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College Tribune | January 20th 2009
Features News
Looking for answers in India Many rural Indians are hindered by an inability to express themselves in English, Peter Lahiff talks about going there to set up a language course to get them talking. “Where do you play cricket?” I asked the first of the five 10-14 year old Tamil boys in the group. “Where do you play cricket?” he repeated confidently. I shook my head and looked to the next one who hesitated for a moment and then doubtfully repeated the question again. I shook my head once more. This wasn’t what I was looking for. We had practiced these phrases over the previous few days and now I wanted them to answer the question instead of repeating it. The game was simple a “goal” would be awarded to whoever answered correctly but it wasn’t going as well as I had hoped. Kevin Kelly and I, who work together in an English school in Dun Laoghaire, were giving classes in a children’s home in a rural part of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu about an hour and a half from the nearest big town Tiruchirapalli, that this has a population of over a million and is not considered a big city is a measure of the scale of things in this massive country. The home is run by a locally based NGO called the Society for Poor People’s Development, Indian’s don’t feel the need to use politically correct terminology when naming such organisations. SPPD was founded in 1995 by a man from the area, Mr. Raju, to support the education of rural children with after school programmes in the villages of these semi-arid plains. Many of the people in this area make a precarious living off the land as either tenant small-holders or landless coolies who graze their goats along the roadside or wherever they can find greenery. Those who belong to the one of the regions indigenous tribes, known as Adi Dravida, are considered outcast by much of Hindu society and find their employment prospects limited by discrimination, even though this has been outlawed for many years. Despite the fact that there is a largely state sponsored education system in India, it can prove very difficult for some children to stay in school. This is due to the need for children to contribute to the household income, the cost of buying uniforms and books and the trouble they can have concentrating when undernourished. The fact that classes can contain up to sixty students makes it impossible for teachers to give extra attention to those who are struggling and if their parents can’t afford extra tuition they quickly get left behind. SPPD uses a combination of charity and state funding to reduce the drop-out rates of such children. They provide after-school programmes and a staffed live in centre for children whose families, for various reasons, are unable to support them. Here SPPD staff work to keep them in main-stream schooling,
at least up until they take the first major state exam at 16 years of age. We got involved when SPPD fund raiser Paddy Doolin, a family friend of Kevin’s, approached him for advice on how to set up an effective English programme. Paddy had realised the need for the staff to be able to communicate better with visitors and fundraisers about the work of the organisation. He also saw benefits in helping the children they were working with to get a good grasp of communicative English as it would enable them to hold their own in school, boost their self-confidence, improve employment prospects in later life and equip them to resist discrimination at the hands of officials. The most important element of an English programme is consistency. That means that we couldn’t just rely on the occasional visitor to give classes as had been the case in the past. I was aware of other programmes that sent out volunteers but without giving clear instructions on content or approach of their classes. The result is classes that are not relevant to the experience of the students or that are not taught in an appropriate way. If you send a student with a degree in
“We wanted to think of a way to bring something to the 700 children who took part in the after school programme in the surrounding villages”
geography out to India to teach English without adequate induction the chances are they will teach what they know in the way they are used to and mini-lectures on world geography for people mean nothing who may not be able to point out their own capital city on a map never mind identify Ireland. In order to decide what would work, however, it was necessary to talk to the students themselves as material designed for teaching English in Europe was likely to be way off the mark. This brought us to Tamil Nadu last December where we taught classes for ten days and interviewed all the people involved. We found that despite the years of study that they had put into learning the language in school, where it is introduced from a very young age, the staff and children alike struggled to make themselves understood. We asked to visit the schools and speak to the teachers in order to better understand what was happening. We were accompanied by Ms Manomani who looks after the children who live in SPPD. She introduced us and translated where necessary in the two schools we visited. The first was a rural Adi Dravida Welfare School where most of the 1000 plus students were having their classes outdoors seated under the shade of trees, the boys on one side and the girls on the other while the teachers walked up and down between them supervising them as they did their exercises and learning off by heart. Many of the classrooms had holes in the corrugated roofs, which in the monsoon season must have leaked like sieves. There was no running water in the very inadequate toilet block. Yet