The Road to English Slow Migration of the Economically Weak Child to Elite India

Students of English from the economically weaker sections in private schools in Delhi now go through an extended phase of muteness and incomprehensibility before they finally pick up the
language, almost by osmosis. The US education system, which promotes bilingualism as opposed to diglossia here, has some lessons for India if the attempt is to make English learning more easy, enjoyable, and useful.

Peggy Mohan (mohanpeggy@gmail.com) is a linguist who writes on language, social change, and education in India. She teaches music at Vasant Valley School, New Delhi.

The views expressed are her own.

Put yourself in my place. You are a music teacher sitting at your keyboard face to face with a class of six-year-old children in an English-medium school in Delhi, trying to teach a song whose English lyrics are on a sheet of chart paper on the wall. One little boy is singing cheerfully with the others. You cannot hear him, but you can see him actively mouthing words. A closer look, however, tells you that his lip movements do not match the words of the song.
Back in 2006, Indian private schools that had been granted government land at concessional rates were directed to reserve 15% of their seats for children from the economically weaker sections (EWS) of society. Then in 2009 the central government passed the Right to Education (RTE) Act, making it mandatory for all private schools to reserve 25% of their seats for EWS children. This Act, notified in 2010, has been implemented in private schools from 2011.
Children who do not know English are not strangers to our English-medium private schools. While the number of children entering private schools with English as their first language has been going up sharply in recent years, these schools always have middle-class local children who begin speaking English in school, along with similar children in other parts of India, and even some children from abroad. While these children would not be spoken to in English at home, one (or even both) of their parents would typically know English well.
These children would pick up English in school by osmosis. Those from abroad would sit in class, mute, awash in the English discourse around them, while English gestated mysteriously and invisibly inside their heads. After a while, there would be signs they could understand and follow instructions from the teacher. Then, one fine day, months later, they would begin to speak English in full sentences – it was ready to come to life, as it were. For local children, the pattern of English acquisition is the same, except that they do not remain mute while English is gestating in their heads – they can communicate with their classmates and the teacher in a local language.¹
Diglossia
Despite similarities between foreign children and middle-class Indian children at the beginning, a major difference between them is that the foreign children later end up bilingual. Their home language is stable, and they are expected to maintain it alongside English and ultimately do essentially the same things in both languages. The middle-class Indian children, in contrast, become diglossic. Once they learn English, it is used for all non-trivial activity, and their first language will soon fall by the wayside.
The Greek word diglossia came into modern sociolinguistics through an article by Charles Ferguson published in 1959.² Ferguson was struck by the way some communities had “high” and “low” varieties of a language, with the “low” variety used in trivial situations, and the “high” variety in less-trivial discourse. His view was that these varieties would need to be related dialects of the same language, and the situation a stable one. But linguists working in more diverse environments were not convinced that the languages in the mix had to be related or mutually intelligible – what was much more striking was the social hierarchy involved, and the distribution of function along those lines, not the language structure per se. There also seemed to be nothing fundamentally important about there being just two varieties. Why not three, or even more? And in a world beset by change (indeed, by mass language extinction), it seemed a pity to restrict this useful model to once-upon-a-time stable situations. In the end, the “di” in diglossia was retained for convenience, without the term having to be applied to just a two-way division, and linguists went ahead and freely extended it to cover the rule-governed language mixture we see in urban India, where English shares space with local Indian languages and dialects.
To return to the little boy in the music class, he was not trying to read and sing the words on the wall. He knew that he could not do so. What he was trying to do was simply blend in visually. His cheerful expression fit the mood of the class. And he did seem to be mouthing words. He was even able to make course corrections based on some of the vowel sounds he was hearing, so that his lip movements at times matched the other children.
There is a pattern such children follow in the journey towards English, and the first stage aims not at mastering language structure, but at simply looking credible in the new elite surroundings. The reason for this has to do with the way diglossia is concerned not so much with the acquisition of a duplicate code for expression as with the transformation of a child’s basic identity. In a diglossic situation, the learner picks up the new language scene-wise, as it were. The first step is only to look right, with the correct facial expression, and to fit into the larger scene as an extra.
The next step involves mastering essential communication at the ground level. For the child, this means being able to speak comfortably with classmates outside of class, and then with teachers in non-academic situations. It is easy for a teacher to get carried away and assume that a child has become fluent in English when he comes and asks, “Where’s my mom?” He has not despite his use of the contracted form “where’s” and the American word “mom”. His ability to follow classroom English is still far from complete, and the entire experience of making sense of English all day long is exhausting. In class, he does not speak up at all, and he often stares out the window and yawns, not bored but unspeakably tired. He may use Hindi when he is stuck and urgently needs to get something across, but he will not experiment with the English structure and try to translate thoughts from Hindi the way a bilingual would. In that sense, English is for him an adjunct first language. He can only say what is in the installed programme. And that level of English is simply not ready.
When children have problems following song lyrics written in English in my class, I generally help them out by reciting the next line in the gap between the lines of the song. If it is only a reading problem, the child will respond by singing the correct words once he hears them. With EWS children, this is usually not enough. There is a whole universe of meaning in those lyrics that is hidden from them, and this needs to be brought out before they can make use of the verbal cue and join in the singing.
This was something we discovered when after-school classes were set up in the Vasant Valley School, Delhi, to help the EWS children with English. Some of the materials the teachers used to teach reading and comprehension were songs I had written. It was instantly clear that the children needed to make connections between the English words in the songs and words they knew – in short, they needed the songs explained to them in Hindi before they could learn them and recite them comfortably. But while middle-class Indian and foreign children would easily be able to see equivalences between the English words and words in their first language, the EWS children were often not familiar with some of the concepts. What was a sea, as opposed to a pond or a river? And how big was a mountain? Even if they did know the Hindi words, these things, so much a part of middle-class knowledge, had not been discussed much in their homes.³
The biggest problem with the diglossic route to English is that for it to work, for those invisible wheels to keep turning in children’s minds, there has to be sufficient access to English speakers. What is needed is not just the daily contact with the teacher in class, but friendships outside the classroom, something more akin to the relationships that set up their first language. This kind of learning would not be incremental, such that one knew, day to day, what was going into their minds and could measure a tangible output in terms of what they were able to say back. The journey would be like going into a tunnel from which the children would emerge further along the route, adapted to a new environment, and adept at a new set of tasks in English. But the journey could be intolerably long – EWS children often remain silent in class until as late as classes 4 or 5, during which time they grow to see themselves as deficient and unintelligent. And during this dark phase, they probably conclude that there is much in this world that they should never even expect to understand.
Bilingual Education
The experience of the US with bilingual education goes back a long way to the time when it was still a British colony. In different parts of the country, programmes emerged for teaching native American children and children of new immigrants from Europe in their home language, often as totally local initiatives. In 1968, the US Congress passed the Bilingual Education Act mandating bilingual education to give immigrants access to education in their first language. The intent behind the Act was to keep non-English-speaking children from falling behind their peers in mathematics, science, and social studies while they mastered English.⁴ In other words, bilingual education was designed to circumvent the long mute phase EWS children experience in Indian private schools, which, to US educators, was something totally unacceptable.
Bilingual education was envisaged not as a way of permanently segregating minority children from the mainstream, but as a humane method of integration that gave minority children a chance to understand basic concepts without having to simultaneously struggle with an unknown language. The idea was that these children would need at most a few years of learning basics in the home language, with their parents able to understand and support their effort, after which they would be ready to be integrated into fully English-medium education. However, the US Supreme Court held that educating these children in the same English-medium classes as mainstream students while they were still young amounted to a violation of their rights.
At the heart of bilingual education is a conviction that the shortest distance between two points, in the sense of the home language and the mainstream language, is not a straight line. On the contrary, the trajectory from knowing a home language to competence in English is a curved path, making an arced transit through natural rest stops along the way, of which a major one is quality time spent setting down basic concepts in the child’s home language. To put it a bit differently, the mad rush to push a young child into English-medium education on the spurious argument that young children can easily learn any language they are “exposed to” is as wrong-headed as the age-old Indian practice of trying to toilet-train newborn children to “save time”. Ultimately it is a colossal waste of time that could have been better spent giving the child more useful experiences – the child automatically trains himself when his body is mature enough to do so.
Children who know Hindi but not English are not a minority in Delhi. They are very much the majority, and they study in their home language in the government-run Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) school system. In MCD schools, children learn their basic subjects in Hindi, with English being taught as a separate subject, in much the same way an early phase of a bilingual education programme would run in the US. Some MCD schools even use English language textbooks for science and maths in their A-streams, and teach in English, as much as the teachers and children can manage.
The problem with MCD schools is that they are poorly funded compared to English-medium private schools, and they are not “integrated” in that they lack the critical mass of students from elite and middle-class backgrounds, with confident parents keeping an eye on things and ensuring that the schools run well. India never set up a common schooling system similar to the neighbourhood school system that works so well in the US – about 90% of families send their children to these schools in preference to private schools. So the well-intentioned English-medium education offered to the A-streams, however much it prepares the children for low-end jobs higher up the food chain, works only slightly better than the early days of an EWS programme. The children learn from textbooks written in English, reading them aloud in class, without the material being properly explained – partly because the teacher too is not comfortable with the English texts. As a result, the children go through the lessons as though walking through a fog, with the concepts only partly understood.
At the heart of this problem is the textbook. What we urgently need to do is rethink the English textbooks that are being used in MCD schools, and take out the old-fashioned British usage that plagues both teachers and children. There is no need to persist with outdated English comprehension passages – there are enough able writers in India who are good with modern English usage and have a strong sense of what goes on in the minds of teachers and children who read their work. The abstruseness of the prose in English comprehension passages, with obscure allusions, and the needless complexity of the explanations in science texts ensure that teachers and children will end up memorising set answers and glossing over chunks of mysterious stuff, instead of engaging with the language. There is still an old brahminical mindset among our textbook writers, that English is a prize that must come only with struggle. It could all be so clear if the people writing the texts were not just “subject experts”, but people who know what MCD teachers and children, even elite children in English-medium schools, can understand, and be confident enough about their own English to write simply. With the right textbooks, simple sentences, and natural prose to allow the children to get comfortable with the language, and scope for proper explanation in the home language, the MCD schools would truly deliver that other pillar of US-style bilingual education – preparing children for the big switch.
But the question that begs asking is if Hindi is the majority language among Delhi’s children, and if these children are more comfortable learning in Hindi, why is there a need for making the switch to English at all? After all, successful societies all over the world teach in their local languages, even for tertiary education. Why not India too?
There is an answer to this question, and it is linked not to educational goals, but to the diglossia that besets larger society. Simply put, to keep your child in the cosy world defined by Hindi-medium education is to limit his chances of employment when he grows up. It is not that good jobs intrinsically require English. It is just that English serves the purpose of a gatekeeper, as it were. It is a convenient job requirement that ensures that the best jobs in the country stay with the children of the elite. For parents, this consideration carries more weight than concerns about whether the child will benefit academically from his English-medium classes, or whether he will lose self-esteem in all the time that he sits mutely in class. The EWS child’s job, for the time being, is to hang in there, as an advance party. His younger siblings will handle the transition more easily than him, but it is ultimately his children, one generation down the line, who will reap the real rewards – they are the ones who will speak English like natives from the very beginning, and be entitled to the best jobs in the land.
Singing with MCD Children
About a year ago, as part of a project with Teach India, I was asked to train a choir of 10-year-old children, some from Vasant Valley School and some from a nearby MCD school, for a performance. Going by my experience with our EWS children, where lyrics in English could be a problem, I chose a song with easy repetitive lyrics – “Where have all the flowers gone”. When the MCD children came with their teacher for our first practice, they told me politely that the song was “boring”. Could I think of a song with more challenge? They eyed the more difficult songs written up on my wall, listened to Vasant Valley children singing them, and averred that they could handle them all, though it might take some time. In the end we decided on a mix of the Beatles’ “Blackbird singing in the dead of night” interspersed with the Hindi song Toota-toota ek parinda, with the MCD children getting half the English lines to sing along with some of our children, and a few key lines in English to do solo.
We communicated at first in Hindi. I explained the meaning of the Beatles’ song, and how amazingly the theme, words, and even the tune meshed with the Hindi song. Soon I was speaking to them mostly in English, and they would stop me and shyly ask the meaning of some unfamiliar word. Soon they too were trying to speak to me in English using the structures they had learned in class, making little mistakes but soldiering on bravely. They would get the nouns fine, but avoid verbs, or simplify the endings and omit tense markers, using the same citation form for all tenses (“he do”). Though they were aware of tense markers, they were not up to using them in real-time speech.
It is unlikely that these MCD children were representative of all the children in their school – their teacher must have selected the brightest ones, or the best singers, to bring to Vasant Valley School. Our EWS children were more randomly selected – they were the children of school employees, along with neighbourhood children chosen in the admission lottery. It could not have happened otherwise. Even if there had been a wish to seek out the brightest and the best, the ones most likely to benefit from being integrated into a top school, it would just not have been possible to do this with three-year-old children. With 10-year-olds, it is easier to do this sort of triage, which would give the brightest MCD children, the ones with a “fire in the belly”, a fighting chance, and banish the notion that integrating EWS children would necessarily bring down academic standards in elite schools.
What was striking about these MCD children was that far from being mute, they were adventurous in speaking English. In short, they behaved like bilinguals. Their attempt to express their Hindi thoughts in English, laughing at their own mistakes, was typical bilingual behaviour. Diglossics do not make mistakes. Think of a Hauz Khas market shopkeeper in an interchange in English with a German customer. The shopkeeper is adept at this conversation (and this one only), and using his repertoire of set sentence frames, inflects his verbs correctly (“didn’t do”), while the German translates his thoughts awkwardly, morph-for-morph, using the English knowledge he has gleaned in the classroom (“don’t did”, “didn’t did”) – exactly as the MCD children did. For the MCD children, Hindi and English remained two separate languages, on parallel tracks, with English just a code to be operated to express a life otherwise lived in Hindi. They were bold enough to make mistakes because English did not reflect on their basic self-image.
Who had learned more, by age 10, our EWS children or the MCD children? That is hard to say without a carefully designed study that delves into silent minds and measures academic gains and the ability to express substantive things in English. But what is certain is that the MCD children we met scored over our EWS children in terms of social confidence, and readiness to engage and ask questions.
What the EWS children ended up with was a single native competence, the bottom end expressed in Hindi and the upper layers in English, like a hardy local plant that has been lopped off a bit above the ground and a more exotic variety grafted onto the stump, to be nourished from the old root system. This shift in their basic linguistic centre of gravity has strong implications for issues such as the vitality and longevity of Indian languages. These children are making a transition the elite made at least a generation ago. It is on the cards that their children will be brought up as a part of the elite, native speakers of English, with, at most, a sketchy knowledge of Hindi to be used in speaking to grandparents and those poorer than them. And this is not good news for Hindi.
What we have created is an India where the elite have decamped to English, leaving it to the poor to keep our languages “warm” for us in our absence. It is not surprising, then, that the poor have taken note of our success and decided to follow us up the food chain into the privileged world of English. While they may know that they are abandoning their heritage by putting their children early into English-medium private schools, they are sanguine about this, choosing to survive in the present milieu than being reluctant custodians of local languages that have given them precious little in terms of livelihood.
Is there a middle ground that might give these children good English while sparing them the trauma of years in the diglossia tunnel of the present EWS system? There is. The Delhi government declared, just a few weeks ago, that early childhood education for all children should be in the local language. This is consistent with the kind of foundations for bilingual education that are already in place in MCD schools. But, in today’s India, it is too much to expect that elite parents will fall in line with these government directives and agree to have their young children schooled in Hindi. We already hear moans about their children not knowing Hindi, and about how they would lose out in this arrangement, even though there are very good private schools in Delhi whose junior sections are Hindi-medium, with the transition to English happening over two years from the beginning of senior school.⁵
Compromise
Suppose, instead, the elite children were left in their English-medium environments, as their parents insist, and the integration of EWS children into those private schools moved from pre-primary to the start of secondary school, or class 6?⁶ By that time their basic concepts would be in place, and they would be mature enough to make equivalences between the new terms being learned in English and the knowledge already established in Hindi. They would be able to approach English as bilinguals, without the mute phase younger EWS children experience, and would probably learn quickly because English has suddenly become much more accessible. And it would be easier for private schools to design classes to transform the English these children have been learning as a separate subject into fluent English, as there is much more known about teaching English to would-be bilinguals as a second language than about making the diglossic route to English more efficient.
This possibility has been overlooked, mainly because Indian private schools differ in their structure from most other parts of the world, where elementary and secondary schools are typically two separate institutions with separate admission procedures. In India we are primed to think that school admission can only mean entry to a pre-primary class. But in all our schools there is already the sense of a milestone reached at the end of class 5, followed by a reprise in class 6, with a new beginning and new teachers, and usually a separate building too.
At the end of the day, our goal has not changed. The objective of the exercise is still the integration of EWS children into our best schools. The only difference is that it will not be done blindly, oblivious of the dangers inherent in thrusting very young children into a bewilderingly alien environment, taking comfort in the fact that their muteness will not be permanent. The point is that they might, with bilingual education, have been bright confident children from the very beginning, which they would continue to be if they were allowed to start their English-medium education in class 6. Most of us have been through something like this dark tunnel, but too few of us remember how utterly dispiriting it is, and how much it makes you doubt yourself. If we really care about these children, and about doing an integration that amounts to something more than random acts of charity to children who always seem to be falling behind, we need to take a more serious look at the EWS programme and make a course correction before it becomes set in stone.
Notes
1 Indian children’s transition to English is discussed in detail in my paper “Invisible Development: How English as a Second Language Gestates and Grows”, in Psychological Foundations, XI (II), September 2009: 43-46. How Indians transit from Hindi to English via code-mixing is also discussed in my paper “L2 Language Learning in Natural Situations in India: Implications for Pedagogy in Asia” presented at the International Society for Language Studies Conference, “Making Connections: Language Studies and International Contexts”, at the National Institute of Education, Singapore, in 2006.
2 Charles Ferguson (1959): “Diglossia”, Word, 15: 325-40.
3 These are classes that have been arranged for EWS children at Vasant Valley School after school hours. I have been collaborating with one of the teachers, Harpriya Nakai. Once a week, I teach song lyrics used in my music class, explaining their meaning, and getting the children to recite and sing them together. This also helps the children later, in the integrated class, enabling them to read and sing the songs like the others in real-time.
4 The source for the information about bilingual education was Wikipedia: specifically, that it was mandated by law as a means of protecting minority children’s rights, and that it was always meant to be a time-bound programme.
5 Sardar Patel Vidyalaya, for example, an English-medium private school in Delhi, teaches in Hindi medium in the junior school classes, shifting to English medium over two years at the start of senior school. In class 6, science and mathematics begin to be taught in English, and in class 7, social sciences is switched to English.
6 This has been discussed in detail in my “Integrating Private and Government Schooling”, Economic & Political Weekly, 19 June 2004. The article discusses the case of Trinidad and Tobago, where the secondary schools were nationalised, and admission was possible only through a common entrance examination during the equivalent of class 5. Eighty per cent of the secondary school places were assigned by the government on the basis of the common entrance examination, the remaining 20% in one-time private schools could be filled at the schools’ discretion from a list of children who had made a lower cut-off. This system has been in place since 1962, and Trinidad and Tobago has consistently had the highest academic standards in the English-speaking Caribbean.