English Language Teaching in its Social Context

ETHNOGRAPHY OF A SRI LANKAN CLASSROOM 219Students also resisted the active use of English as a medium for instruction or interactionin the classroom. During the first week when I asked students to introduce themselves inEnglish by making use of simple syntactic structures 1 had written on the board, they simplygiggled and found it embarrassing to do so. Students responded inTamil even though I usedEnglish for questions, commands, and explanations, whether in formal or informalsituations. Thiru displayed the most paralyzing sense of inhibition. It was simply impossiblefor him to produce a single word of English from the textbook or by himself. The longmoments of silence would become embarrassing as the class waited patiently for Thiru toopen his mouth when his turn came to do an exercise or read a passage orally. AlthoughThiru was very voluble in class in Tamil about matters related to university policies andregulations, in English he was simply tongue-tied.Much of the stress seemed to result from the implications of English for the identityand group solidarity of the students. A particularly trying time was the correction ofpronunciation as required by the textbook. BecauseTamil lacks syllable-initial fricatives, thestudents pronounced he and she as /ki/ and /si/. The discomfort of the students in myrepeated attempts to correct such pronunciation was explained by their later commentsthat revealed their awareness of such pronunciation being identified as “nonstandard” SriLankan English. These students had been the target of insults by middle-class speakers of“educated” Sri Lankan English. Not only pronunciation but the very language was a classmarker. Supendran said that he simply avoided contexts in which students (from “betterbackgrounds”) used English with him because he felt that they were flaunting theirknowledge of the language in order to make him look ignorant. English then providedunfavorable subject positions to such students, making them feel disadvantaged, helpless,inferior, and uneducated. Students also felt that the use of English for interactions wouldbe interpreted by their peers as an attempt to discard their local rural identity and pass offas an anglicized bourgeois or even a foreigner. It was probably for this reason that in thequestionnaire, although 50% stated that they would use English “with a foreigner who alsoknew Tamil,” all except one rejected the possibility of using English “with aTamil who alsoknew English.”The conflicts English created for the representation of their identity become moreexplicit in the conversation pieccs students had to role-play in each unit. Students typicallyuttered their parts in a flat reading intonation when they were asked to dramatize thedialogue in front of the class. My model renditions with an eye for realism only increasedtheir inhibition. Students said that it was “funny” or “unbecoming of themselves” to speakin such manner. It soon became apparent that the discourse behind these dialogues was itselfso alien to these students that they had difficulty entering into the roles specified. One suchconversation was between Joe and Susan in Unit 4d while they budgeted their weeklyexpenses: Joe’s casual remark that he has to hold a party soon for 35 people in his office tocelebrate h s promotion irks Susan because of insufficient notice and the amount of additionalexpenses involved when they have just purchased a new house. When, as usual, studentsfound it difficult to imaginatively enter into the situation, I tried to construct local situationswhere such dialogue could be expected to occur. Students however pointed out that thegenre of “money talk” or “budgeting conversation” was alien to their peasant background.“We spend as we earn,”according to one student, was their lifestyle. Even the consumerism,thrift, delayed gratification, and drive for social mobility assumed by the conversation turnedout to be alien. It was not surprising then that such role-playing exercises were purely ofacademic interest to them and, therefore, nothing better could be employed for these otherthan the reading intonation for descriptive prose. Indran’s notes in his notebook at the endof the class were a telling comment on his attitude to the exercise. He had simply jotted