The NK magic at a grammar seminar

The star attraction at an international grammar seminar I attended sometime ago at Nagarjuna University was a short, scraggy old man with pan-tainted teeth and a run-down look.  When he spoke, the audience, consisting of university and college teachers of English, listened with rapt attention.  Every now and then, they either laughed or clapped, even though the man was speaking about the dreariest of all subjects, namely, grammar.  And when he concluded his speech, the delegates wanted him to continue.

    Natesan Krishnaswamy is the man's name.  He is more familiarly known as "Professor Krishnaswamy". His friends and admirers call him "NK".  The 80-year-old NK is the envy of teachers (How I wish I could be unpedantic enough to say, "Teacher's Envy", after the Onida advertisement!): he has the right recipe for regaling the audience.  But it is a recipe than can work only with NK.  People who have tried to use it have only revealed themselves to be a bunch of amateurs.  But, in the process, they have gained the most important lesson that the cook is as important as the recipe.  NK's cooking is authentic and distinctive.  And "vegetarian"!  But "vegetarians" and "non-vegetarians" alike enjoy his meal, savouring every mouthful.

It's the English language that NK "cooks".  He "cooked" it for about three decades as a professor of English grammar and linguistics at the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad.  Among those who have feasted on his grammar teaching is the well-known British novelist AS Byatt, who said in a letter to the London Times: "I was part of a course for teachers, listening to Professor Krishnaswamy talking about modern English grammar with a wit and passion I've rarely heard in any lecturer."  Though retired officially about fifteen years ago, NK has never taken retirement from grammar teaching, teacher training, and materials writing, the last two of which he practises now with much greater charm than in the past.

At the grammar seminar, NK was the first to lecture after the inauguration.  As soon as he took over the mike, he cast a spell on the delegates – a spell that didn't break until he left.  With sturdy ideas and charming illustrations, he disproved the theory of post-colonialism and offered a neo-colonial perspective.  A delightful iconoclast, he held Crystal's concept of "World Englishes" up to ridicule, and rubbished Kachru's idea of "Indian English".  When he spoke about the celebrated "native speaker competence", the audience were not just amused; they collapsed into laughter.

On the second day of the seminar, Professor Tickoo gave a scholarly lecture on dictionaries.  At the end of the lecture, he cautioned, "No dictionary can be expected to be always correct."  NK substantiated the warning with a delightful example:  "As a grammarian and linguist, I have always wondered what the part of speech of 'Yes' is.  I looked it up in the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary; it said 'Yes' is an interjection.  Then I looked it up in Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English; it said 'Yes' is an adverb.  What is the correct part of speech of 'Yes'?  Nobody knows, least of all lexicographers.  Only God knows!"  It was greeted with peals of laughter.

NK believes that inspiring people to study grammar will be much more effective than implanting grammar in their minds.

The decline and fall of the sari

On a Friday, I entered my classroom and became as bewildered as the proverbial bull in that china shop.  (But I was not, I must hasten to add, rough and clumsy like that bull.)  What caused the bewilderment was the sartorial extravagance that lay before me: the girls in the class were draped in silk saris of vibrant colours and decked out with gold necklaces, bracelets and chandelier-like objects that dangled from their ears.  "Fascinating!  Absolutely fascinating!"  I said, wondering at the difference six yards of fabric could make to a dreary classroom, and asked them, "But what's the occasion?"  "Today is the first Friday of the sravana masam", they replied blushing and laughing.  It was all very pleasing – the saris, the chandeliers, the laughter and the blushing.

When I think about it now, I feel that there is something else that is much more pleasing: the thought that the sari is here to stay, and that it still enjoys a presence on campuses, however scanty the presence may be.  And with the sari stays its magic: I have always wondered how the sari manages to stay where it stays without a belt or band to strap it in place.  Defying the pull of gravity, I mean.

The sari story is at once heroic and sordid.  Its gallantry lies in its defying the attempts of innumerable ravagers – from Dussashan in the Mahabharata to his modern counterparts – and in its obstinate refusal for a long time to be replaced by the outfits that came with the invaders, the Moghuls and the Europeans.  But it has shrunk alarmingly – from 24 yards to 18 and from that length to 12 and to the present 6, the last of which is barely insufficient, if you want your sari to be draped not just round your waist but the entire lower part of your body, and tucked up between the legs, with a pallu that is long enough to go across or around the shoulder and come down to be securely tucked up into the folding round the waist.

There is nothing, however, sordid about the sari shrinking to six yards.  Convenience rather than perversion must have dictated it.  And aesthetic sense.  Imagine Aishwarya Roy being draped in an 18-yard sari!

When did the sari begin to decline and fall?   When its various possibilities began to be exploited in our films about four decades ago.  Two films come to my mind immediately.  One is Raj Kapoor's box office hit, Ram Teri Ganga Maili, in which there is a bathing scene with the heroine, Mandakini, draped in a diaphanous sari.  The second is a love scene in Mr India in which Sridevi dances in a sari that leaves little to the imagination.  With the navel-baring potential of the 6-yard fabric being fully exploited in the movies of the following decade, the sari literally declined and fell.

When the sari fell, the salwar rose – the salwar that seemed to represent a happy compromise between the inconvenient sari and the "indecent" western wear – and  rose to prominence.  It has already gained social acceptance even in South India, the last bastion of the sari, relegating the latter to the status of the "costume dress", to be worn on formal occasions like weddings and the first Friday of the sravana masam.

But is the salwar half as aesthetic as the sari?  "The apparel oft proclaimeth the man", said Shakespeare's Polonius.  It "proclaims" women much more loudly.  Now, what the salwar proclaims about a pear-shaped woman is not aesthetically very pleasing.  And the world seems to be so full of pear-shaped women!

Business Line : Industry & Economy / Economy : No shortcut to develop communication skills: Expert

Business Line : Industry & Economy / Economy : No shortcut to develop communication skills: Expert

Trivialization of Sanskrit in colleges

In one of my columns in an English language newspaper, I complained that an average Indian student at the school or college level knows no language well enough and that the proficiency in English that students of medium schools / colleges have acquired can only help them communicate in a few limited contexts.  I traced this linguistic impoverishment to their linguistic apostasy – the almost total neglect of their mother tongue in favour of English – and urged that parents, teachers, and educational authorities should encourage children to develop a healthy interest in their own mother tongue.

By a curious coincidence, the government of Andhra Pradesh announced on the very day the column appeared that Telugu would be a compulsory language for all classes upto Class X from this academic year.  Even in schools where the medium of English is other than Telugu or English, the second language will be Telugu for Classes VI to X.  The new policy seeks to give the mother tongue its due place in the curriculum and implement Telugu as the first official language.  It is a good move against the loss of the mother tongue that I wrote about, though the success of the new policy depends upon how the people concerned at the school level implement it. 

I hope the government introduces a similar scheme at the intermediate and the degree levels also.  At these two levels, there is a great demand for Sanskrit, not because students are fanatical about this so-called deva basha as much as Professor Murali Manohar Joshi was when he was the HRD minister, but because it is easy to score high marks in that language.  At the intermediate/degree level, the majority of students who opt for Sanskrit cannot read or write in the language.  Why should they, when the system doesn't require them to?  In the examination, the students can answer all questions in English and score 90 per cent and above.  Nothing in the college curriculum is so grossly abused and trivialized as the teaching, learning and testing of Sanskrit.

This can be corrected only if the intermediate boards and universities impose two restrictions: one, students who have not studied Sanskrit (or at least Hindi) in the earlier stages should not be allowed to opt for Sanskrit; and, two, in the examination, students should be required to answer all questions in Sanskrit.

Poor merchandise and easy money

Spoken English is on the market now.  Thanks to globalization, the IT revolution of the 1990s, people’s desire to emigrate to their dreamland, call centers, societal pressures and the need to ‘arrive’ in society, the demand for spoken English has greatly increased.  To cash in on this surge of demand, a large number of spoken English ‘shops’ have sprung up.  The traders have certainly prospered.  But do they provide good value for money?

 Once I guided a project on which some of the spoken English ‘shops’ in my own city were investigated.  Our sample was large and representative and so our findings (namely, that the ‘merchandise’, low in quality, is not good value for money) is generalizable.  The inadequacy of the spoken English courses is due to three unsound assumptions on which they are based.

The first unsound assumption is that learning is additive.  The courses attempt to simplify the language learning process by reducing the language into units – words, structures, sounds, etc.  They assume that if the learner masters these units, he will be able recombine them into verbal messages in real-life communication.  But this process doesn’t work: the learner is unable to communicate effectively, putting together the language bits and pieces he has learnt.  Research has disproved this discrete-elements approach; it shows, on the contrary, that learners perceive and acquire a language in complex chunks.

The second unsound assumption is that the sentence is the appropriate unit of planning and performance.  The students of the spoken English courses are given practice exercises in which the utterances exist in isolation; little importance is given to how a sentence takes on meaning in the context.  Even when dialogues are used, the emphasis is on interactional communication (which is meant for the maintenance of social relationships) rather than transactional communication (which is message-oriented).  An Indian learner requires English for transactional reasons.  He is frustrated when he is unable to perform transactional functions in real life, in spite of his having “learnt” spoken English.

Thirdly, the spoken English courses give undue importance to pronunciation.  There are two problems here.  One, the teachers themselves cannot pronounce words in English correctly, stress the right syllables and use the right intonation, and so their trying to teach pronunciation, that too with the Received Pronunciation as the model, is a futile exercise.  Two, in most cases, learners who benefit from the teaching of pronunciation are those who already have a reasonably good accent; those who need remediation seldom show much improvement. But, ignoring these two factors, our spoken English teachers readily accept Professor Higgins as their model.  Higgins is a wrong model because his student was a native English speaker.  She had her English already; all that was required on the professor’s part was to rub off the rough edges of her Cockney tongue.  But our own learners are totally different: they don’t have the language to support the niceties of pronunciation.

Whenever someone asks me to recommend a spoken English course offered in my town, my reply is this colloquial catchphrase: You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Language lab: can it really help?

I wonder if the language laboratory is a current fad in the teaching of English in our country.  At a weekend workshop I ran for teachers of English, a school teacher proudly announced that her school had set up a language lab.  “Things are looking up now”, she added.  She was looked up to by her fellow-participants from other schools who seemed so down-hearted at not having a language lab in their own schools.

On several occasions in the recent past I have heard both school and college teachers complain that they have not been able to make much headway in the teaching of English because they have not been equipped with a language lab.  Interestingly, most of them don’t know what a language lab is and what it can be used for.  If they get one, I’m sure they will be disillusioned.

In Bernard Shaw’s play, Pygmalion (or in its film version, My Fair Lady), Professor Higgins taught a Cockney flower girl the finer graces of English speech.  If you have a similar aim, you can think of a language lab as a means of achieving it.  But there is one problem.  Professor Higgins’s student, Eliza Doolittle, had her English already; the professor’s job, therefore, was not to teach her the language but to rub off the rough edges of her Cockney tongue.  You can’t say the same thing about your own learners.  Most of them don’t have the language to support the niceties of pronunciation you want to teach in your language lab.  This apart, learners who benefit from the teaching of pronunciation are those who already have a reasonably good accent.  Those who need remediation seldom show an appreciable degree of improvement.

Producers of language lab materials are sure to protest.  They will claim that they have interactive packages for developing different language skills.  I have examined the packages produced by some of them.  They can at best be used for developing proficiency in interactional communication rather than transactional communication.  For the latter, the classroom is the best place.

A machine can seldom sustain people’s initial enthusiasm for it; the novelty soon wears off.  A few years ago, when my wife asked me to buy her a static cycle, I was reluctant.  It was because the static cycle had a history of not being touched after a couple of months’ use.  But, as it always happens, my better half’s wish eventually got the better of my better judgement.  The object of her wish, the static cycle, which cost me Rs 4000, lies almost untouched now in a corner of our bedroom.  I hope it doesn’t happen to a language lab.  Even a very small one will cost twenty-five times as much as the static cycle cost me.  If it is left to gather dust, it will certainly pain you, even if you have money to burn.

Accuracy of memory and memorizing

Sometime ago, I interacted with some language teaching experts on the principles of language teaching.  When they said that, in the education system, at any given level in India, the examination tests only memory of reproducible content and that, given the importance the examination enjoys in the system, the entire teaching-learning enterprise is content-based and memory-oriented, I was in complete agreement with them.  But not with the antidote they proposed, which was: "Don't test memory at all."

I'll explain what they meant with a very simple example.  Let's suppose that one of the tests prescribed is Shakespeare's Macbeth.  If one of the questions in the examination is, "Why did Macbeth decide to kill Banquo and his son?"  it is invalid because it places a severe demand on the student's memory.  Instead, if at all you want to ask that question, give the relevant passage from the text in the question paper itself and then ask the question.  Or, make it a multiple choice question.

This seems to be an extremism to me.  If what the experts advocated is representative of how experts in testing think, the pendulum seems to be swinging too far away -- from a preponderance of memory to no memory at all! 

We must distinguish between accuracy of memory and memorizing.  The former is not just desirable but necessary and ought to be promoted.  Otherwise, we will have to suffer, in our everyday life, the embarrassment that Wiener, a famous mathematician, suffered.  Forgetting that he had changed his residence, he went back to his old house on an evening and didn't find his family there.  The neighbours gave him his new address.  He reached the area but couldn't locate the house.  Then he saw a girl in the street and asked her, "Excuse me, do you know where the Wieners live?"  "Oh, come on, Daddy," said the girl, "I'll take you home."

Wiener was an exception; his mind was preoccupied with mathematics.  But in the life of an ordinary person, negligence of memory will lead to decay of accuracy.  Bertrand Russell pointed to a greater danger: adults developing slipshod habits of mind and failing to notice distortions of facts which will have a sinister motive.  What needs to be discouraged, therefore, is not accuracy of memory but rote-learning – memorizing  something without thinking about it or trying to understand it.

It makes sense to say that, in language teaching, what is important is not the ability to remember the content of the set texts but the ability to communicate competently.  But communicative competence does call for accuracy of memory.