Papua New Guinea is going through a crisis in the teaching of English. Some aspects of this crisis have been recognized and steps taken to rectify. Others are not understood.
The first in recent times is the removal of teaching in vernacular language. This was a policy foolish in the extreme in that students had their valuable time cut by learning their village language instead of English. Two lessons a week were enough.
It was the work of the Australian National University and Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), the first pushing their funding wagon and the other making progress towards the Second Coming.
Jesus was not coming until all languages had a Bible. He was just sitting up there waiting for the SIL to complete their work.
Village children had much of their time wasted in the fact that the sole organizer of vernacular teaching was often the lone teacher who spoke the language.
The teacher was recruited from the village partly on the basis of own vernacular skill and could not be transferred. Another vernacular teacher may not be available.
But a bigger problem had been escalating for the last 30 years. That is the presence and slow depletion of first language expatriate teachers who maintained a level of English teaching above the national teachers.
But even that had problems. The students who did well in their English education are now middle aged having benefited from expatriate teachers in the country in the 1960s and 1970s.
Those students from the 1960s and 1970s may well be now retired. Their places have been taken by younger national teachers.
Older teachers from Australia who were consultants have now been replaced by young consultants with doctorates who may or not have experience in teaching and may not have any qualifications in curriculum design.
There has been a massive change in policy across the western world over the last 50 years. The causes are not clear.
Firstly there was a big shake-up in the 1950s and 1960s as the result of the US reaction to the Soviet Union putting the satellite Sputnik into outer space. Out of all this came Mastery Learning that later was to be known as Outcome Based Education.
familypositiveliving.blogspot.com/.../mastery-learning-benjamin-blo...Cached
8 Sep 2011 – The patron of Mastery Learning and Outcome Based Education
was Benjamin Bloom who designed a Taxonomy of Educational Objectives ...
Then there was the reaction of teachers who decided that the old methods were old fashioned and to be discarded. First to go was the practice of rote learning. Students were to conceptualize rather than memorize. They have come to do neither.
Then came the reaction to the education of their teachers many of whom were men who returned from World War 2. My grade 8 teacher in Queensland was an officer in World War 1.
The baby boomer generation of the 1950s saluted the flag and made an oath of allegiance. Classes moved around the school in squads as they would do in military basic training. Many male teachers were NCOs and officers in the war.
Students were to have short hair that was soon to be pushed aside in the 1960s by the Beatles. Male teachers were to wear respectable clothes with a black tie.
Then there was the style of teaching and the curriculum. Baby boomer children had to know all the grammar rules, punctuation, latin and greek roots, tenses, subjunctive mood, present and present continuous tense, analysis, parsing, copy book writing and synthesis of sentence structures.
Out of this era came wonderfully crafted novels. The best novels that I hold in my private library have immaculate and varied sentence structure and syntax, far more polished than I could ever imagine.
Take the novels of Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Sydney Sheldon, James Patterson, Azar Nafisi, Derek Hansen, Geoffrey Archer, Marcia Willett and many others.
The focus on grammar was reassessed by the baby boomer teachers and much was removed. It was seen to block writing creativity.
There was a saying that “more is caught than taught”. That may be true but it is also true that “much more is caught if taught” and “far more is caught and taught by Mastery Learning”.
This was a foolish fantasy with no basis in research. Australians would say it came out of the fluff in navels. Do we also not have to teach skills to pilots, doctors and engineers? They just perform on the basis of what they caught.
If Senator McCarthy were alive, he would be seeing the removal of basics as a communist plot to slow down the US in its response to the Soviet technological advance after Sputnik. Or perhaps it was a protest against the Vietnam draft. Anything is possible.
Perhaps the removal of formal teaching of literacy gave more time to baby boomer teachers to make love not war.
But grammar was removed so that students learned to read by reading and write by writing. It was no longer necessary to know what a sentence was. It just happened.
The belief was that students learned language by reading books. This is true of course. Far more detailed language learning takes place if student understanding is reinforced by the basics of grammar, derivation of words and spelling with identification and practice of structures.
Reading becomes confirmation of what has been learned. Writing becomes the application of learning. It is another source of input to the brain.
Speaking language lays down the memory traces of rhythm, rhyme and modulation. Writing reinforces the structures in symbolic form. Reading develops subliminal reinforcement.
Even in the 1960s, the theorists were telling teachers to appeal to every sense in the learning process. But that was not enough to bring back the basics.
But PNG is now reaping the harvest of poor teaching, first by expatriate teachers in the 1990s to the present.
The nation still had old fashioned teachers until that time. Copeland is one of the last of the old time teachers and seeking to bring back the basics.
It is time to urge the education planners of the world to go back to basics and ignore the teacher ‘flock of sheep’ syndrome. One leads and everyone else follows. A new change comes and all else is thrown out. No such idea of integrating new ideas with the old.
Let us all return to class chanting of multiplication tables, together with:
class recitation of poetry,
focus on phonics in spelling and sentence skill,
oral reading aloud of texts,
return to spelling reinforced by repetition,
derivation of words by greek and latin roots,
student practice of language structures,
promotion of rules of effective and interesting writing,
maintenance of logical argument,
emphasis on grammatically correct sentences, and
writing in terms of all of the above.
The Department of Education is urged to declare that all students are to have learned the multiplication tables by the age of 10 years.
The big mistake is to assume that in the absence of old fashioned teachers, the next to take charge are university lecturers. They may well think that the basics is all about semantics and other abstract concepts. They will want to bring the university curriculum into the primary school classrooms.
Bruce Copeland BA BEdSt (University. St Lucia Brisbane)
teacher of English, Tok Pisin and Bahasa Indonesia
supporter of Mastery Learning and basics.
www.digitaltermpapers.com/a10242.htmCached
This is the core principle of Outcomes Based Education (OBE). ...
developed the principles on which "Mastery Learning" was developed
by Benjamin Bloom. ... used in OBE are based on Benjamin Bloom's
Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.
