INTRODUCTION

English Language Teaching (ELT) includes variousv approaches,

techniques and methods that are involved in teaching English, to people
with English as First Language and also those who use it as a second and
a foreign language.
When English is used as the predominant language forv
communication at work and for education, but not at home, it is termed
as ESL(English as a Second Language). This happens in the immigrant
communities of countries such as Australia and New Zealand or Canada.
Countries such as Brazil, Japan and Thailand, do not usev English
for communication, but only at the elementary levels of education. They
use English only for international communication, for example, where
there is a lack of another common language. Here English is used as a
foreign language(EFL- English as a Foreign Language).

ELT IN INDIA
In India, the traditional methods of teaching English is used and the
learners are still taught in the traditional Grammar method, giving lot of
importance to writing and reading and with scant attention to
interactions or actual use of the language Professional organizations and
individual researchersv are helping in the redrawing of paradigms in
ELT, and new approaches and methods are being integrated into the
educational curricula in many parts of the country Examinations such as
IELTS and TOEFL also play a crucial role in changing the approaches to
ELT, though it happens only after the tertiary education.

BASIC CONCEPTS IN ELT

The goal of language acquisition is communicative¢ competence,
which is the ability to use the language correctly and appropriately to
achieve communication goals. Communicative competence is made up
of four¢ competence areas: linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse and
strategic. The first language or mother tongue of a speaker is known as
L1 and the second language of a speaker is known as L2 in ELT and
Linguistics
Glossary :
PT (Proficiency Test) : PT measures overall language ability, like IELTS or TOEFL, without
focusing on a specific curriculum.

AT (Achievement Test)

An AT assesses what a student has learned in a specific course or program, unlike proficiency
tests.

CE (Communicative Efficiency)

CE refers to how effectively a learner can use language in real communication, balancing
fluency and accuracy.

History of English Language Learning and Teaching in India :

The history of English language learning and teaching in India is a rich tapestry woven from
historical, cultural, and educational threads. It reflects colonial influences, post-independence
attitudes, and modern global dynamics.

Colonial Influence: The British colonial period established English as a language of

administration and education, creating a lasting impact on the linguistic landscape of India.The
colonizers did not just a set of religious beliefs, nor only a pioneering spirit and a desire for
colonization, but also their language, and though many years later the Americans broke away
from their one-time colonial masters, the language of English remained and it is still the main
language of the world's predominant economic and political power. The imposition of English as
the one language of administration helped maintain the coloniser's power and rapidly became a
unifying/dominating means of control.

Educational Reforms:

1. Macaulay’s Minute (1835) advocated for English education in India to create a class
ofeducated Indians who could assist in governance.

2. The establishment of universities in Calcutta (1857), Bombay (1857), and Madras(1857)

promoted English as a medium of instruction.
3. Wood’s Despatch (1854)

4. Emergence of Indian Literature in English: The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a rise
in Indian writers using English, including figures like Rabindranath Tagore and Mulk Raj Anand,
which contributed to a growing interest in English language and literature.

Anglicists strongly believed in the superiority of Western culture and that the best education for
Indians should happen in English. They put into practice an educational system that would
create a class of anglicised Indians who would serve as cultural intermediaries between the
British and the Indians.

The English Education Act (1835)

Based on the Minute prepared by Thomas Babington Macaulay in consultation with, and
submitted to, Lord William Bentinck, the then Governor- General of India Recommended
withdrawal of support to Sanskrit and Arabic books, and reduced support for traditional
education They believed that English is better worth knowing than Sanskrit or Arabic: Macaulay
pointed out that "a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature
of India and Arabia" and "Whoever knows that language (English) has ready access to all the
vast intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the
course of 90 generations"

❖ Main Arguments of Macaulay's Minute

• English should replace Persian as the official language

• English should be the medium of instruction in all institutions of learning

• Translation of Western knowledge into undeveloped vernacular languages need not be

encouraged

• Indians trained in English can undertake the training of the rest of their countrymen

• This is called Downward Filtration Theory (education as filtering down from the higher- class
people to the lower classes or the masses)

Excerpts from The English Education Act

• "We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the
millions whom we govern; a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste,
opinions, morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of
the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the western
nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great
mass of the population"

Wood's Despatch (1854)

• Called "Magna Carta of English Education in India"

• Presented by Charles Wood, MP, to Lord Dalhousie

• Based on the request by the Court of Directors to frame a General Scheme of Education,
applicable to the whole of British India

• The first authoritative declaration of educational policy in India which laid upon the government
of the country the responsibility of creating a comprehensive and properly articulated system of
education from primary to university level

• Against Macaulay's "filtration theory", laid stress on mass education, female education and
improvement of vernaculars, and favoured secularism in education

❖ Recommendations

• To set up education departments in every province

• Setting up universities in all major cities of India modelled on the new London University

• At least one government school in every district

• Grant-in-aid to be given to private schools

• Increased attention to vernacular schools for elementary education

• Primary schools – vernacular education; High Schools - Anglo- vernacular education; Colleges
English education

• Focus on teacher training

• Stressed on vocational education and women's education

• Supported mother tongue as the medium of instruction at school level

• Wanted to create a class of Indians as the workforce (like Macaulay)

World Englishes

The concept of World Englishes recognizes the existence of multiple Englishes, shaped by local
cultures, languages, and contexts. It Includes varieties such as Indian English, Singapore
English, and others, each with distinct phonological, lexical, and syntactic features.

Teaching Implications: There must be an inclusive approach to teaching English, incorporating

diverse varieties to validate students' linguistic identities and enhance their communicative
competence in a global context. Nobody owns English anymore, in other words - or perhaps we
could say that we all, 'native' and 'non-native' speakers alike, own it together in a kind of
international shareholders' democracy since whatever English we speak - Indian English, British
English or Malaysian English -we have, or should have, equal rights as English users. This does
not mean, of course, that there are no 'haves' and 'have-nots' in World Englishes.The speaker of
World English is, perhaps, capable of dealing with a wider range of English varieties than
someone stuck with native-speaker attitudes and competence; indeed, as Rajagopalan
suggests, anyone who can't deal with a Punjabi or Greek accent is ‘communicatively deficient'.

Productive and Receptive Skills

Teachers tend to talk about the way we use language in terms of four skills - reading, writing,
speaking, and listening. These are often divided into two types. ‘Receptive skills’ is a term used
for reading and listening, skills where meaning is extracted from an already produced discourse.
‘Productive skills’ is the term for speaking and writing, skills where one has to produce language
themselves.However, these skills cannot always be strictly separated. We might also want to
question a once commonly-held view that receptive skills are somehow passive, whereas
production skills are in some way more active. In any case, whether we are reading or speaking
we often mix what we are doing with other skills.

Receptive skills and productive skills feed off each other in several ways. What we say or write
is heavily influenced by what we hear and see. Our most important information about language
comes from this input. Thus, the more we see and listen to comprehensible input, the more
English we acquire, notice, or learn. This input takes many forms: teachers provide massive
language input, as does audio material in the classroom and the variety of reading texts that
students are exposed to. Students may read extensively or listen to podcasts. They may interact
with other English speakers both inside and outside the classroom.

• Productive Skills: These are skills where language users produce language. They include
speaking and writing. Productive skills allow learners to express their ideas, feelings, and
opinions. They often require greater cognitive load as they involve generating language.

• Teaching Strategies: Activities include role-plays, presentations, writing essays or stories, and
peer feedback.

• Receptive Skills: These skills involve understanding language, encompassing listening and
reading.

• Receptive skills are crucial for comprehension and interpreting information. They lay the
foundation for developing productive skills.

• Teaching Strategies: Techniques include listening exercises, reading comprehension tasks,

and discussions on texts.

Differences Between Acquisition and Learning :

Unless there is something wrong with them mentally or physically, all children acquire a
language as they develop. Indeed, many children around the world acquire more than one
language and by the age of six or seven are speaking as confident bi- or trilingual. This
miraculous language 'instinct' happens almost effortlessly.

As far as we can see, children are not taught language, nor do they set out to learn it
consciously. Rather they acquire it subconsciously as a result of the massive exposure to it
which they get from the adults and other children around them. Their instinct - the mental
capability we are all born with - acts upon the language they hear and transforms it into a
knowledge of the language and an ability to speak it. This is an instance of language
acquisition. If we can cultivate this kind of environment in language teaching and learning
settings, we can boost the process and pace of learning.

• Acquisition: A subconscious process similar to how children learn their first language. It occurs
naturally through exposure and interaction in a meaningful context. Acquisition tends to lead to
more fluent and natural language use.

• Learning: A conscious process involving formal instruction and understanding of grammatical

rules. It often involves studying the language in a structured setting. It involves organised,
conscious learning and application that require study capabilities. We study or are taught
grammar and vocabulary as part of this.

• The language we acquire subconsciously (especially when it is anxiety-free) is the language

that is available to us for easy and immediate use in spontaneous conversation.

Indian English (GIE)

English is used in India by different linguistic groups. Regional varieties of English
are defined and described Negi reference to the state language such as Tamil English,
Malayalam English (Manglish", Gujarathi English, etc.
Despite the fact that there are as many kinds of Indian English, certain common
features do exist. In the educational front, the Anglo-Indian sehools and Convent
schools grew in demand. Based on common intelligibility, a new variety known as
General Indian English (GIE) has been identified. Now an Indian Standard English is
slowly consolidating itself with growing acceptance from first users of English. Today
English is the official language of four states (Manipur, Meghalaya, Nagaland and
Tripura) and of seven Union territories that are under direct control from New Delhi
(the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Chandigarh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Delhi,
Lakshadweep, Mizoram and Pondicherry).In 1967, Parliament passed the Official
Language (Amendment) Act, which specified that: Notwithstanding the expiration of
the period of fifteen years from the commencement of the Constitution, the English
language shall continue to be used for all the official purposes of the Union for which
it was being used immediately before such commencement (Constitution of India,
2007:212). The act sanctioned the use of both Hindi and English for all official
purposes, and this continues to be the case. But at the same time that the Indian
Parliament re-designated Hindi as the national language and made English an official
language for an indefinite period of time, 14 other languages (22 by 8th schedule,
2008) also continued to be designated as official languages. Today in India, English is
the primary medium of education, law, media, and business.
It is also used for social interactions and in a pan-Indian literature. Although it owes
its origin to the British Received Pronunciation, GIE deviates in its phonology and
quality of phones. It takes into account the common segmental features across Indian
languages such that GIE is distinctly Indian, but without prominent regional
influences.
GIE has several salient phonological features such as a reduced vowel inventory
compared to the Received Pronunciation (RP) of British English, the substitution of
retroflex stops for RP British English alveolar stops, and the omission of some
fricative sounds (Bansal, 1976; Wells, 1982).
Although suprasegmental features were not standardized in the CIEFL monograph,
the rhythms of (G)IE are notably different from those of most other Englishes. For
example, whereas British English is a canonical stress timed language, IE has most
often been characterized as syllable-timed (Gargesh, 2004) or nearly syllable-timed
(Babu, 1971). General Indian English (GIE) has a 17-vowel system (11
monophthongs and 6 diphthongs): /i:, i, e:, e, z, a:, D, o:, u, u:, and a/ and /ai, si, au, la,
ea, and ua/.
A few features of Indian English are given below:
› Indian English is generally syllable-timed.
* General inconsistency in word stress- the tendency is towards equal stress in all
syllables.
> English in India is rhotic, i.e. r is pronounced in all positions.
/t/ and /d/ are retroflex and th-sounds are aspirated / and /d/
> F is pronounced as an aspirated /p/
> Among many Indian speakers consonant clusters sk, sl, sp have an extra fronted
vowel such as iskool, islip.
* V and W generally get neutralized at W, hence wine and vine are wine.
> Speakers of many Dravidian languages tend to put y sound to pronounce 1, m, and n
such as 'yell', 'yem', 'yen' and w sound to pronounce old as 'wold' and open as 'wopen'.
* Double consonants as in summer, silly get prominence than they are due.
* /3/ is replaced by /f/ as in measure, vision etc
> Some features are quite native as in replacement of v for b (vowel into bowel) in
Bengali; j for z (zed into jed; zero into jero) as in Gujarathi; d for t (canteen into
candeen) as in Malayalam.
> Lack of subject / auxiliary in interrogatives as in 'What you would like to take
home?
> 'One' is used in place of a, as in 'He gave me one book'.
> Verbs such as 'know', which do not take progressive form, my brother'.
are used in the continuous as in '*You must be knowing
> Word duplication, as it commonly used in Indian languages, is attempted in English.
For example, 'I brought some small, small things'.
* Yes and no are commonly used as question tags: 'You completed your portions, no?'
'You are expecting him, yes?
Isn't it is a generalized tag for most expressions. 'The students are present today, isn't
it?
* Indian words and expressions that have gained recognition include: ayah, bamboo,
betel, curry, bungalow, cheetah, chitty, juggernaut, pundit, sahib, basmati, chapatti,
samosa, goonda, dewan, mogul, ahimsa, guru, chutney, yoga, Samadhi, zamindar,
lathicharge, batch mate, issueless, tiffin box, etc. The words given here are only some
representative ones and the numbers tend to increase every year.