A few days ago, I was at the barber’s for a hair-cut. When I entered the narrow, air-conditioned salon, a programme had been on on a Telugu TV channel. It was a musical show on which different groups of young people were presenting a series of music-cum-dance performances, and the competition was being judged by a panel of judges consisting of a Tollywood star of yesteryear, a music director, and two playback singers. The show was being anchored by a pretty young girl in bridal outfit. All the eyes inside the salon were fixed on the TV screen. The three barbers were no exception: they managed the cutting and the shaving with one eye firmly fixed on the TV screen and another eye on the head or the chin where the hands were dexterously at work. Time and again, the anchor, the participants, and the judges were screaming out exciting exclamations in half-Telugu-half-English, and this provoked a good deal of giggling inside the salon.
All of a sudden, the
anchor screamed, ‘Come on, guys, time is running out.’
I asked my barber,
‘Ammayi cheppindi meekku ardhamayinda?’
‘Emi cheppindi, saar?’
‘Time is running out.’
‘Ante, time ayipoyindi,
katha?’
‘Ayipoyindi kathu;
ayipovuthunnadi.’
‘Time’s running out.
Cheppu,’ I said.
My barber is not the
type that would have taken shelter from a rain in a school. He may have been
“conscripted” into a Telugu medium school for a couple of years, but the school
itself and the English language would have been poles apart. With some
difficulty, he said, ‘Time’s running out.’
The programme
progressed. The anchor, the actress and the participants kept squealing with
excitement, either individually or all of them at the same time, and this
generated quite a lot of English expressions. I noticed a perceptible change in
the barber’s behaviour now: he seemed to be listening carefully rather than
casually, as he had been earlier.
All of a sudden, the
anchor screamed, ‘”Oh” momentnurchi ippudu manam “wow” momentkku vachamu!’
Now, the barber asked
me, ‘Sir, “wow” ante enti?’
‘Oh” kooda annaru
katha? Adu meeku ardhamaindha?
He gave a sheepish
smile.
I said, ‘oh ante
ascharyam.’
‘Wow ante?’
‘Wow ante chala
ascharyam.’
The first round of
presentations in the series was perhaps the “oh” moment for the anchor. They
were in the last round now, and the sense of surprise, from the anchor’s point
of view, had reached a crescendo. Hence her description of it as the “wow”
moment.
Film-based
dance-and-music shows of this kind take place almost every day on television
channels, and they are keenly watched by young people like my barber. But,
hereafter, when he watches these programmes, he will do so with yet another
purpose added to his watching: he will not let go of the English-language
expressions in the exclamations being screamed out without thinking about them
and making sense of them because his attention has been focused on this
particular aspect. And, given this attention, he will have little difficulty in
understanding those expressions in their context. In other words, what I did with
the barber was consciousness-raising, and I believe this works eminently in
adult language learning.
Perhaps the basic
principles that operate in the barber situation should be the guiding
principles behind our instructional efforts on a foreign language programme
meant for adult learners – namely, motivation, consciousness-raising, a certain
amount of teaching followed by practice, with the rest of the responsibility
for pursuing and consolidating their learning in an ongoing way – throughout
their lives – being left to the individual learners.
