Language Education

Teaching English in India

Nishevita Jayendran, Anusha Ramanathan, Surbhi Nagpal

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000412451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

This book situates the teaching and learning of language in general, and English in particular, within the sociocultural context of India. It engages with current scholarship in literacy studies and the pedagogies of language acquisition and learning.

The volume discusses the cultural, discursive and sociopolitical functions of language education and the teaching of English in Indian schools. It examines the importance of adopting flexible pedagogical and multimodal strategies in teaching vocabulary; grammar; literary genres like fiction, poetry and drama; rhetorical discourses; and communicative English to learners for whom English is not one of their home language(s). It also discusses pragmatic approaches to curriculum design for communicative competence and critical literacy rooted in theoretical principles of language education. The authors analyse issues relevant to secondlanguage acquisition; English language teaching (ELT); emergent, adult and critical literacies; and critical pedagogies in language and literature.

Written in an accessible style, the book comes with case studies, exercises and additional references to support an independent exploration of the fields. This book will be of interest to students and teachers of language, literature and education, as well as teachers and educators in schools and universities. It is also of relevance to policymakers, non-governmental organisations and public and private sector bodies that work in the fields of language and literacy.

1
The notion of language

An overview

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all.’

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

Language is the most pervasive and intricate system that is unique to the human species. Understanding the nature of language, its functions and the ways in which it operates remains a much-discussed topic in the humanities and social sciences. Research in domains as varied as linguistics, neuroscience, culture, anthropology, aesthetics, psychology, philosophy, literature, semiotics, rhetoric, stylistics, discourse analysis and sociology, to name a few, influence our understanding of language. Debates through the centuries have offered multiple perspectives to the question, ‘What is language’, several of which, while illuminating different aspects, remain unreconciled. How can we communicate effectively if each of us uses language in our own idiosyncratic way? Underlying this question is the assumption that language is essential for human communication. But is communication the sole function of language? And what does communication mean? It is only appropriate to start this book with the fundamental question: What is language? Unpacking and critically assessing the various responses to this question will help us formulate a more nuanced understanding of what language does, must do, should do and could do. This will, in turn, help us formulate the rationale and objectives of language education and its relevance for literacy.

Objectives

In this chapter, the reader will be able to

• gain an overview of language through select thinkers from philosophy, ethnography and linguistics;
• understand the relationship between language and thought;
• identify ways in which language, culture and identity relate to each other; and
• engage critically with contemporary perspectives on New Literacy Studies (NLS) and critical literacy.

What is language?

Let’s try a small activity. Think of words or phrases that come to your mind when you think of language.

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Were any of these words a part of your list?

code, communication, message, system, sign, grammar, dialect, accent, syllable

And how about these words?

imagination, culture, art, poetry, story, sound, discourse, philosophy, narrative, literature, identity, tradition

A cursory comparison of your list and that of your neighbour’s would show that there are a wide range of areas covered in a layman’s understanding of the term. Terms like ‘communication’, ‘medium’, ‘tools’ and ‘grammar’ may be common to our lists. Less likely are imagination, discourse and philosophy. This exercise shows us that there is no ‘correct’ definition for language. Rather, our understanding of language draws from a wide range of disciplines and applications. Philosophy, linguistics, ethnography, sociology and literary studies are just some disciplines that influence our approach to, and expectations of, language. Semantics, semiotics and discourse analyses approach language as structures that carry meaning, parts of which are driven by the sociocultural contexts of their use and production. Psychologists and philosophers debate the relationship between language and thought, as they unpack the ways in which language constructs identity. Cultural theorists take this argument ahead when they look at the ways in which identity is socially and culturally embedded. This embedding has a corresponding influence on the use and place of language in human life since our beliefs and thoughts derive from our experience of (being in) the world. Does our language then reflect what we have understood of the world, or do we construct our worlds through language?

For Lachman Khubchandani, we live in language. Language is essentially human. However, Khubchandani points out that in the process of delving into the aspect of communication that is seen as the core function of language, we miss its larger attributes and capacities. Language is not a conglomerate of small parts that comprise a whole. On the contrary, the whole comes prior to the parts (Khubchandani, 1997). What this implies is that the purpose of language is to convey a complete meaning holistically. To do this, different parts in a language unit work together. So, for example, if I want to say that I saw a cat, the sounds of ‘c’, ‘a’ and ‘t’ combine as three small phonetic parts to form a word. If we apply Khubchandani’s argument here, we need to look at the three sounds together to make meaning holistic rather than focus on the individual, discrete consonant and vowel sounds. Similarly, words come together to form sentences, sentences combine to form paragraphs and so on. In each case, individual components build up a larger picture of meaning by interacting with each other in unique ways. The study of different parts of language should, therefore, be such that it helps us understand systems holistically.

Khubchandani highlights further that living languages are characterised by change, fluidity and plurality. Variations in the form of dialects and regional languages are natural to living human languages (Khubchandani, 1997). Sociolinguists discuss the link between geographical locations and language variations as they investigate the ways in which languages transform and modify across space and time. Our approach to learning and teaching living languages, of which English is an example, and the knowledge systems constructed through these languages, must factor in these variations and fluidity.

The sections that follow are organised around different notions of language that discuss the relationship between language and thought, its link to culture and identity, its nature and function as a representational and symbolic medium of communication and, finally, the place of language education in literacy studies and practise. We will look at some key theorists for each notion, whose ideas throw light on one specific aspect of language. We will finally draw these different strands together to understand their implications for literacy.

The aspects of language we will consider in this chapter are clustered around the following thematic heads:

• Language and Structure
• Language and Symbolisation
• Language and Representation
• Language and Culture
• Language and Literacy

Language and structure

Language is fundamentally rule governed and frequently regarded as a structure. We can understand structure in different ways. It can be seen as grammar, as genres, as discourses that frame speech and as cognitive structures that give shape to human thought. This understanding of language as structure has had an impact on the ways in which language is taught in schools and colleges to children and adults. The two theorists we will look at in this section, from the Western tradition, who have influenced a large part of our teaching-learning approach are Ferdinand de Saussure, a structuralist, and Noam Chomsky, who in his early works adopted an innate approach to linguistics and generative grammar.

Let us start chronologically with Ferdinand de Saussure whose work on structural linguistics has had a lasting impact on not only the study of language but also on other allied disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, such as sociology, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, political theory, critical theory and literary criticism, to name a few.

Saussure was a Swiss linguist who taught students at the university in Geneva in the early decades of the 20th century. His work on the nature of language, titled A Course in General Linguistics (1956), offers a systematic understanding of the study of language. Saussure approached language as a system or structure (which eventually led to the term ‘structuralism’ in critical theory to indicate a method of analysis that views knowledge as, and through, structures). Language was a sign that comprised two aspects: the signifier and the signified, presented as ‘Sign = Signifier + Signified’. Saussure defined the signifier and the signified as two sides of a coin. These two sides need to come together and coexist for a coin to be complete. Similarly, the linguistic structure is complete as a meaning-making system when the signifier, or the means through which an object is implied, and the signified, or the object that is being referred to, move simultaneously.

Let us take an example to illustrate this. If I want to ask you to give me a pen, how do I do it? I can wave a pen at you, hoping that you understand that I need one. I can mime the act of writing to show that I need something to write with, again hoping that you will understand that I want a pen. I can speak to you and request that you lend me your pen. How do I know that you have understood my request, particularly in the last option where I have spoken to you? This will happen only if both of us share a common understanding of what a pen is an...