A channel provided by English
R. KRISHANMOORTHY
|
Conscious that communication skills make all the difference for a student in the job market, Principals took the initiative to make the course an effective foundation, inviting resource persons of repute to highlight the importance of English in academic pursuits.
|
FIRM FOUNDATION: Students at St. Joseph's College taking the bridge course in English to improve their language skills.
Complying with a directive of the Bharathidasan University, colleges have devoted between a week and a fortnight at the start of the academic year for orienting freshers to the basic requirements of English language in the realm of higher education.
A conviction that a bridge course in English is a dire necessity arose from the realisation that a substantial section of the students joining the Arts and Science colleges hail from rural areas and are found lacking in English.
Conscious that communication skills make all the difference for a student in the job market, principals took the initiative to make the course an effective foundation, inviting resource persons of repute to highlight the importance of English in academic pursuits.
Now, as the bridge courses, designed around the model provided by the university, have ended in most of the colleges, teachers involved in the exercise do not want it to be a one-time exercise in isolation. They fear that the benefits of the course would be diminished if the students do not sustain their initiative to enhance their communicative ability.
At St. Joseph's College, which provided the university the model of curriculum and methodology it had developed and perfected as an autonomous institution, 1,300 entrants were initiated into the course, handled by teachers and 25 postgraduate English literature students.
However, at the end, a random analysis was quite revealing. Students from rural areas wanted English language course to be administered in Tamil-medium before they are subsequently introduced to their major subjects in the English medium.
Weak students wanted the course to be extended for at least one more week, and the teachers found to their surprise that the students' knowledge of English and communication skills got worse every passing year, despite their exposure to the language for 10 years or more at the school-level. "It is a strange conundrum that calls for a convincing answer," observes the Head of the English Department, P.V. Cecil.
The National College too designed its week-long course, with the competence of the rural students in mind. Right from arranging words in alphabetical order to making notes from passages, and writing sentences from pictures, the syllabus was designed in graded levels.
Use of visual projections and experiencing sounds through language lab modules proved a refreshing experience for the students. Nevertheless, here too the emphasis was on learning English as a continuous process.
G. Balakrishnan, retired Vice-Principal, St. Joseph's College, who was instrumental in framing the syllabus, says that students should first unlearn the structures taught at the high school level.
Echoing the same view, Florence Vassou, an academician, is emphatic that students can attain the required competence only by making a sustained effort with perseverance.
A. Noel Joseph Irudayaraj, Professor and Head, Department of English, Bharathidasan University, puts it forthrightly: "A bridge course often deteriorates into a ritual when it is not radically conceived as continual recharging of the linguistic and literary batteries of the students."
While inaugurating one such course at Nehru Memorial College, Puthanampatti, he insisted that it could be made effective by supplementing it with weekly, fortnightly, or at least monthly sessions and workshops.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Education Plus
Karnataka
Chennai
Coimbatore
Hyderabad
Madurai
Tiruchirapalli
Vijayawada
Visakhapatnam
