Communication skills lie at the centre of all success in today’s world. Those who can express their own thoughts, opinions, and plans effectively enjoy the ability to lead, manage work, and people. These elements of communication skills definitely require practical English, rather than theoretical knowledge of the language.
We know that Singapore, a technologically advanced society, places great importance on English teaching for its future generation. Here, students practice oral presentations and free writing at least twice a week, in addition to their regular classes, which truly nurture them to face the challenges of today’s world.
When this becomes a reality for teaching English to school students in Singapore, we provide our students with English books that include the pronunciation and meaning of each word in Bengali, along with their line-by-line Bengali translation and discussions on some commonly known grammar items and formulas in Bengali.
Our students, to be honest, do not perceive whether they are learning English or Bengali, let alone developing their communication skills in listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
Teachers and guardians prefer helping with books (actually, these are not books but guides and notes) with the Bengali word-for-word and line-by-line meaning. Publishers who can publish books with increasing Bengali content enjoy more commercial aspects, keeping students engaged.
When Students do not practice English as part of their communication skills, orally and in writing, they are surely not developing their communication skills in this language to face the realities of the current-day world, and hence they lag behind. Now, how will teachers truly help the students acquire this language, along with developing the necessary skills for their individual and national benefits?
Teachers must be motivated, smart and curious enough to search for useful sources to learn how to effectively teach this language to non-native learners. Many suggest teacher training! Teachers have received extensive training from multiple sources; however, there has been no significant improvement in their effective teaching of language to students, resulting in enhanced communication skills.
Many people advise the government to establish a language lab in all educational institutions, which seems to be an impractical suggestion. Our government cannot afford to do it. We suggest that the government take steps commensurate with our state’s ability.
Moreover, we have computer labs in many educational institutions that remain unattended, and only dust gathers on the computers and tables. Our available resources should be utilised to develop the fluency of our learners, and assessment tools should be original tests designed to develop the skills of our learners.
It is transparently evident that the 12-year project to teach English to our students has largely failed, as no student can effectively and comfortably communicate in English after receiving certificates from the education boards, indicating a lack of proficiency in English communication skills. However, very few of them can, but that is not the contribution of this system of institutions.
They can learn this language either through their family background or by being active on social media, following some recent techniques. Still, the state must nurture the mechanism and system of teaching English as a compulsory subject until grade twelve at the cost of national expenditure and time.
The state has to nurture around three lakh English teachers from primary to higher secondary level. Students pass the public examination, but it does not say anything, as they cannot produce anything of their own, either in writing or speaking.
Nowadays, we notice that English teaching centres have sprung up in every nook and corner of the country. Why is it so? The state has failed to develop the required skills of students. These centres require students to memorise dialogues for various situations (e.g., a market, an airport, an office, or a doctor’s visit) and produce sentences before others to demonstrate their fluency or performance.
Learners must engage in various activities to become familiar with the use of different vocabulary and sentences necessary for effective communication. The set or imagined situation may not be common or the same everywhere. When the situation changes, learners will be unable to cope with it and will be unable to continue their conversation.
Students’ books are rewritten by note and guidebook sellers who vie with each other to produce English books, ranging from the easiest to the most difficult, capturing the market and eroding the vitality of learners. Students read English books entirely in the Bengali language. It superficially seems that it helps rural and weaker students learn English, but that is a mistaken notion.
Students can read and must be able to read English without relying on their mother tongue’s pronunciation, which can hinder their ability to learn English. The worst thing is that teachers prefer and lovingly use these books. They never think that students will be totally focused on gaining skills in this language.
In our national assessment system, we have just introduced question-answers, MCQ, information transfer, making sentences from a substitution table, True/False, rearrangement, and composition. None of these items is set in the question as absolutely new.
All the items are old and have been stored in either a board or an educational institution. And questions follow a particular pattern. No board goes beyond that. These items are already known, though it is claimed that some seen and some unseen items are set in the board exams, as well as in the internal exams.
Unknown means beyond the textbook, but students are already familiar with these items in their study books or in test papers. Necessarily, testing students’ competency using these items does not retain any merit.
The greatest competency, namely listening, which accounts for 40 per cent of our communication skills, and speaking, which accounts for 35 per cent of our everyday communication skills, remains largely absent from our system. Still, we certify our students with an A+ or an A. The education boards dare not deviate from this tradition, as it would result in a greater number of students failing in this subject, which neither the institutions nor the government want.
Their failure in the board exam means creating huge chaos in the country that nobody wants. Therefore, blaming only the government does not absolve us of our duties. So, gradually, the testing items should be changed, leading to creative and skill-based, as well as unknown items.
Now the most pressing need is to totally ignore and ban the note and guidebooks that include pronunciations written in Bengali and meanings also in Bengali. This phenomenon seriously weakens students’ natural ability to grasp a foreign language. It not only makes them overburdened but also fails to establish a foundation in this language.
It rather makes them crippled that we must not afford to accept. We must speak out against this situation as English teachers first and then involve others, along with the government, to ban this kind of book.
About the Author
Masum Billah works as a President of the English Teachers' Association of Bangladesh (ETAB), Dhaka, Bangladesh. He previously worked as an Education Specialist at BRAC, an international NGO in Bangladesh.