Masum Billah

Communication lies at the centre of all success in today’s world. Those who can smartly express their thoughts, opinions and plans can lead and manage work and people, and these qualities require practical English skills rather than theoretical knowledge. Singapore, a technologically advanced country, gives due importance to English learning for its future generation. Students there practise oral presentation and free writing at least twice a week along with their regular classes, which nurtures their ability to face the challenges of the modern world.

While this is how English is taught to school students in Singapore, we give our students English books with each word’s pronunciation and meaning written in Bangla, with line-by-line Bangla translations and grammar rules. So, they scarcely learn to understand English without the help of Bangla, let alone develop expertise in listening, speaking, reading or writing it.

Teachers and guardians often prefer helping books (actually guides and notes) with Bengali word-for-word meanings. Publishers who provide more Bengali meanings – their books gain more popularity but scarcely help students achieve the main learning purpose. If students read English books entirely through Bengali pronunciation, it hardly teaches them true comprehension. When students do not practise English orally or in writing, they fail to develop the skills necessary to cope with the demands of today’s world and thus lag behind.

It is evident that the 12-year English teaching project has almost failed, as most students cannot communicate effectively in English even after obtaining certificates from education boards. Only a few can, and that is mostly due to their family background or exposure to English in some other ways. Still, the state continues to teach English as a compulsory subject up to grade twelve at great cost of national expenditure and time. About three lakh English teachers are engaged from primary to higher secondary level, yet students passing public examinations cannot produce anything original in writing or speaking.

Nowadays, English teaching centres have sprung up in every nook and corner of the country because the state has failed to develop students’ required skills. These centres make students memorise dialogues for different situations (market, airport, office, doctor, etc.) to show apparent fluency. Learners, however, must engage in varied activities to become familiar with vocabulary and expressions needed for real communication. Memorised situations do not help them adapt to new contexts.

In our national assessment system, we have question-answers, MCQs, information transfer, sentence making, true/false, rearrangement, and composition. None of these items are new; they are repeated from previous boards or institutions. Although it is claimed that both seen and unseen items are included, students are already familiar with them from test papers and guidebooks. Therefore, such testing does not measure genuine competency.

The most important skills—listening, which accounts for about 40% of communication, and speaking, which covers about 35%—are entirely absent from our system. Yet students are awarded A+ or A grades. Education boards avoid changing the system for fear that many students would fail, which could create chaos. However, testing methods should gradually change toward creative, skill-based, and unseen items.

In these circumstances, teachers must be motivated enough to find effective ways to teach English to non-native learners. Some people opine that the government should establish language labs in all educational institutions, which will be a rather costly venture. Instead, the existing computer labs, which mostly remain unused, should be utilised to develop students’ fluency. Assessment tools should genuinely test learners’ skills.

And banning notes and guidebooks with Bengali pronunciations and meanings is a more urgent need now. These seriously weaken students’ natural ability to grasp a foreign language, overburden them and destroy their enthusiasm for learning English. Such materials cripple learners intellectually and linguistically. English teachers must raise their voices against this situation and work with others, including the government, to ban these books.

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The writer is the President, English Teachers’ Association of Bangladesh.

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