[lg policy] Sri Lanka: Letting the Genie out of the Bottle: About Language Education in Lanka

[Harold Schiffman]

Letting the Genie out of the Bottle: About Language Education in Lanka


Rohana R. Wasala, Daily News, 8 October 2010

Cynics might see some contradiction in the rehabilitation of English
as a medium of general education, with prospects of eventually making
it the universal medium of teaching in the future, in a country where
sixty years of teaching it as a second language must be considered a
failure, and where the general educational achievement level even in
the mother tongue leaves much to be desired. Barely 40% of students
pass in English at the GCE O/L, though success is ensured by
compromised standards. However, this low success rate is not uniformly
shared across the country; the performance level in the rural areas is
usually far below that in urban areas. Students do hardly better in
such important subjects as science and maths. And this is also a
country where a significant 6% of the children of school-going age do
not attend any school at all because of poverty; some families need
the money that their children earn to physically survive; the picture
would have been even more dismal but for the welfare measures
introduced by successive governments such as free textbooks and free
school uniforms. And on top of these still unresolved problems is the
issue of the likely linguistic, cultural, and sociopolitical impact of
English medium education on the island nation. However, it appears
that the current changes are inevitable and are here to stay; English
is regaining its pre-eminence in education. As for the swabasha
medium, the genie is out of the bottle. I don’t want to be an alarmist
or a wet blanket by saying this. My intention is to stress the
importance of realistic planning, and determined plan implementation.
To avoid the disastrous pitfalls that the changes already initiated
are likely to involve, sound forethought is an absolute necessity on
the part of planners and policy-makers. At this juncture, we need to
manage the changes in such a way that the future generations will
remember us with gratitude for daring to take a step backward in order
to go forward in earnest.

The most important reason behind the rather hurried reinstatement of
the English medium is the need to participate in the global
“information economy” that the former US President Bill Clinton talked
about at the dawn of the new millennium; in our circumstances, English
is perceived to be the key to this resource, and thus, it figures
prominently in our education and employment domains. The Sri Lankan
government declared 2009 the Year of English and IT. There is a
conscientious effort being made by the authorities to normalise a
healthy level of proficiency in these two interrelated areas among the
youth of the country. An English medium education is believed to
immensely facilitate this.

The success of the change will depend, among other things, on the
students’ acceptance of this reason. The general failure of the school
English teaching programme to date has been mainly due to their
non-perception of an actual need to learn the language. If the powers
that be are able to convince them now that they must go beyond
learning English as a second language and adopt it as the medium of
instruction in view of the vital educational goal which they cannot
reach through their own mother tongue, they will be totally amenable
to such a switchover.

Unfortunately, however, while English is being boosted, it looks as if
Sinhalese and Tamil are taken for granted. The deleterious effects, if
any, of the medium substitution could be more pronounced on the former
than the latter, for Sinhalese enjoys little geographical space beyond
Sri Lanka for its survival. What is going to happen to these
indigenous languages vis-à-vis English in the longer run is hard to
predict, though a tentative prognosis may be hazarded: In a situation
where English gradually expands its dominance in the mind of the
language user pushing the indigenous language into relative
unimportance, processes that languages in contact normally undergo may
be expected to operate. One such process is known as cross-linguistic
influence in which linguistic elements from the sociopolitically more
dominant language percolate into the I-language system of the less
dominant one. { ‘I-language’ is Chomsky’s coinage for the idea of
language as an internal (and also individual) phenomenon; it refers to
a person’s unconscious knowledge of the rules underlying their
language, which, in linguistics, is also called their declarative
knowledge or competence.} Cross-linguistic influence is inherent in
all language contact situations such as the emergence of pidgins (When
speakers of two mutually unintelligible languages try to communicate
with one another using a mixture of those languages, a pidgin
develops; a pidgin has only a reduced grammatical structure, and is
never any community’s native tongue), the development of creoles
(pidgins that have acquired a grammatical structure, and become the
mother tongue of a particular language community), and even the
process by which a language eventually ‘dies’; the reverse phenomenon
takes place when a foreign language is learned through classroom
instruction or individual study: elements from the learner’s native
language appear in the new language. When the learner’s proficiency
increases, the two languages begin to coexist in the mind of the
learner without any further traffic either way. But in an authentic
language community such as that which may emerge when English is made
the exclusive medium of education, it could even displace the
indigenous language altogether resulting in a language shift. Such an
eventuality would of course be an unprecedented catastrophe as far as
Sinhalese is concerned.

But considering the fact that we have preserved our essential
linguistic and cultural identity over the millennia despite
unrelenting foreign pressure, any possibility of the Sinhalese
language being soon counted among the world’s dead languages should
probably be ruled out. Sri Lankans are not an uprooted or transposed
slave population without a definable history on whom a foreign
language can be imposed to indulge somebody’s whim. However, planners
and policy-makers should be mindful of their responsibility to do
everything possible to preserve our ancient language.

It is assumed that we are moving towards a form of bilingualism, or
even trilingualism. My personal opinion is that while universal
bilingualism (in English and Sinhala/Tamil) is a feasible objective
about the necessity of achieving which there’s no question, universal
trilingual proficiency seems a bit over the top unless it is
adequately justified, for how can one hope to persuade all Sinhalese
and Tamil students to learn each other’s language when there’s no
apparent reason for doing so in a context where English serves them as
a link language? Some might say, “Let those Tamils who have a good
reason to learn Sinhalese do so; let the same apply to the Sinhalese
with regard to Tamil”. This, in fact, is what is happening in informal
and formal situations even now.

However, by making proficiency in both Sinhala and Tamil compulsory
for all its employees, the government is providing a meaningful reason
for people to learn both languages; this is not like asking them to
learn both languages for the sake of communal harmony, and national
unity, which would be unconvincing (because it is common interests
more than common languages that unite different communities). If
properly implemented this requirement will serve as a good motive for
prospective government employees to learn both languages. Such a
situation would encourage voluntary language learning. Since future
educational schemes are likely to be more job-oriented than now
Sinhalese and Tamil students will be able to make a choice of Tamil
and Sinhalese respectively if they know that they will be required to
interact with people speaking only one of those languages in a
particular social/working environment in the time to come. Unless such
a worthwhile target is offered for them to focus on second language
Sinhala or Tamil will suffer the same fate as English has done over
the past sixty years.

The English medium will potentially prove to be even more problematic
than teaching English as a second language for other reasons.
Decisions about language always involve coming to grips with complex
sociopolitical issues relating to such vital areas as national
identity, human rights, equal educational opportunities, etc. Raising
Sinhala and Tamil to official status displacing English which was the
language of a very small privileged minority did improve the situation
in those areas. Now the problem is if the return of English could mean
the undoing of whatever was achieved under the language policies
adopted after independence. For example, will it confer certain
advantages on one section of the population while depriving another of
the same?

I am not suggesting that the English medium should be abandoned; it
should be there, just as much as Sinhalese and Tamil mediums must be
there, for there are Sri Lankans, though a minority, whose mother
tongue is English, and others who choose to study in English for their
own reasons. Parents must have the freedom to choose the type of
education their children should receive. That is a fundamental human
right recognised even by the UN. So, let’s have all the three mediums
side by side, but proficiency in English as a second language must be
made compulsory for the Sinhalese and Tamil medium students. There
must also be freedom for all students to change their medium when they
find that necessary, after proving their eligibility to do so.

It is worth considering how the changeover to the English medium is
likely to impact on the Sri Lankan school system, which consists
mainly of a large network of government schools and a relatively small
number of non-government schools (the latter expanding at a rate,
though). Government schools are of two types: national schools and
provincial schools; the national schools come under the central
Ministry of Education, and the provincial schools under the provincial
councils. Private schools and International schools, which are
non-government schools, are generally autonomous institutions. Though
not controlled by the Ministry of Education, private schools follow
the regulations and curricula of the Ministry in all three media. On
the other hand, the international schools, which have only the English
medium, follow foreign, mostly British, syllabuses. Naturally, the
socio-economic background of the students who are generally likely to
attend these different categories of schools will determine the degree
of reception that the English medium will enjoy.

My feeling is that it will find a better haven in non-government
schools than in government schools for obvious reasons. Usually, only
those parents who can afford to pay high fees will send their children
to private or international schools; often they themselves have had a
background of English education, or can afford to reinforce their
children’s education with further help from private tutors. Children
in government schools who opt to follow the English medium must depend
on their teachers and other meagre resources available in such an
environment. At the beginning at least, there will be an acute
scarcity of teachers capable of teaching different subjects in
English. However, it may be said, with some reservations, that this
problem will not affect the private and international schools to such
an extent since teachers who want to serve in those schools will
invariably be required to have the ability to teach in the English
medium.

In any case, continued public acceptance of the English medium will
depend on how successful it is in the government school system. There
are already about 10,000 government schools across the island, and
this number will increase when the Ministry of Education creates in
the next few years a system of 1000 well equipped secondary schools
(as envisaged) on par with today’s so-called national or popular
schools; according to its plans, some of these schools will be newly
built, while the rest will be existing schools appropriately upgraded;
they will be located in all the electorates, fairly distributed
according to demand. This is a measure taken in order to put an end to
the current mad rush for securing places in the so-called “popular”
schools in towns that leads many parents to resort to fraudulent
practices such as doctoring documents and bribing school authorities.
An added incentive for them to seek admission for their children to
town schools is that these schools offer the English medium. The
special schools that the Ministry is going to establish in the
provinces should also have this facility.

 There are already more than one hundred International Schools in the
country today, and we can only expect more of them to be established
in the future. Begun in the early 1980’s for the children of
expatriates in Sri Lanka working under various projects these schools
were later thrown open to local students too whose parents could
afford to pay high fees for an English medium education of
international standards. At the beginning these International Schools
were mainly located in urban centres such as Colombo and Kandy; but
today they are found even in some remote places, and cater to a mainly
local student population. International Schools are business ventures
registered under the Board of Investment (BOI) and as such do not come
under any government ministry responsible for education. They are
autonomous private institutions the majority of which prepare students
for British examinations.

International schools are probably the least ‘national’ in a vitally
important sense, though not all such institutions would deserve that
description. The education they deal in may be of ‘international’
standards. But if it has no ‘national’ value the country will be just
wasting its resources. The education of the country’s young is an
unavoidable national responsibility that we all share. The government
should help the international schools to be pro-national institutions
without writing them off as a systemic aberration.

Today, the formal education system in Sri Lanka is being subjected to
some profound changes, albeit tacitly. The reintroduction of the
English medium along with the reauthorization of private education
amounts to a virtual reversal of the post-independence reforms,
obviously demanded by the exigencies of the fresh national resurgence
that is taking place in the wake of decades of relative stagnation. In
this context, the state cannot and should not relinquish its
responsibility and initiative in education. Whether the schools are
government or non-government, national or international, they are all
sustained on the country’s wealth, and the people have a right to
demand value for their money. What the country needs out of education
is a generation of young people equipped with the knowledge and
skills, and the moral character necessary to work for the happiness of
all Sri Lankans without discrimination.

http://thuppahi.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/letting-the-genie-out-of-the-bottle-about-language-education-in-lanka/

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