From the sidelines

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.