them," he says.

Confronted with gaps like this is R Murugesan, assistant headmaster of English at the Government High School in Manalur. While he has a number of students with the enthusiasm and acumen, he has few teachers to spot their potential and refine it.
"What we need are newer methods — audio and video broadcasts, practical training and individual attention — to help students grasp the language in its whole context, and not a just as a syllabus template to pass an examination," he says. "For this, we need teachers who are skilled in the language themselves. But what we have are teachers who were hired a decade ago with just a diploma in teaching. Pitted against them now is a new breed of teachers armed with an MA and BEd degrees, who are finding little scope or monetary promise to join our schools. But the fact is that rural government school students are in desperate need for such hands-on training, because they don’t have an external environment stimulating the kind of knowledge-building and day-to-day interactions, as city students do," he adds.
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