THREE LANGUAGE FORMULA

THREE LANGUAGE FORMULA

Language is not only a rule-governed system of communication but also a phenomenon that to
a great extent structures our thought and defines our social relationships in terms of both power
and equality. The speed with which normal children become linguistically proficient in not just one
but often several languages by the time they are three years old shows that we are probably born
with an innate language faculty. All specific linguistic development is, of course, socio-culturally
mediated, and every individual successfully creates a repertoire of multiple registers to negotiate a
variety of social encounters. It is indeed a pity that educational planners and language policy
makers are not able to capitalise on this innate potential of the child. In a country like India, most
children arrive in schools with multilingual competence and begin to drop out of the school
system because, in addition to several other reasons, the language of the school fails to relate to
the languages of their homes and neighbourhoods. Most children leave schools with dismal levels
of language proficiency in reading comprehension and writing skills, even in their own native
languages. In addition to a variety of socio-political reasons that adversely impinge upon our
educational system in general, some reasons that are primarily responsible for these low levels of
proficiency include: lack of any understanding about the nature and structure of language and the
processes of language teaching-learning, particularly in multilingual contexts; acute failure on the
part of educational planners to appreciate the role of language across the curriculum in contributing
towards the construction of knowledge; not paying enough attention to the fact that a variety of
biases, including caste, race, and gender, get encoded in language; inability to appreciate the fact
that language consists of much more than just poems, essays, and stories; unwillingness to accept
the role of languages of the home and neighbourhood in cognitive growth and failure to notice
that cognitively advanced language proficiency tends to get transferred across languages. It is
becoming increasingly clear that linguistic diversity is as important for our survival as biodiversity.
It is imperative that we make provisions for education in the mother tongue(s) of the children
and train teachers to maximise the utilisation of the multilingual situation often obtaining in the
classroom as a resource. Recent research has demonstrated the positive correlation between
multilingual language proficiency and academic achievement. It has also shown that multilingualism
leads to greater cognitive flexibility and social tolerance. What we need to do is to ensure
comprehensible input in anxiety-free situations and make every possible effort to eliminate caste,
colour, and gender bias. Unless the educational planners pay attention to language across the
curriculum in all its dimensions, the goals of equity, justice, and democracy may remain distant
dreams. Our recommendations in Chapter 10 should be seen in the above context and in the
context of our proposals (Appendix III) about languages in the school curriculum.