A quick tip to get your child (especially young boys) to read...

Hello Everyone!

Is your little boy or girl a reluctant reader?  My son is surrounded by books, is read to as much as possible, is give the opportunity to buy his own books, but, despite our best efforts, the IPAD and TV prevail.  

I discovered a really easy way to increase his vocabulary;  I bought a picture dictionary with simple meanings suitable for his age.  My son uses this to help with his English homework or if he asks the meaning or spelling of a word, I encourage him to check this in his book.  Since the homework given is quite short at this age, I feel the dictionary gives maximum benefit in a concentrated period.  This is a godsend to little boys or children who have yet to develop better attention skills.

In addition, please remember to keep it visible at all times on your child's desk in his room.  I cannot tell you how wonderful it was to see him pour over the book, select the word, read it aloud and place it back on his table.  The additional and surprising benefit was his desire to keep a tidy desk afterwards with pencils, sharpeners etc., in their cases.

This has really worked wonders for my 7 year old, so try it with your own and let me know how it worked.

High-tech English teaching in India

Good morning!


When you picked up your morning newspaper, here in India, did you notice the article in the INDIAN EXPRESS?


It refers to a new mode of teaching English in classes for older children in Gujurat.  I find it rather ironical that Lord MacCaulay, who is mentioned in the article, shot himself in the foot by introducing English as the main means of breaking the spirit of the Indian people:

Lord Macaulay said the following about India in 1835 in British Parliament:

"I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation."

(Please note, it is debatable whether the correct year was 1833 or 1835, but what matters for Indians is the statement itself). 

And yet, it is the very use of English that became a weapon to fight against the Raj themselves, particularly in Calcutta, where the Raj formed their capital.  It is a welcoming thought that those who were ruled became their own rulers: SWARAJ.  It is further ironical that the knowledge of English has helped India at a time when her rise has made her a global player in the economic arena.

Take a look at Gujurat's interventions in English teaching according to the Indian Express:

Students will now learn how to write a bio-data, create an email account, key in text messages on mobile phones and read newspapers in schools and much more before they learn to recite Wordsworth’s The Daffodils.

Rejecting the Macaulay way of learning English, Gujarat Council for Educational Research and Training (GCERT) has revised Classes V-VIII textbooks that teach spoken and communicative English before teaching writing techniques.

The new text books for Class VIII, for instance, have exercises on comparing mobile phone models, creating email accounts, filling in a voter identity card, talking to neighbours and conversing with friends as part of its English syllabus.

In schools across Gujarat, learning English is compulsory Class V onwards. The new system, tested on some 500 schools for a year under the Right to Education (RTE) guidelines, does away with learning basics of grammar like verbs, nouns, gender and subject-predicate. The emphasis is more on everyday situations. So every English word lists the Gujarati way of writing it and is also translated to help one know the meaning and learn pronunciation. The new syllabus will be implemented in over 40,000 government-run and government-aided schools in the state.

Unlike the stress on alphabets and age-old rhymes, English language teaching now focusses on tools of communication and gadgets. So there are exercises like “List out the gadgets in your home” (Class VII) and so on.

“The changes have been incorporated to make the content interesting and practical and which the students can relate to. In this manner, it is far easier to teach them English as a child understands what he sees and uses in a daily life. More than writing it correctly, it is important to understand what he is being taught,” said former adviser to Ministry of Human Resource and Development Subir Shukla, who was brought in by the state government to suggest and incorporate changes in the curriculum, particularly in English subject.

“A child should know how to read a newspaper, advertisement, fill an application form for admission in a school or college or even electoral roll. Though the prevalence of Gujarati is widespread and deep-rooted, we are hoping to make students adopt and use English comfortably and conveniently,” said Haresh Chaudhary, curriculum co-ordinator and teacher trainer at Gujarat Council of Educational Research and Training (GCERT).

Shukla said the curriculum has been framed keeping in mind the holistic development of a child. “Learning through exploration, practical exposure and interesting content is aimed at removing fear for the language among students. The main idea was to remove the general notion among children as well as their parents about their inability to grasp and use English,” he added.

Sample exercises

Collect information about your favourite mobile phone and list out features that you want factored in the use of social networking sites and email

Simulate elections for class representative with candidate symbols like television, mobile phone

Collect film songs based on patriotic theme and the ones that describe India. Do you agree with what is said in them?

Mobile manners and etiquette tips

Avoid talking about personal topics when other people can hear you. Maintain a distance of at least 10 feet from the nearest person when talking on your cellphone. Phone should be switched off or put to silent mode during a job interview, funeral, wedding or any other setting where a quiet atmosphere is needed.

   

India - An English Language Powerhouse

The website OPENEQUALFREE.COM, sees India as an attractive place to study English.  Please read their article below:


To study French, one usually goes to France. It’s a logical choice, the nation of the language’s origin. This logic applies to learning German in Germany, Kazakh in Kazakhstan, and Quechua in the Andes. But in an emerging trend, students from East Asia are seeking to improve their English in…India?
To work and study in the U.S., Canada, UK, or Australia has been and still is the dream of many East Asian students hoping to increase their competitiveness for jobs. But a year-long program in California or Ottawa can rack up a bill exceeding tens of thousands in first-world currency. If English language prerequisites are not met, ESL academy fees can easily add another $5000. That’s where India comes in. With living costs near rock-bottom (a small restaurant meal in India’s most expensive city costs around $3.50), India is becoming an educational way station for more Asians on their way West.
The Guardian reports that over 1,000 South Korean students are enrolled at 43 schools throughout the country. In many Indian states, cheap English tuition can be found of a quality comparable to that of U.S. and Australian institutions. The Woodstock School in Uttarakhand, which has one of the best-known ESL programs, enrolls almost 100 Asian students from Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, and Taiwan. Instruction takes place in the folds of the Himalaya Mountains.
This is the colonial legacy of the British Empire, that England no longer maintains flagship status over the English language. Even Canada and the U.S., two countries which have English as their de facto language, are heirs of a settler tongue. Without counting these, 58 sovereign nations now list English as an official language. The Hindu in fact worries that the rich diversity of regional Indian languages is being lost, as “parents feel it is better to communicate in one universal language than to speak to the kid in two regional languages”–that universal language being English.
According to The Nation, a Thailand newspaper, some students are foregoing Western college degrees altogether in favor of Indian courses. For a four-year degree, these students end up paying about one-fifth what they would have spent in the UK or Australia. India’s attraction as a BRIC country, as well as its multiple listings in the QS World University Rankings‘ top 200, are seen to offset inconveniences like rough roads and other patchy infrastructure.

Quality crisis in Indian primary education

Please take a look at SHAILAJA FENNELL's article below in The Business Line.  (The author is Lecturer in Development Studies and Fellow of Jesus College at the University of Cambridge.)

India's poor educational outcomes should not come as a shock — it has not yet been able to ensure that 6 per cent of the national budget is spent on education. Achieving high enrolment levels is clearly not enough.

India's poor performance in the ACER PISA tests released earlier this month, where Shanghai came out at the top and India was placed second from the bottom (just above Kyrgyzstan), has provoked a barrage of questions: Why is the education system failing India, at a time when the potential of positive returns from its demographic bulge and the growing proportion of its people in their twenties and thirties should be contributing an additional injection to growth?

The poor educational outcomes should not come as a shock, given that India has not yet been able to ensure that 6 per cent of the national budget is spent on education. This, despite it being recommended decades ago, by the Kothari Commission Report in 1964. While the new Right to Education Act has provided the legal basis to ensure that all children can access school, there is still a long way to go before enrolment in schools itself becomes an automatic assurance of quality education. Programmes such as Mid-day Meal are important in increasing enrolment and retention, but will not be able to overcome the very low level of financial resources and difficult teaching environments encountered in most schools.

Uneven terrain

Any meaningful answer needs to be based on an understanding of the increasingly uneven terrain in the provision of education across India. There are obvious implications of the current pattern of educational provision. These relate to the very unequal access to educational resources with per child investment being significantly different between elite and government schools, the evidence of considerably better quality of schooling in urban than in rural areas, and policies of encouraging new private providers into the education sector not supported by adequate regulation.

The poor performance seems particularly difficult to understand, in the light of successful initiatives to improve the quality of schooling by State education departments such as those in Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh, and even private players such as the Azim Premji Foundation. While it is important to reflect on continued weaknesses in the delivery of education, there needs to also be programmes to address the financial and social difficulties faced by children from poor families in paying and staying on in the schooling system.

Research conducted on the educational outcomes of the poor in four countries (Ghana, India, Kenya and Pakistan), between 2005 and 2010, shows that only children from better-off socio-economic households are able to successfully navigate through to complete secondary schooling.

Those households most likely to experience educational risk — dropping out of the educational cycle without completing secondary school — are the poorest in the community.

The introduction of private providers to create competition in the local educational sphere does not seem to have reduced this divergence. While the new private schools have seen increased enrolment, as children from better-off households choose them over the government schools, the poorest households are unable to avail of this opportunity and continue to fall off the educational ladder. They do not regard education as a potential contributor to improving employment opportunities; instead, they are resigned to poor educational and employment outcomes.

Chinese initiative

The only solace to be gained from undertaking a detailed analysis of current educational provisions is that all developing countries have had to face these challenges in recent decades. Take China, where rural households in the poorer provinces have been particularly prone to educational risk. A longitudinal study conducted in Gansu (one of the country's poorest provinces), over 2000-2009, indicates that rural households regarded the poor educational outcome of their children to be due to their severe financial constraints, which also prevented them from buying educational aids. Also, their own low educational attainment could not support learning at home.

The disparities in the Chinese educational system were becoming evident in the late 1990s, with large intra-provincial differences between urban and rural educational outcomes. The response by the federal authorities in China was to implement a system of sponsorship for children from poor households from 2004, to cover costs of textbooks, board and lodging. The scheme is still under way and its objective is to ensure coverage of all poor rural children by 2012.

The financial outlay provided by the federal government is to be applauded, but the initiative has yet to reduce the wide gap in the quality of teaching and attitudes of teachers in urban and rural areas. Furthermore, youth from poor households in interior provinces, who have successfully completed secondary education and entered tertiary education by taking personal loans, are now faced with very poor prospects of employment. They find it difficult to compete with youth from better-off provinces, and stand no chance against the well-off and far better-taught youth coming out of Shanghai schools.

Linkage with job market

If the intention is to improve the provision and quality of Indian education to ensure that the youth bulge can really provide a boost to economic growth, it is important to address the weaknesses in the educational sector. The state then clearly needs to ‘put money where its mouth is', whether this is through public or private funds. That would be the beginning of a more equal and higher quality provision of education, which should be followed by measures to improve educational quality. The provision of education at primary and secondary level using locally relevant curriculum and delivered using innovative teaching methods should become the norm in every State's education policy.

Last, and certainly not least, it must be understood that having national enrolment levels close to 96 per cent in India today is not enough. It is worth remembering that in the early 1990s, the Kyrgyz Republic had enrolment rates of 100 per cent. But in the difficult economic period that followed, it fell below 90 per cent. The collapse of employment opportunities was a major reason for the disillusionment of Kyrgyz youth with the possible gains from completing the educational cycle. If the youth currently in schools in India today — particularly those in the poorer states and in difficult rural environments — are to contribute to making a better tomorrow, one must have better linkages between educational and labour market outcomes in the near future. 

And if you tolerate this, then your children will be next.

Hello Everyone,

After a couple of months training adults in the corporate sector, Smart Talkers India is back, blogging to you all about the state of play with the English language, here in India.  And there are no surprises that YOUNGISTAN (the term coined for India being the land with the largest youth population) were still making mistakes in basic English, even those with MBAs and Post grads.

The Hindu newspaper tells us, "The readers for whom English is a second language, or a foreign language, will never acquire the skills or the finesse of the ‘elite' (first-language learners) if they never strive to learn the correct language. The gap will never be bridged".  

Does the problem begin at school level?  Yes, I believe it does, having experienced this with my 6 year old and his education of English in India.  Another issue is, parents do not use English early enough with the child.  Do not mistake my intentions - I have a strong belief in also using the mother tongue and speak Bengali, too, to my child, but he had an advantage from the start, in that he was surrounded by 3 languages, namely Hindi, English and Bengali.  He continues to be a good speaker and this has been noted in his school reports.  And this is an important criteria of language - that it is to be spoken first, before it is read.  However, spoken English is not uniform throughout India, and virtually obsolete in government schools.

It seems, that those who had a convent education had fantastic use of grammar.  My own father had a Jesuit education before he set off for the UK almost 50 years ago.  His English is impeccable, as are many people who have had this education in India.  Some people feel it is because the foundations of the English language were carefully and correctly laid to the young students.  Nowadays, there is so much available on line such as grammar checks, spell checks and talking dictionaries, such as Cambridge on line (no excuses please for mispronunciation either in UK or US English).

Take a look at the following articles  from The Hindu newspaper, and former BBC correspondent, Mark Tully which have much to say on this subject:

http://www.thehindu.com/arts/books/article1155559.ece

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-15635553

The wonderful Manic Street Preachers (band of UK fame), clearly express the "sins of the father" in the song, "And if you tolerate this, then your children will be next" ; that is, that those of you who persistently, misuse or ignore that which is the correct path or method, will pass this on to your children.  In the case of the English Language in India, I continue to lament at its abuse, even at school level.

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