The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : It’s Tamil medium, yet learning proves a challenge

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Wednesday, Jul 30, 2008
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

It’s Tamil medium, yet learning proves a challenge

Meera Srinivasan

The problem is the gap between written and spoken forms

PHOTO: K.V.SRINIVASAN.

STUDY TIME: Language plays a key role in learning, say experts. A student studying in Tamil medium goes through his science textbook in Chennai on Tuesday. —

CHENNAI: At a time when school education has become quite demanding, students with Tamil as the medium of instruction seem to be having an additional challenge – that of language.

Since spoken Tamil is considerably different from formal, written, Tamil, understanding concepts becomes difficult, say teachers.

“Words such as puvi eerpu sakthi (gravity) are hardly used in conversational Tamil. Scholars perhaps use it while delivering a formal speech. Otherwise, our spoken Tamil is largely different from what the child reads in textbooks,” says the teacher of a Corporation school. “Sometimes, even teachers find it difficult to understand,” she says, on condition of anonymity.

Even for a language such as English, where the written and spoken forms are the same, there is a practice of looking at the two independently. “But in Tamil, which is more complex, we are yet to find a solution to bridge the gap,” says the headmaster of a government higher secondary school. “Some students assign a colloquial equivalent to the difficult words in order to understand. But the process is cumbersome,” he adds.

And the problem, teachers say, gets compounded as the child goes to higher classes. “Children find it hard not only while learning subjects such as science. Even in Tamil itself, they have to constantly learn very complex terms. Without any choice, they resort to memorising without any understanding,” says a class VI teacher of a government-aided school in Central Chennai.

The disparity between the spoken and written forms of Tamil could make the learning process more tedious, experts in linguistics agree. Languages with this inequality are categorised as diglossic. The classic form is often used in writing and sometimes, in public speaking. The spoken language, however, is simpler and far more informal. But for languages such as English, this difference hardly exists.

“While it is very effective when children study through their mother tongue, we should also see how close the written form is to the way a language is spoken,” says N. Deivasundaram, Professor and Director of the Linguistic Studies unit, Department of Tamil Language, University of Madras. This difference is true of most classical languages, he says.

“And in Tamil, there are so many regional dialects in spoken form. We have almost arrived at a common spoken form (as is used in films or mainstream). But written Tamil is simple only in mainstream Tamil newspapers and magazines. We need to focus on school textbooks to make learning easier,” he points out.

The Tamil Nadu Textbook Corporation is the authorised agency for the printing and supply of textbooks. The content is under the purview of the Directorate of School Education.

When contacted, Director of School Education P. Perumalsamy said the textbook committees were consciously trying to make the content more accessible. “We are trying to use simple language wherever possible. Only the technical terms cannot be simplified in subjects such as science,” he says.

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