Lt.(Dr.) Datendra Kumar works as Assistant Professor & Head in Dept. of English, Govt. P.G. College, Lansdowne, Pauri Garhwal.

Language is a means of communicating thoughts and feelings. As Dwight Bolinger says, ‘Language is species specific. It is uniquely human trait, shared by the cultures so diverse and by individuals physically and mentally so unlike one another’….1 It is a man’s ability to use language for purposes of communication that distinguishes him from other animals. Of all the languages in the world today English deserves to be regarded as a world language. It is world’s most widely spoken language. It is the common means of communication between people of different nations. English is the most useful ‘library language’ in higher education and our most significant window on the world.2 It is a cementing force.

A very important reason for regarding English as a world language is that the world’s knowledge is enshrined in English. Today the compulsions of learning English are no longer merely political but scientific and technological. And no longer is English the language of Great Britian only; it is the language required by the world for greater understanding; ‘it is the most international of languages’.3 English stimulated a new consciousness among the people, of political and cultural nationalism and encouraged the quest for the true meaning of the Indian experiences of history in relation to the west.

THE PROBLEM OF SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNER

The availability of the right type of teaching materials and audio-visual can certainly make the teaching of English in India quite effective. Audi-Visual aids are an integral part of the learning situation and areas important as the blackboard and chalk. In India teaching of English suffers as a result of the inadequate and poor availability of these resources. The two vital factors in a second language learning situation are the students and the teacher. The teacher has problems to tackle when he is faced with the task of teaching a class of students who show varying capacities of assimilation. As Robert Lado says, ‘The language teacher must be educated, at least, to the levels of his peers. He must have the general preparation of a teacher. He must know the target language well enough to be imitated by his students’.4
The teacher’s language is the principal model for the students. In India the main problem is not to have competent teachers of English. Wilkins is right when he observes, ‘It should be unrealistic to expect a teacher to set objectives which he himself is not capable of teaching. A teacher who himself has difficulty in speaking the language he teaches, is not going to succeed in giving his pupils a command of spoken language.5

LINGUISTICS AND THE SECOND LANUAGE TEACHER

Both linguistics and language teaching are concerned with language. Each can learn something from the other. Language is a meaningful activity and linguistics, on the whole, is more occupied with the grammatical levels than any other academic study connected with language. Perhaps it is because of the linguistics’ concentrated attention on the phonological and structural aspects of language that makes him subordinate vocabulary teaching to grammar teaching. Linguistics teaches us that words should be learnt in the context of their linguistic relationship. Every English teacher in India knows that one of the problems he has to contend within the classroom arises from the pressure of the mother tongue on his students of a particular language group learning English as a second language, influences their performance in English in such a way that almost all of them make the same mistakes in pronunciation, spellings, grammar and vocabulary. Robert Lado’s Linguistics Across Cultures deals with the importance of contrastive analyses in second language teaching. He says that the inference of the students’ mother tongue accounts for a number of errors and difficulties that occur at the time of learning and afterwards in the use of the language. (more…)