My experience of working in three different types of schools in India over three decades has thrown up common areas where improvement is needed to improve the standard of education at the senior level in India. I have worked in a government-aided school, a Diocesan School, and a Niche Public school, all of which could do better by addressing various urgent issues.
First and foremost is the standardization of content delivery, which although very subjective in nature, can vary tremendously with variation in experience, subject knowledge and expertise of the teacher in his or her field. The lack of experience in most teachers teaching higher grade levels like the board classes of tenth and twelfth has created a lot of confusion. Less experienced teachers tend to copy-paste materials from unauthenticated sources on the internet and even substandard refreshers and help books with the result that what is taught and examined at the school level has little relevance to what is being examined at the board level.
It is of utmost importance to give regular training to teachers in pedagogy and subject knowledge throughout the year so that they are in sync with what is required by the examination board. In many cases, the strict formats that are taught in school and for which students are penalised don't even figure in the marking scheme of the board exam. While it is a good idea to focus on formats, one should also look at other aspects such as expression, content, value points and presentation. Unfortunately, teachers who focus merely on the format of the date and the placement of the announcement in a notice or a letter might be ignoring more aspects of the answer.
One very significant lacuna in the teaching of English in schools of India is the absolute lack of the teaching of formal grammar and its rules. A majority of the students studying English in schools in India are learning English as a second language. They have a tendency to use the grammatical rules of their mother tongue while studying English and this causes great confusion in their written expression. The lack of understanding of the mechanics of complex sentences and the use of conjunctions can be found lacking even in students of grade twelve. Total ignorance of the use of prepositions, punctuations like commas and even full-stops is appalling indeed!
The introduction of a decent amount of formal grammar and the training of teachers themselves in the use of grammar can help a lot. It was appalling for me to come across a person advocating the use of the preposition 'between' for a group and not two groups. You can divide the chocolates between the two of you, not in the group of twelve students. When do you capitalize the word 'General' and when do you write the word in lower case? When do you use 'would' and how do you differentiate the modal from 'will'?
The lack of standardized support material and textbooks for the teaching and learning of English (along with other subjects) is adding to the confusion on how we teach English to students of grades eight to twelve in the schools of the country. A large number of substandard publishing agencies and a number of dubious learning websites have sprouted adding to the confusion. In all this, probably students in rural areas are at least not able to access most of the websites which is not true about schools in urban and developed areas. A large number of videos can be accessed that use the Hindi language to summarise English lessons. Most of these websites are meant to draw students to coaching centres and coaching centres.
The NCERT and the CBSE need to work in tandem to address the issue of lack of standardization in the teaching of English and the assessment of English at all grade levels. A robust in-service programme and a system of follow-ups should be made mandatory for all teachers teaching in government and private schools.
A lack of understanding of formats in the writing sections of the syllabus needs to be addressed. Why are we teaching letters at times when we have started using emails and hardly write letters at all? Why does the job application have to be included in the grade 12 syllabus, that too as an option for letters to the editor? Why have we removed the teaching of note-making from grade twelve? Note-making is an important skill that helps students take notes throughout their lives! Why are we not teaching students skills in English that will help them throughout? Why are we teaching them topics that are redundant and not required, like for example letters? Why are we teaching students notes of acceptance and notes of regret when we can always drop a WhatsApp message or even an email for the same?
A very large number of young students studying in grade twelve cannot write a proper Statement of Purpose for admission to a college abroad. They exceed the word limit by a thousand words and then come to their English teacher to bring the word count down to the accepted word limit. The problem is that a sound word choice and a good expression matter when you are writing a Statement of Purpose. A student that I once knew, called me up recently from another state as she wanted me to edit her statement of purpose that ran into 1500 words and exceeded the minimum required characters. She needed it to gain admission to a University in the UK to undertake her studies in Law. She also told me that she did not want the 'essence' of the SOP to be changed. Unfortunately, it was a rambling essay that contained numerous anecdotes from her own life which appeared to be absolutely redundant and unnecessary. After poring through her document for over a whole hour and editing and correcting her mistakes in grammar and expression, cutting down on about two hundred words, I was done. In the end, I told her that she would have to delete a couple of paragraphs that were based on her real-life experiences. She was not happy about my suggestion.
Students lack the ability to order their thoughts into paragraphs and smooth transitions when they are writing an essay, an article or a report. The hamfisted rule of splitting their essay into three random paragraphs is not enough. You need to teach them that the essay needs to be divided into an introduction, the hook, the hypothesis, and the statement, the introduction is followed by the argument where one needs to have a proper discussion of the topic, and the analysis of the data for the same. One concludes the essay with a suitable tying of the loose ends. In other words, one needs to have a proper flow or transition between the introduction, the body or the analysis and the conclusion.
There is a sense of apathy and deja vu in the teaching fraternity about how the job has become a last resort for those who could not make it big in life. It is certainly not a much-paying job and it definitely comes with its share of stress and fatigue. The need to conform to substandard pedagogical patterns and use straitjacketed practices in the teaching of English can be overwhelming at times!
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