FOUNDATION COURSE: LANGUAGE, LITERATURE &
CREATIVITY -ENGLISH
University of
Delhi, Orient Blackswan, New Delhi, 2013
Book Reviewed by
Gifty Gupta
Delhi
University has broken ground by developing a versatile “study material” book
and is out to demonstrate the pedagogy for effective and meaningful learning. As
a language of global communication, English is not only seen as a language of
development through which nearly all contemporary knowledge is accessible , but
also as a language of opportunity, social prestige, power as well as success.
Students
today want to learn English as a communicative tool in social, educational and
economic settings. It is important that the learners should be consciously led
to develop their learner language by engaging them in socially meaningful
activities. There has been a great deal of research that ascertains that a language
class should represent simulation of real communicative situations by focusing
on the integrative and interactive activities. Thus, language teaching should
be meaning and function oriented, learner-centered and interactive.
The foundation
course on ‘Language, Literature and Creativity- English’, seems to have been
developed with the above objectives in mind. A vital component of the new Four-Year
Undergraduate Programme of the
University of Delhi, the course endeavours to incorporate concrete activities
and not just hypothetical suggestions and idealized changes. It aims at
“implementing a new mode of participative and creative pedagogy”, and also
promises to deliver “not only stimulating study materials, but also outcome-oriented
tasks for the students to perform in class or at home…”
In
doing away with the streaming of students on the basis of the years spent in
learning a language, the present course reaches out to a heterogeneous group of
students. The tasks have been so designed as to be chosen, modified and used by
the teacher/facilitator to cater to different difficulty levels present in the classroom.
The
group activities not only give a fair chance to the students to interact among
various levels of linguistic proficiency,
but also enable the teacher to be inventive in treating the subject according
to the need of different groups of students.
There
are eight units in the book, which have been designed with the focus on
enhancing the learner’s listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. For
instance, the activities requiring the students to listen to the clips on
YouTube website are very innovative and interesting as the students’ keen
interest in technology actively engages them in the given tasks. They have an
easy access to the sources available online for their further reading. “It’s a
‘Happy Classroom’ wherein we are allowed to talk, sit in groups, use internet
and express ourselves freely,” exclaimed a student. According to another: “We
look forward to our LLC lecture even in the late hours, because we interact
with a new group and a new task every time we meet; it’s so evolutionary and
therefore interesting.”
The
titles of all the units are suggestive of their extensive and comprehensive themes:
‘Dialoguing with Nature’, ‘The Location
and Dislocation of Culture’, ‘Beyond the Classroom’, ‘Thinking Livelihood’,
‘The Hungry and the Homeless’, ‘ Telling Experiences’, ‘Creative Journeys’ and
‘Art and Life’. All the units recommend group learning and include trans-
disciplinary activities. For instance, the tasks vary from responding
to news headlines to sensitivity to environmental issues; from writing a
positive statement to thinking about the traditional games of India; from
common errors in grammar to discussing
the food security bill, and from being sensitized to the problem of
displacement to understanding literary language, just to name a few.
“There
has never been such a versatile accumulation in the language courses. It’s
certainly a favourable shift towards achieving the much desired creative
expression,” says one of the teachers of this course. What is called for is an
imaginative engagement with the material by both, the learner as well as the
teacher.
The
strength of the course lies in bringing a transition from evaluating a student
for his/her capacity to memorise the content to encouraging him/her to achieve
some degree of communicative competence. The suggested class presentations and
group projects provide a practical platform to the students in order to participate,
perform and practice in real life situations.
Thus,
the study material serves as an invaluable resource in the discipline of
English Language Teaching that attempts to eliminate the habit of rote
learning. The students are required to analyse the content, understand issues and
be able to think clearly and develop an argument cogently.
The activities have been carefully designed so
as to appear more like games than strenuous grammatical exercises. For example,
discussing a given ‘cartoon’ in groups of five, rearranging ‘jumbled words’,
responding within a minute to a quick query and role-playing dramatically are
some of the exercises which not only adopt
a learner-centered approach, but also aim at bridging the gap between the basic
school training and the integrated and reflective approach in college.
As
there is no content to memorise, students are not required to produce ‘the
correct answers’ for writing an exam. However, they are expected to understand
the concept and think precisely. The challenge is for teachers to adopt a
creative pedagogy and flexible methodology to make this course as effective as
it is intended to be, for “one who dares to teach, must never cease to learn”.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Gifty Gupta
is Assistant Professor in English at Shaheed Rajguru College of Applied
Sciences, University of Delhi.
Source: Book Review published in Confluence -South Asian Perspectives (UK),
Winter 2013, P#20.
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