Teaching English as a Second Language: Reading straitjacketed?

By Susantha Hewa

In two letters appearing in The Island of 7 and 10 November, K. Siriweera and George Braine highlight the importance of cultivating the reading habit among students to speed up their language acquisition process. Braine goes on to say that teachers of English should be encouraged to read more so that it would naturally prompt their students to pick up the habit- a suggestion the relevance of which cannot be overemphasized in terms of enhancing the overall English language proficiency of students.

Reading, one of the most dynamic language skills that students can be made to acquire in their primary and secondary classes in a relatively short time doesn’t seem to have been sufficiently encouraged over the years. Undoubtedly, Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) in Sri Lanka has achieved appreciable success by gradually shifting from a rigid and formal system focused on “teaching” towards creating a language acquisitive environment in the classroom. Nonetheless, we have yet to go a long way towards producing students with an adequate proficiency in English.

Despite various attempts being made to create a level playing field for the improvement of all the four language skills, i.e., listening, speaking, reading and writing, the last skill (writing) has easily outclassed the other three in the competition of gaining priority during the teaching sessions at school. However, many would justifiably point out that there is much room for improvement even with regard to the writing skills of most students, who leave school for higher education or employment.

It is heartening that the teachers and syllabus-designers have made palpable changes in methodology to enhance the speech-fluency of the students, primarily, through group activities. To a lesser degree, even listening has received considerable attention despite lack of necessary facilities and technology. However, sadly enough, the crucial role reading can play in the development of language is perhaps underrated and taken for granted. This becomes obvious when one considers the lack of novelty in techniques being used as well as scant enthusiasm shown by both authorities and teachers towards exploring the possibilities of liberating reading from the limits imposed by the classroom and the textbook. It is nothing short of a misfortune that reading in our TESL classroom is marooned in an ocean of unexploited reading texts. In short, if one wishes to highlight the constraints of teaching an L2 within the confines of a classroom, reading is no less illustrative as an example of pathetic underutilization than speech.

Of course, students in high-status schools and those whose parents are English-educated effortlessly take to reading and thereby reap enormous benefits in the long term. It is pathetic that students in government schools have neither enough inducement nor opportunities to access the vast resources of exciting reading materials. It would be a bit unprofessional of the teachers and syllabus designers to leave it to the students to go the extra mile and read ‘extra’ material on their own because in L2 instruction, facilitating is much more productive than ‘teaching’ in the conventional sense of the latter. The distance between the students and ‘extra’ reading texts can be abridged if the authorities think outside the box and set up necessary mechanisms with the help of the teachers to address the problem. As Mr. Braine suggests, teachers becoming avid readers is a necessary precondition in positively influencing their students. “Anyone who has time to clean, is not reading nearly enough” as they say. And, if he happens to be a teacher, he is not certainly sending the right signals to his students to begin enjoying their reading.

In an exam-oriented system, answering questions in writing is necessary and inevitable. However, in Second Language (L2) teaching, specially, in the early grades, it would be off-putting for the students to be unwittingly ‘forced’ to read a passage with the ‘warning’- “Remember that you should answer the questions given at the end”! It is surely the customary method of assessing how far the students have understood the text. However, this long established method wouldn’t be that effective, if we want to cultivate the habit of reading for pleasure. If you remove the element of pleasure from reading, the beginners are likely to be repelled by it rather than develop a longing for it.

It’s a truism that little children yearn to listen to and read stories. As they grow, listening to stories dies a natural death for obvious reasons. However, their natural desire for getting immersed in fictional worlds with their surprises, suspense and twists and turns in plot persists. It becomes a potential which can be profitably tapped to provide them with a most engaging language acquisition experience, if you enable them to access suitable books, as we have said above. The prominent linguist Prof. Stephen D. Krashen says, “People acquiring a second language have the best chance for success through reading”. And, as we know, in acquiring the four language skills either in L1 or L2, the sooner a child starts, the more effective and easier the acquisition process is.

The magic of making a child take to an L2 is to provide him with as much interesting reading material as possible without expecting the child to ‘compensate’ for his pleasure by assigning him with any assessment tasks. The kids who get addicted to reading for pleasure in their early years tend to shift to reading for more serious purposes seamlessly, without effort, unlike those who were forced to read limited texts with a “palpable design” on testing them.

It’s time we realized that, at least, reading can be made to appear a leisure pursuit- not a tedious activity with a sting at the end of reading in the form of questions. We have to free it from the shackles of the school textbook. The success of teaching an L2 is more a matter of exposure than of formal teaching severely constrained by outdated pedagogics.