Communicative English: A failure
Md. Momin Uddin Bablu, Piaratoloa, Kushtia Zoo
I have carefully read the letter of Mr. Zahid Akter published on July 13, 2003 on Daily Star, written in response to Dr. Alam's letter titled "Communicative English: A failure" published on July 07. Dr Alam mentioned in his letter that 'students are not eager to learn grammatical rules'. Needless so say, Mr. Zahid Akter have failed to make out the "not eager to learn grammatical rules." Students simply don't show any interest to learn grammar because they are not asked any grammatical questions in the exams. I believe they would certainly show eagerness in learning grammar if they have to answer more grammatical questions in the SSC and HSC exams. It is a fact that students do well when they are asked to answer questions on passages or as such because they can form ideas, though vaguely, from the given passages. So, they prefer to answer such type of questions more. But when they are asked to write a correct statement, most of them fail to do so as they don't know how to arrange words in proper sequence to build a complete sentence. When they write a composition it is usually full of grammatical mistakes. It is because they don't know how to arrange words in proper order to build up a grammatically correct sentence. Therefore, it appears that to encourage communicative English means encouraging students to learn incorrect English, which in my opinion is of no value. Mr. Zahid Akter has expressed a very well-thought observation in his letter, that "such approach (communicative English) may prove to be ineffective if the teachers are not well-trained and creative enough." Actually the problem lies there, in many-schools and colleges in village and local towns, especially in the non-government ones, there are no English teachers, let alone well-trained and creative teachers. So who will teach such complicated communicative English courses to the helpless village- students? Mr. Zahid Akter, at one point in his letter, said, "we do not remember students coming out with good English through that time-tested method," which is according to him, rather time warn. It is not clear enough what he actually meant by this sentence, but it can be said strongly that hundreds of prominent English scholars came out through that old system of English teaching. Even Mr Zahid Akter himself, was perhaps taught English in that old method which is never timeworn as he believes, rather truly time-tested as Dr. Alam believes.
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