Teaching English in Primary Classes.

 Language is man's main medium of communication. It is the axis around which man's effective expression of his thoughts revolve. It is rather easy to communicate orally in one's mother tongue but writing is comparatively a difficult task. It becomes even more difficult if it is in a foreign language, especially for the ones who have done the schooling with the medium as mother tongue. It is almost impossible for most of them to construct an error free meaningful sentence.

Such students when they reach the tertiary level learning finds writing as a herculian task as it demands academic writing in their respective discipline. Academic writing requires formal use of language and a knowledge of the technical terms of the discipline. For those who are not even thorough with the informal language, it is impossible to effectively produce a formal discourse.

The reason for this is that, from the primary grades the students have never been learning to produce a sentence on their own, instead they have been byhearting what had been in their text books. 

In order to bring about a change, the school level education should aim at giving the students exposure to English speaking environment and teach them the usage rather than directly teaching the meanings. Only then they would understand how sentences are framed correctly rather than directly converting their mother tongue to English.

Ms. Sabina, Asst. Prof. of English, Al Shifa College of Arts and Science, Kizhattoor, Perinthalmanna