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The field of language teaching (represented by ELT as we know it) has one rather unusual feature which sets it apart from other formally taught school subjects. In the specific domain of assessing the progress of learners or pupils receiving instruction, a clear sharp distinction is made between testing, which is achievement oriented and testing which is proficiency oriented. It is widely accepted that the central aim of teaching English language is the development of the ability to use the language for communication or proficiency, though the value of different means (techniques) is a matter of vigorous debate. School board and university syllabi and examinations are known to be heavily weighed down by the ideational content of the ‘passages’ in the readers and lists of grammatical elements demonstrating form delinked from meaning. It is a long-standing complaint that these achievement tests favouring memorization and reproduction do not measure language proficiency. Mathew (2006) in the pages of Fortell  highlighted this issue, asking whether the move from achievement to proficiency is being realized. It is taken for granted that this is an appropriate direction of change or reform. I do not dispute this basic argument in the specific setting of the unhappy history of ELT in India. However, the proposal to address proficiency directly and ‘bypass’ achievement needs more analysis. I propose in this essay to revisit this achievement-proficiency tension in language education from the wider perspective of educational measurement. I go on to address the basic issue of articulating a framework for assessing the progressively developing language ability in English over several years.

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Beyond the Achievement-Proficiency Divide: a New Perspective on Language AssessmentRead More »

A status message on a popular social networking website posted after the recent N.E.T. exam reads:

Joke of the day: “The wasteland” has how many lines? Will someone, please, enlighten me?

‘The Wasteland’ (1922) is an acclaimed poem by T.S.Eliot. Any post-graduate student of English Literature can expound on the poem’s structure, content, meaning etc. But is knowing the number of lines relevant? The comments on the above post go on to analyze the logic of such a question and whether the information asked is a benchmark for possessing the knowledge of English literature and if it is then to know the number of lines of enumerable poems becomes vital to pass the exam. Add to these the questions asked on plots, names of characters, settings, locations and bio specifics of authors and one wonders if the exam is for a teacher or an encyclopedia enthusiast. The above instance also underscores the fact that a wrong answer here could fail the examinee if a requisite score is not obtained resulting in multiple attempts at cracking the biannual N.E.T. exam even as excellent scholarship and academic record hang in limbo. Evidently the situation necessitates an assessment of the suitability of N.E.T as an appropriate examination for evaluating teaching aptitude and testing subject knowledge especially of English Literature. It involves a critical look at the disparity, lacunae and shortcomings in the pattern and syllabi of N.E.T. that produced a skewed result of only eleven successful candidates in English in June 2010.

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An Appraisal of the N.E.T. in English LiteratureRead More »

* Article first published in FORTELL September 2011 issue.

Teaching texts as remote in time and place as Spenser’s Epithalamion is a challenge indeed. The ears of city-bred adolescents, so accustomed to the unabashed big bang of our pronouncements in Backstreet Boys, Venga Boys and Savage Garden etc. just do not respond to the snow-soft mercy-petitions in Platonic love poems addressed to “impossible she’s”. And the small towners: the rural and the semi-urban first generation migrants, sitting quietly as “backbenchers” in the class, find it funnier still because fresh in their mind are the reverberations of a more vibrant, terse and dialogic Desi or Margi (popular and classical) tradition of native love poetry embedded in Mangalacharsⁱ, Barahamasasⁱⁱ, Bhramar Geethasⁱⁱⁱ and other Radha-Krishna duos like these.

Any Indian child who has had the chance to spend even a few hours with grandparents, distant aunts and other folk-narrators readily available at community meets is at least vaguely exposed to Parkeeya Nayika^iv or Nakh-Shikh Varnan Parampara^v of Indian classics. And my humble submission is that one of the ways of arousing interest in Spenser and his kind of apparently artificial and urbane utterances of love is to place them against the more sophisticated and vibrantly passionate utterances of love in the popular songs or couplets of Jaidev, Vidyapati, Soordas^vi, and the Reetikal poets^vii. Thus, studying Epithalamion, as the mangalachar of a typical marriage song of the Nachari^viii tradition could be both interesting and rewarding from the post-colonial perspective of highlighting the subtext of differences.

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The Classroom Reception of Spenser’s EpithalamionRead More »