Teaching English

ESL Reading Skills

Many of the Indian students excel in courses abroad. They top the lists of schools and universities. They are well known for their hard work, sincerity and dedication to studies and work. But not many within India are able to develop their full potential. Those who have achieved success have done it in spite of the education system rather than because of what they learnt in schools. In a vast country like India it is not possible to make sweeping general statements about what is happening in the nation as a whole. But in a majority of places a lot of people have voiced their concern about the way of teaching in schools which hamper the growth of creativity and the innate potential of the students rather than facilitate their development. Our education system does prepare the students to work under a lot of pressure and achieve their goals in spite of all odds. Those who survive the pressure do well wherever they go. But what about those who crack under the pressure and who do not learn the basic skills that would make them literate and educated in the real sense of the terms?

Why are Indian children not able to read?

English Medium schools in India begin the teaching of oral English right from pre nursery. The children, who are to get into the KG classes when they are three years old, join the pre nursery classes as early as one and a half to two years. Many schools instruct the parents to talk to their children in English so that they will be able to talk in English before they are three. The teaching of reading English begins with KG I. In many schools the second language which is mostly Hindi begins from KG II.

M ost of the teachers who work at this level are not trained to work with young children. They are usually graduates who are ready to work for a meagre amount which may range from 25 to 75 dollars a month. When they are asked to teach reading in English they teach in the way they were taught by their teachers. So the teaching usually begins with the writing of the letters of the alphabet, the capital letters first. The child is asked to repeat the letters A to Z everyday and is asked to copy them hundreds of times. Then they start with the small letters and the whole procedure continues. Then they copy the capital and the small letters together and fill in more pages in their notebooks. All this happens in the first year of KG. In the second year they start copying words and sentences. In addition they begin copying the letters of another language, Hindi.

When the children come to Class One the sentences grow longer and the books grow bigger. This is due to the false assumption that the children should now be able to read after two years of language instruction. From Class I to Class XII and then through graduation and post graduation the same assumptions result in a multi storied building with no foundation.  It is a miracle that many students survive in spite of this academic mess and have earned a good name not just within the country but also in different parts of the world.

This is the reading programme of very expensive private schools and the condition of the State Board and Municipal schools is still worse.

What can be done to remedy the situation?

Whether the teachers are trained or untrained it is possible for any sincere teacher to develop awareness about how languages are learnt and how a child can be helped to learn.

1.      No one can learn to read by writing. If the children are asked to copy the letters of the alphabet, the purpose of the activity is to develop a good handwriting. This they should do only after they develop the skills of listening, speaking and reading.

All of us learn a first language at home. We begin to learn it not by writing the letters of the alphabet. We first listen to the language being spoken by our parents, relatives and friends. Then we begin to speak the language. Later when we go to school we begin to read and write.  So whatever is to be learnt well has to be first heard, then uttered, later read and finally can be written down.

2.      The teaching of the letters of the alphabet should begin with the sound of the alphabet rather than the name of the alphabet. The sound will help one decode the letters and read them when they appear in words. So it would make life easier for the children to listen to the sound /b/ by associating it with familiar words like book, bench, boy, etc. If each sound is introduced separately and later combined to form words, the initial problems of reading could be minimised to some extent. This way of teaching should be followed for the Indian languages too. In fact children will learn to read faster in their mother tongue because the letters correspond to the sounds they make in Indian languages. In most Indian languages we have as many as 50 letters and each sound has a separate letter.  In English there are only 26 letters and they represent 44 sounds.

3.      It is also not necessary to make the children learn the letters of the alphabet in A-Z order. This order is useful only for referring to a dictionary. When we introduce the sounds the letters represent, for example, C for /k/ sound, we choose it because children know words like cat and car. When they are shown pictures of cat and car and the /k/ sound is repeated they can associate it with the pictures and the words.  After showing flashcards for different words of this kind, the teacher can write the letter on the black board and repeat the sound it stands for. The teacher can ask the students to draw pictures of their own choice beginning with this sound and copy the letter c. Next she may introduce /t/ sound with pictures like table, toy, etc. and ask the children to copy the letter t and draw other objects. After introducing /m/, /r/, etc. she can combine the sounds and introduce ‘a cat’, a mat, a rat, etc. and draw these on the blackboard. So the teaching may begin with letter c standing for the /k/ sound for example and go on in the order of t, m, r, etc. The criteria for selection is the words these sounds make and the pictures that go with them should be familiar to the students.

4.      It is not necessary to teach the capital letters first. The capital letters are used for sentence beginnings and for names. For the rest we need to use the small letters. So it will be easier for children to learn small letters first and learn the capital letters through other activities like learning to write their names. A special class should be conducted to give them specific information like sentences always begin with a capital letter and end with a period or full stop. A lot of mistakes the children make by mixing up capital and small letters can be avoided if they are not introduced together too early in their learning programme.

5.      This plan of teaching of sounds is incomplete without the exposure to complete texts. So the teacher should read story books to the children and interact with them by talking about the pictures in the story books and the things that happen. In the context she can ask the children to point some sounds or words which they have already learnt. She can also use video programmes like ‘Rat-a-Tat-Tat’ that initiate the children to identify sounds and learn to read through story reading activities.

6.      It would be more effective to give the children graded readers, for example, storybooks with lots of pictures and very few words to books with more text and less pictures. The teacher can read to the children, read with them parts of the stories and help them learn to read aloud and read silently. This kind of activity should replace reading of the textbook lesson and answering questions based on them. In many schools children memorise the answers to these questions and write them at the time of examinations. Even those who get very high scores because they have a better memory do not grow up to be good readers. In the examinations again instead of asking them to write answers from memory, an unseen passage can be given and questions can be asked. Then the children will have to read that passage, understand it, read the questions, understand the questions, find the answers to the questions and them write them. Unless we do this we cannot call ourselves language teachers. By asking them to repeat from memory we are teaching language as a content subject.  The content of the lessons in the language textbook, whether it is English, Hindi or any other language is not meant to be committed to memory. This memorisation may be important for remembering certain dates and events in History, certain places and resources in Geography, certain theorems and formulas in maths and science. The passage in the English or Hindi book is meant to develop language skills.

While teaching the Indian languages like Hindi the phonic method is followed in many schools. But the problem is in making the children copy whole words which do not mean anything to them while trying to teach one sound. Further, the teaching of sounds is not followed by reading of real books which are simple and accessible. The children are expected to repeat and copy strings of words and just progress to sentences and paragraphs automatically. If this part is remedied our reading programmes can help children become real readers in our languages as well as in English.

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