Language and Language Teaching, Issue 2 - Azim Premji Foundation

Prior knowledgePrior Knowledge is another obstacle in learninga new language, as we all know from our B.Ed.days. The language the child has acquired sincethe day she/he learnt to speak may pose someproblems in the learning of an entirely newlanguage.For instance, in Tamil, there are three genders:masculine (M), feminine (F) and neuter (N) andin Hindi, we have only two.In Tamil we have 3 forms of verbs to go witheach gender, such as:avan poran aval poral adu poraduHe goes She goes It goeswah jata hai wah jati hai no separatewordsA child coming from a largely Tamil-speakingfamily will be flabbergasted! Where to put achair or a table: in the masculine gender or inthe feminine gender? In Tamil, both table andchair belong to the neuter gender, whereas inHindi kursii ‘chair’ is feminine but mez ‘table’masculine. My grandfather used to say:relgaadi roz subaha samay par aatii hai parsham ko pataa nahiin kyon der se aataa hai?‘The Train is always on time in the morning; butI don’t know why it comes late in the evening?’We could never make him understand the genderissue, and sometimes it would be hilarious justto listen to him and my grandmother talking toeach other in Hindi, mixing all the genders! Butwe cannot laugh when our students do this; wehave to teach them the correct rules. I do notsuggest that all Indian languages should be learnt,just the ones that are spoken in the region or bythe children in their respective classes, plusEnglish.I will relate one incident that my father told me.He had a Bengali friend. After their training,they were posted to different stations. Whenthey met after some time, my father asked himabout his office, and he told my father thateverything was okay but there was no ghoraaand ghorii.My father was perplexed—why would a clerkneed a ghoraa (horse) and a ghorii (mare) inan office? As some of you would have guessed,he simply meant gharaa ‘pitcher’ and notghoraa ‘horse’; and gharii ‘watch’ and notghorii ‘mare’.Though this is a very good example, but it doesnot apply to a primary class where we have tobe very careful not to let such situations get outof hand, or they might destroy the goodwillamong the children. Everybody’s mother tongueis close to their hearts. Most of the children andparents are extremely sensitive to the issue oftheir language.Some fundamental steps• Within a week an efficient teacher mustknow what the mother tongues of thechildren in her/his class are. On an averagethere will be 4-5 different language groupsin one class. It would be a good idea tomake a list.• Make all the children speak or read loudly.Make notes of the letters or words whichneed attention.• Group the children according to their mothertongue, e.g. 5- Marathi speaking; 6-locallanguage; 9-Hindi; and so on.• Casually, ask the children synonyms ofsimple words that will appear in the text.Ask questions such as:“What would you call a ‘chair’ in yourlanguage?”Ask whether a word is masculine, feminine orneuter in gender .For this you may have to keeptheir age in mind. Therefore, in class 1 you mayask:Language and Language Teaching Volume 1 Number 2 July 2012 18