Addressing Low Proficient Learners in English -1

K N Anandan

Teachers at all levels of teaching English frequently complain about the poor reading and writing skills of learners. They seem to be less worried about their poor skills in listening and speaking. During my recent visits to some of the residential schools in Telangana I have met several students in classes 5 to 10 who are poor in all the language skills. This is an issue that cuts across schools in several states irrespective of the medium of instruction prevailing there.

In order to overcome the issues related to the poor standards in productive skills  some of the teachers pull students through crude remedial measures such as teaching letters of the alphabet, making them copy words and sentences from the textbook, forcing them to memorize spelling and even giving them punishments of varying degrees of intensity. Ushered by their conventional belief systems teachers may not confess the futility of such exercises. This is especially so as there is always an option of putting the entire blame on students. And going one step ahead, they may also ventilate vehement criticism on Discourse Oriented Pedagogy arguing that students are to be taught the basics of language as early as possible. What they define as basics is debatable as it is in most cases, nothing more than a baggage of discrete linguistic elements such as grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. Perhaps they do not realize that productive language skills cannot be addressed by putting the receptive skills of listening and speaking at stake. Nor do they seem to understand that the poor performance standards in English have basically to do with their failure in giving comprehensible and holistic input to the learner. It may be more than a cultural shock and utter bewilderment to most of them to realize that their attempts to teach English in bits and fragments are not likely to be fruitful. At the end of their school life most students are destined to be pushed out of the educational system without having made any significant achievement, an unpleasant reality which remains as pristine as it always has been.

The dismaying situation stated above is not without solutions. Discourse Oriented Pedagogy (DOP), which I had introduced in classes 1 to 8 in Kerala in the year 2007 and four years later in classes 1 to 10 in Telangana proposes a sequenced set of well-defined and tried out classroom process that can arrest the issue of poor language skills from growing into monstrous dimensions. The actual problem lies in the aberrations teachers make inadvertently, or sometimes deliberately, in the modular mode of transaction suggested in DOP. Let us have a glance at the transaction modules and the protocols meant for addressing low proficient learners in each of these modules.   

Modular Transaction Proposed in DOP

What do we mean by a transaction module?  Avoiding ambiguities we can pedagogically define it as an activity package comprising protocols that generate specific language constructs. The modules are mutually independent but each can be linked to the other. The modules in language class are the following:

Theme-based interaction and developing concept maps

Producing a specific oral discourse

Reading

Writing a specific discourse

Editing

Each of these modules are transacted in such a way that even those learners who are conventionally labeled as ‘slow learners’ get space for self expression and are engaged. If these processes are carried out systematically the issues related to low proficient learners do not grow into monstrous dimensions. However, my experience with the two states where DOP has been introduced tells me that the expectations are not always met in classes mainly because most teachers have not been able to resolve the tension between their traditional belief systems and the pedagogical practices they have to carry forward.

The issue of non-achievers was there earlier too; but it seems to me that people never suspected the pedagogy that was in use but accepted the reality in a taken for granted manner. They were very much complacent about the systematic teaching of the “basics” and if the learners were not able to produce the expected outcome the problem could easily be located in the low IQ of the learners, if not, the incompetence of the teachers. But the moment the shift in pedagogy was brought in the poor performance standards of learners was unreasonably attributed to pedagogy disregarding whether teachers were following the classroom process or not.  

                                                                    

Let us refrain ourselves from parading the possible reasons for the present state of classrooms where a number of students are relegated into a pathetic realm of low-level proficiency. Instead, let us try to work out a few more alternatives. I would like to share a few of them in the forthcoming blogs.