#24. Do away with ‘Speak only in English!’
“At school, you must only speak in English!” — Schools and teachers are undoubtedly paranoid about enforcing this rule on their children. I find this to be the biggest farce in trying to encourage children to learn the English language.
Teachers have the following hypothesis: ‘By enforcing the children to speak in English, they will get better at the language as their communication with peers and teachers will predominantly be in English.’ While I don’t disagree completely with this hypothesis, I do not support it fully as well.
The reason being, the repercussions of imposing such a rule could be drastic and deep. Let me demonstrate this below:
To explain the above illustration: Enforcing learners to speak exclusively in English could curb fluent expression from the children, which in turn could reduce meaningful student participation in the classroom. This could arise out of fear of failure/ridicule and ultimately lead to peer isolation. Due to all this, facilitators would not be able to gather accurate feedback on what learners like or know, the result of which will lead to creation of poor and out-of-context lesson plans. Finally, this encourages rote learning, which is what we are trying to avoid in the first place.
There could be a lot other factors that could extend from this chain of consequences.
The solution: Connect, Extend, Challenge
This is one of my favorite routines and can be customized to most cases. Though it is predominantly used for exercises pertaining to visible thinking, it holds very relevant for this case. Here’s some basic information about this routine:
Study the above diagram carefully.
Objective: To teach English to children who are not well versed with the language.
Connect: The question you need to ask is: What language do they already know? It could be Tamil, Hindi, Spanish, French or even a localized version of English. This is the bridge that connects the learner to the language he wants to learn. We often neglect this bridge.
Extend: The question you need to ask is: Using what they already know, how can I teach them English? I’m tempted to share the below classroom rules chart to drive home this point (and the one above)
The above image clearly specifies the rules of “Working with a buddy” in both English & Spanish. So kids who struggle to read English can always turn to Spanish to understand the context more clearly. The more children are exposed to this, the more they internalize the new language.
The same structure can be made use of in verbal communications as well (This is what I mean: Say that you encounter a difficult sentence while reading a story in English. To explain the meaning of this sentence, do not think twice to switch to the native language. This will ensure that the learners are connected to the story and at the same time learn new words in English as well)
Challenge: The question you need to ask is: Now that I know that my learners are getting a hang of the language (English), how can I challenge them to learn something new?
Verdict: Whether you prefer the Phonics method or the whole language identification method to teach English, the precursor is to impart learning is by ensuring that learners are given a context that they can connect/relate to. The context here is, of course, a language that learners are already familiar with.
