Gary Pathare chats to us about the problems of achieving full literacy ahead of his upcoming webinar in our Academic English Online Conference titled Basic literacy in ELT.
I admit it: I am on a mission. Let me explain
The longer I have spent away from the centers of EFL materials production, the UK and North America – and I have been in the UAE for 18 years now – the more often I feel the need to explain “but it doesn’t work like that here in the Middle East!” The focus of discussion about the Middle East context is generally on cultural issues, but there is an elephant in the room: literacy. Without reasonably fluent mastery of the code that is the English writing system, mainstream methodology simply cannot work, and in my context, that mastery is not a given.
To put the problem in context, imagine you had to learn Japanese to enter tertiary education. You can read and understand only a handful of the vast number of kanji and kana symbols, inconsistently and with difficulty, and you have never been taught how to write them correctly. How would you feel if your teacher expected you to extract grammar rules from studying Japanese texts, and then respond to the texts in a meaningful way? And to read grammar boxes at home, and write essays in Japanese?
On a pre-service ELT training course, trainees may be given a short history of the various methodologies and approaches leading to the widespread adoption of the ‘Communicative Method’. They will probably learn that this is not a strict formula, and that we are now perhaps ‘post-communicative’, but there are a number of key principles to adopt. These include the centrality of the learner, a focus on communication as a means of language learning, a positive view of mistakes, the desirability of inductive approaches to ‘acquiring’ grammar, and so on. Texts will mirror those from ‘real life’, and there will be an expectation that these should be of interest to the learners. Communicative methodology tends to favour topic-based course organisation; so, for example, to enable them to talk and write about transport, learners will be given vocabulary such as train and car. Trainees will learn to create and teach activities that follow these and related principles.
This is very different from the methodology a trainee primary teacher learns in order to teach literacy to young native speakers. There, the emphasis will be on very controlled, systematic, teacher-led practice and mastery of written forms and of spelling and sound relationships. In contexts where literacy in English has not been mastered, these skills and methods may be more appropriate and effective than those of the typical ELT course book, especially when you consider that to teach spelling, you need words that embody spelling principles: train, rain and main, or car, far and tar, rather than topic-based vocabulary sets.
Literacy in any language is hard-won
As a father of two teenagers who have had all the educational advantages available, including literate parents, a houseful of books, and great teachers, I can testify that achieving full literacy took many years of hard work. The teachers controlling this process viewed the English writing system as complex but also regular enough to be teachable and learnable by all.
What I am suggesting is that, in some contexts, we need to learn and apply lessons from the L1 literacy teacher, and adopt them systematically and from basic principles, alongside our other approaches. The literacy lessons in standard course books generally address issues such as when to double a consonant before an –er comparative ending, when to use a comma in a conditional sentence, when to capitalize, and where to find the topic sentence of a paragraph. In other words, they assume that learners are already fluent in the basic writing code as a result of transfer from their own broadly similar writing systems, and merely need to focus on the discrepancies between them.
Now, I can anticipate concerns. It is important not to stigmatize learners as ‘illiterate’, and there is the question of how adult learners (who may be highly literate in their own complex scripts) will respond to lessons on forming letters or sounding out words. These are certainly areas that require sensitivity and a considered, transparent approach, but they should not prevent us from tackling the issue.
This is not a universal problem
In one sense, I may be overstating the case. This is not a universal problem; and even in contexts with completely different L1 scripts; many learners do receive the necessary support. However, as the movement of people around the globe increases, more and more ELT professionals find themselves teaching learners of great linguistic diversity, including those who have not yet really begun to master English literacy. For these learners, the consequences of being disadvantaged as a learner of English cannot be overstated, given the immense importance that English now has in the global workplace. So my mission in this webinar and elsewhere is this; to draw attention to the problem outlined above, and to explore ways in which teachers, trainers and publishers can help learners overcome it.