Abstract
India is the second largest English-speaking country by population. In spite of that, a large population in India is struggling to learn, understand and use this language to earn their livelihood. Failures convert students to dropouts and English is one of major causes of this effect. Ability can be polished using processes. Guided morphing is such a process to learn English as an additional language. This method was initially designed for individuals with Marathi as native language, but could easily be adapted for other native languages as well. It has four stages – Marathi (source language), Engrathi, Marlish and English (target language). People who already know English, may find this process useful to learn other languages like Spanish, French, German, Russian, Portuguese, etc. As one can see, the list has only European languages and not Orientals. There is a reason. Well, all these interesting things and the process itself is discussed at length in this post. Actually there two posts – Current post ‘Part One’ describes the rationale behind the technique and subsequent one ‘Part Two‘ concludes with actual technique and an example. Hope that helps !
In the month of June in year 2005, I received an email from HR, to volunteer in a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiative. The goal was to facilitate learning of English language to students of schools and colleges in rural areas of Maharashtra, with special focus on spoken English. It was further appealed that Marathi-speaking individuals should come forward as volunteers, since they would be able to converse and to mix with students much better (Maharashtra state of India has Marathi as its official language). I replied by suggesting my interest and my availability for the initiative.
In a meeting on following Saturday, we were told that the initiative would approximately take four week-ends. Additionally, I got to know that attendees were a group of teachers, not the students themselves. Since it is different to be in front of teachers than the students, the responsibility and the challenge were at different level. In some sense, we were supposed to come up with a mechanism, whose inculcation in teachers would harvest the benefits at the level of students. Readers interested to explore actual methodology can read the next post
Myself as a student, I was a poor and slow learner of English language. When I was unable to cope up with complexities of the language at that time, one of my tuitors (with whom I had personal tuition for English language) Mr. A. D. Bhore, encouraged me, by taking a different path. Both of us share Marathi as mother-tongue. This commonality he used to show similarities in various forms of language (such as derived nouns. For example, ‘happy’ and ‘happiness’ along with their equivalents in Marathi language). Later it shew me how the languages are developed and evolved (even later, some of these things helped me to understand this in context of computer programming languages).
English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as Second Language (ESL) are two of the well-known approaches in English language learning for individuals whose first language (or even second language) is different than English. When individuals from such non-English-speaking countries need to migrate to an English-speaking country, EFL is the popular approach for acquiring the language skills. In case of individuals interested in language study itself (e.g. English literature, philosophy, etc), ESL is more suited approach.
For example, in rural India, typically the first language is language of the state such as Marathi for Maharashtra. Second language is national language – Hindi, for example. English becomes priority language under special circumstances, such as education, professional career, which has already spawned many institutes offering courses on English language communication, in written and verbal both forms. Now the interesting thing to note here is – People typically tend to mix words from different languages, in case they know many languages. People living at borders of Indian states are used to this phenomenon. For example people from Maharashtra, Andhra and Karnataka state borders would bring words from Marathi, Telugu (language of Andhra Pradesh), Kannada (language of Karnataka) and Hindi (India’s national language). Such as linguistic cocktail definitely confuses others. Dialects are in fact such cocktails. In linguistics, the technical term for this cocktail is – ‘Language Transfer‘. So it might appear that it is worth nothing. But it is not true !
In language learning, a concept called as ‘Monolingual Education’ in which the student is allowed to use only the target language (English in our case) to converse with others. Use of any other language during conversation is strictly discouraged. This means that ‘mistakes’ are discouraged, resulting into discouragement of students. This is especially true in case of parts of the rural India (and the World for that matter) where students are afraid of English language. In many cases, dropouts emerge from failures in learning English language (Mathematics being another strong contender), despite being good in other skills/subjects. Further nobody looks into matter of such ‘lost’ talent. Many of those dropouts hesitate to learn even operational knowledge for computer because of this barrier.
‘Bilingual Education‘ is opposite of ‘Monolingual Education’ such that the students study in two languages. For example, a substantial number of schools in Maharashtra offer some subjects in Marathi and some in English (typically maths and sciences in English and rest in Marathi). This approach is commonly called as ‘Semi-English Syllabus’. There are pros and cons of both methods discussed in this article.
So as part of the CSR, inadvertently I took benefit of the facts – Linguistic Cocktail, Bilingual Education and Indo-European Language family. I tried to setup a (formal) platform for learning the language(s) such that it sets up the native language as a boiler-plate, using which students are more comfortable to converse in English. Today’s school-syllabi probably does not have such foundation/provision, making it difficult to learn English language. The reason is co-existence of two monolingual educational settings -one for Marathi and another for English. This is true even for semi-English medium. So people try to learn not only English language in monolingual educational setting but the entire education itself in English language. If not feasible for certain reasons, then at least semi-English is preferred.
‘Guided Morphing’ platform tries to address some of these problems. It is not a silver bullet for language learning. The platform has ‘Marathi’ as source language and ‘English’ as target language (which is not very strict requirement). Assuming it is a long journey from source language to target language, two intermediate languages ‘Engrathi’ and ‘Marlish’ are introduced. The students would split the journey – from Marathi to Engrathi, from Engrathi to Marlish, and from Marlish to English. Each intermediate language has its own pros and cons and most importantly its purpose.
