Englipeesh

I recently read an article from Outlook magazine about the way English is being taught in our country and also about the recent suicides that are committed by students who are not able to withstand the pressure of facing English exams in the academics.

From my experience, i have seen many tamil medium students who were my room mates and class mates struggle hard enough to score a pass mark in English, they have completed all their school education through tamil medium and finally when they land in colleges, they are forced to go through all the materials in English, It doesnt stop with getting a pass mark in subjects, it is about the fundamentalism of understanding the concepts and applying the same. It is about handling viva voce during practical exams, i have seen students who tell the externals "Sir can i explain it in Tamil?" and it continues to the final year project and also in the campus recruitment.

Even though they fight this battle of getting a engineering degree with a decent pass mark, they find it difficult in landing up to a job. And to a sad note, not all my tamil medium friends have been placed in a nice job today. it is only those who are able to speak fluent english got placed in MNC during placement and it is only those who are up in the ladder right now. Year after year this "English speaking curse" is still continuing.

The existing curriculum only stresses on marks and grades. For SSLC, all they care is MPC (Maths, Physics, Chemistry) but what bout English?
Engineering Degrees doesnt have any soft skills added in the curriculum, English is available only in the first year and after that it is only the core topics. There is no stress for humanities related study.
Management Degrees are also on the same page, there is no social responsibility in the degrees being offered.
One can easily complete thier Doctorate (Ph.D) with out the aid of English, but when it comes to Job right from star hotel waitor, store keeper, call center agent, executive manager every one needs ot be fluent in English?
How can people suddenly accustom to such a drastic change?

Spoken English and short term courses are definitely not going ot help and it is those set of people who make money out of your weakenss.

Some of the self help tips that I used to recommend to my fellow mates who were poor in communication

1. Read any section of the newspaper loudly. You dont have to memorise the meaning of the complex jargons, but when you speak english it must flow out freely without any hassles.
2. Read those sections loudly in front of the mirror. See yourself speaking out those sections clearly if you are hesitant to talk to someone in the hostel.
3. Watch English news and other movies and pay more attention to the way they pronounce the words. Try repeating any of those sentences again and again.
4. Try to write out the daily usage phrases in English and try speaking it out loudly and in due course enhance the list of phrases that you have.
5. Last but important point, self confidence is the key, if you think you are lower than anyone just because you dont know this foriegn language, forget about that. It is totally wrong conception. You are no way inferior to anyone and you have your own capabilities and strengths.
6. Volunteer yourself for more project presentations and other activities and learn it as a language rather seeing at a source of income.

Some more key points from the article which stresses the importance of this language. (For those who dont have access to read Outlook online)

According to Uma K. Raman, head, Skills Enhancement, HCL BPO, her company rejects 92-93 per cent of applicants for poor English. Sandhya Chitale, director, Nasscom's Educational Initiative, puts the rejection rate for non-engineering graduates applying to the IT and IT-enabled sector, both in "voice" and "non-voice" roles, at 82-83 per cent, for lack of soft skills, including written and oral English.

"The curricula only emphasise reading and writing, not listening and speaking. You can't get a sentence out of a student who is asked to talk about himself," says Chitale bluntly. Raman declares written English even worse than spoken. "There is a myth that Indians are good at grammar," he says, "but they are only good at learning concepts - what is a noun, what is an adjective - not at applying them."

English writing abilities of school students is poor, even in the country's top schools. A 2006 survey (conducted jointly by Wipro Applying Thought in Schools andthe organisation Educational Initiatives) among Class 4-8 students in 134 top English medium schools in the five metros found that 80 per cent of students even in Class 8 make mistakes in comprehension, grammar and syntax

Quickfixes, say the experts, invariably result in large numbers of people moving around with templates of sentences in their heads, a superficial, limited language acquisition, similar to the way tourist guides speak different languages. Sometimes it works, at other times it causes huge anxiety. Vijaya Subramaniam, deputy principal of the Sardar Patel Vidyalaya, and a regular user of Delhi's Metro, marvels at how a few catchy sentences and phrases, incorporating words such as "cool", "dude" and "awesome", enables commuting college students with shaky English to belong to the group.

Meeting the country's large-scale demand for job-oriented learning of English without moving towards "fixed phrase parroting" is a big challenge, says Prabhu. Motivated advice from the language-teaching industry doesn't help, he warns, because it fosters the false belief that you can acquire a language quickly. "Language learning," Prabhu stresses, "is an organic process - you can't grow a plant in three days instead of three years." Nair says, in the same vein, "Language is not a prosthetic limb, you can't attach it, you have to grow it."