Missing the Obvious

Many of the readers may be familiar with Edgar Allan Poe’s famous short story titled “The Purloined Letter”, in which the thief eludes sleuths by placing the stolen object before everybody’s eyes on a table where no one ever thought of looking for it.
The story could be well regarded as an allegory of our habit of scanning the distant skies for solutions of problems which often stare us in the face. A case in point is our public administration ministry’s recent decision to send 350 secretaries to Thailand for enhancing English language proficiency, which became viral on social media.
The ministry has given a clarification labelling the report misleading, but it has tacitly admitted that the proposed training programme involves mid-level government officials, not secretaries, and it aims at educating the trainees in governance, financial management and negotiation skills in addition to elevating their linguistic expertise.
While none disputes the need for training of the government officials, the necessity of training in the English language for mid-career officials, and that too in Thailand, has raised the eyebrows of a cross-section of people. This points to the unsavoury fact that mid-level officials in the bureaucracy suffer from considerable deficiency in the English language and that Thai officials are more competent in English than their Bangladeshi counterparts.
Many of us must find ample justification for the concern expressed in a television interview by the late Dr Sadat Hossain, former Cabinet Secretary, over the decline in the standard of English. He said that junior officers in the bureaucratic hierarchy could no longer conduct negotiations or discussions with foreign visitors in English. They are unable to explain Bangladesh’s needs to aid-givers, nor do they understand written communications fully. Important schemes fall through as a result, and prospective investors leave disappointed and frustrated.
Now, the question that very pertinently arises is why the mid-career professionals in the administration cadre still need help with language. Are they intellectually ill-equipped to handle the language tolerably well? Is the recruitment process defective enough so that it fails to pick linguistically competent candidates? Or does it have anything to do with our schooling system?
Those who have some ideas about second language learning would readily agree that effective language learning takes place in early childhood. The earlier a child is exposed to a foreign language, the better is the acquisition. It is often seen from experience that those who neglect language learning at school struggle to handle it at a later stage no matter how hard they try.
Much ink has been wasted so far over the pitiable condition of English language education at schools all over the country, except for a few English-medium schools in the capital. But nothing concrete has been done with a view to ensuring better teaching standards in schools and colleges. Most high schools have nobody on their staff who could sustain a conversation in English for five minutes. The result is that the pupils never hear the language spoken and are expected to acquire a sense of English sentence structures from their textbooks alone. So the students cannot make a distinction between the spoken and the written forms of English. What children need, when called upon to learn a new language, is complete immersion in it for a certain period of time of the day at school.
What is happening at the moment is a waste of energy and time and resources. If the country is serious about remedying the blunder made by banishing English in the 80s and early 90s, we should have teacher retraining courses on a massive scale, and it should also be laid down that language classes must be conducted in the target language, as far as practicable.
We do realise that thousands of teachers could not overnight be trained in the use of spoken English flawlessly. But spoken English, even if it left much to be desired, would give students a sense of language in its lively form rather than dull lessons based on stilted textbook language. And this practice could start as early as class III after a child has had some knowledge of the alphabet and a few basic words, which was recommended by Professor I. A. Richards decades ago. 
Concerning the training of the bureaucrats, there is still time for recovery, provided urgent steps are taken to require new civil service entrants to attend crash courses on English, preferably under the guidance of native speakers. The British Council can play the most vital role here. Whoever is selected for civil service should be tested for proficiency in written and spoken English. A civil servant, whatever the nature of his duties, should be required to acquire a reasonable vocabulary, understand written documents and discuss a scheme or project with a visitor from abroad. His tenses may be wrong, his sentences open-ended, and his prepositions a headache to grammarians, but he should be able to make himself understood to foreigners and should be able to follow a conversation conducted in English. Sentimentality in this case will be ruinous.
There is a tendency in our country to overlook the obvious and seek circuitous solutions in almost every sphere of life, a tendency which involves us in huge expenses and leads nowhere. A stitch in time saves nine is a proverb we have forgotten so that a simple tear will go unmended till it develops into a large hole in our clothing, making it unusable.

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The writer is a teacher in the Department of English, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet. [email protected]