Number of words: 753

Parents stimulate their children’s speech by picking up elements of the child’s primitive language and playing it back to him in an expanded form. it is difficult to overestimate the importance of this continuous and intimate interaction of mother and child for the development of sensitive empathetic responsiveness to others which remains much more intense when it is stimulated by a familiar figure than by a stranger. A child’s success in school depends considerably on the quality and quantity of experience at home and in the neighbourhood. Unfortunately not all children come to school equipped with the same background of experiences. And while the school has an obligation to make up at least a part of this deficit, this is easier said than done. For most schools, homogenous classes ignore the child’s background and, assuming everything to be similar, build on what is quite obviously an erroneous assumption. School therefore can be traumatic. Readiness for language depends on an accumulation of background experiences over a period of time. When a child’s background of experiences is so limited that he can find in it no basis for interpreting the material he reads, it will have no more meaning for him then highly technical material that we feel would have for us. Many writers have been concerned with providing compensatory experiences in the classroom for those students who lack the necessary generalizations. Compensatory experiences can also result from audiovisual possibilities which reduce the word usage of the teacher and the abstractness of a new language teaching and which can provide an effective substitute for the excessive talk that the teacher can convince himself is necessary for the importance of using language skills more effectively. Challenging experiences like individual or group projects and making contact with resource persons are also great help in aiding the young inexperienced by giving meaning to observing, thinking, speaking, listening, reading and writing. Often people need to touch, feel, taste, see, hear and manipulate objects in their environment in order to understand them. As he shifts from the world of objects to the realm of words, which represent objects and situations, he must make the change progressively. For it is meanings, that to a large extent, constitute the environment, especially the psychological environment of the individual.

The school must, through this curiosity, lead the child into vital problem solving and more critical enquiry which constitutes thinking. This line of enquiry received a major boost in Helen keller’s autobiography, ‘The story of My Life’, where she recounts the value of the printed word as a representation of language.
We walked down the path of the wellhouse, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand on the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled on to the other, the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness, of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me.
This correlation is the result of an awareness which is given expression through language. Emotional states of mind can only be conveyed in any degree of subtlety through books. As Freiere in Brazil discovered, illiterates rapidly learn to read when the words they were interested in are relevant to the social and political situation. The rising number of illiterates in today’s schools are victims of bad teaching and prisoners in a culture where reading beyond a basic level is sadly irrelevant to them.

Language is designed to express meanings of people. This does not mean that when they use language they are necessarily clear in what they want to say. It is easiest for us when stating facts. It is also fairly easy to classify things.The difficulty begins to arise when we attempt some sort of reasoning. The value of language is to test for the presence of each of these types of knowing. But this underscores the need for teacher student interaction. All classroom activities are sustained almost entirely in talk or writing. Most classroom discussion is of the question answer type. It follows that unless the student is able to understand what the teacher says, and the teacher is able to express his thoughts clearly, there can be a breakdown in this interaction, with unfortunate results for the student.

Excerpted from pages 96-99 of ‘Examinations: An Informative Update’ by M Mascarenhas.