A pesonal account of English Language aquisition

The following is an assignment that was submitted as part of the English language teaching paper. I remember it was about tracing the acquisition of English by each of the students. It is astonishing that after nearly a quarter century, I have very little to add or delete either the facts or the style.


ELT Assignment

English being never spoken at home, I consider it as a second language for me. As I feel that my case is a bit too different, this analysis of my learning of English would contain many things subjective; that is this analysis cannot be confined to the class room alone, though I have already stated that circumstances having had to go to six different schools until I reached 5th std, I think this shift of environment might have influenced me very much; though I cannot pin down in what manner or how.

As for my KG I cannot recall much. But as for the first std I remember a book in which appeared such characters as Mr. Bell and Mrs. Bell and their children john and Mary; and such sentences as john is Mary’s brother, Mary is John’s sister. John is taller than Mary etc. If I remember right these four characters appeared in the whole book. (I restrain myself from categorising this method adopted by the book , because I am not sure of the terms used; like grammatical, situational etc) KG and first std were done outside my state and where Hindi and English were predominantly used among the students and between the teacher and the student.

My parents returning to our own state, I found myself in a process of unlearning English and substituting with Malayalam (which rather was a painful experience) because our local school used Malayalam as a medium. Though in the subsequent years up to 5th std I did not learn English actively I tried to read the signposts (which gained me a slight superiority as English was the height of affluence among the desi companions) I was encouraged by my father and I was interested as well.

The dormant English helped me very much in getting an admission into an English Medium school when I reached 5th std. (My father being particular, I did not try to insist myself on Malayalam medium which was another option. The fifth std book was very elementary compared to my first standard and I found it very easy. There were names nouns against pictures later sentences against pictures depicting actions such as he is kicking a ball and later small photographs and little poems. The teacher used to read aloud and we used to repeat aloud . but I must not fail to mention that all explanation were in Malayalam.

Having covered this book much in advance our headmaster brought in 2 or three lessons from radiant readers in std V.

This improved the vocabulary and new methods of testing like fill in the blanks with the right words, with the opposite of the word and small question answers followed. There were also composition books in which we had to write paragraph on a festival or about our school and letters from 6th to 10th we had almost a consistent pattern in which list of vocabulary , grammar items and new usages preceded the actual reading passage followed by exercises. The teachers went on elaborately explaining meanings of words in isolation as well as in the context.
Grammar items and exercises also were done as per instructions . In the 8th standard a supplementary reader was introduced an abridged version of Huckleberry Finn and later in 10th Oliver Twist. This formed a separate paper as far as tests were concerned.

Methods f test included fill in the blanks with the right word, with the right preposition with the definite article, indefinite article , paragraph question based on the reading passage an din the second paper essay writing précis writing etc.


The main drawback of these years was that English was never spoken either among the students or between the teachers and the students. Such penalization as 25 paise for speaking in Malayalam in the campus miserably failed due to impracticality in enforcement.. I feel that teachers themselves are able to be in English without faltering.
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I must add that I was interested in English during these years partially because I had a faint superiority over the other s for a reason I mentioned earlier and partly because of my parent’s encouragement so much so that I became interested in some extra reading mostly abridged versions from Mc Millan’s stories to remember series, Readers’ Digest was another recourse.

But in my reading or writing I never paid conscious attention to grammar and punctuation. Nevertheless I could detect an error. In spite of this I could write fairly well without errors although I had little chance of speaking. If at all we spoke English it was by way of answers to questions which teachers asked ; a far removed exercise from everyday conversation and communication, which later proved to be a drawback for me as in discussion both formal and informal.

I must add that my English being mostly bookish I am at also for colloquial terms which impede smooth understanding of comparatively better speakers of English especially those who are born and brought up in cities and for whom English is more of a first language. And I sometimes have to endure such remark as you speak like a book.

Another impediment is the mockery at my accent (which was considerably improved in the opinion of my friends.) From other students. They , very few of them mock at the long o s which for them presumably is vulgar and awkward. This sometimes makes me self conscious and nervous in front of them.

But being newly exposed to the Tamil aaall India radio I feel it is no better or no worse than the long ool India radio similarly with pocket. Some Tamilan friends pronounce it as packit.

Leaving the digression let me come to my +2 days . in our system it is called pre degree and is the first two years in college (unlike in TN) is usually a period of sudden freedom and therefore much time id devoted to all activities other than studies. Nevertheless I stood first in English. The syllabus included books, essays, plays poetry and an abridged version of David Copperfield. Plus a little grammar We were to write essay and annotations for tests. Neither had we any oral tests.

Very few questions were asked in class. Lectures predominated teaching. Grammar was tested by giving a sentence and asking us to insert the preposition definite article of indefinite article in the right place etc.

I being particularly interested in English chose English Literature. But whether I still retain the liking for English lit as much as I do for English is doubtful. Although I have tried my hand at versification I have not yet had the courage to get hem published.

The roots of sociological imagination

How does one aquire a sociological imagination? By sociological imagination it is meant that one is able to conjure a picture of a byegone era or a separate people, based on some reading or some other understanding. During 1985-88 I was at LOYOLA COLLEGE, Madras doing English Language and Literature. One of the assignments was to write on Defoe's England.

Daniel Defoe wrote among others his most important novel Robinson Crusoe from which the character and his friend Friday gave the picturesque and immortal 'man friday' expression to the English language.Obviously it was the age of exploration on the high seas.

Years later in 1998 when in Bihar I told my mother on the hopelessness of certain groups of people there that back home in Kerala even the most downtrodden had some hope for their next generations whereas the same was hard to come by among those I found there.

Mother exclaimed at my thinking process and only then I realised that not all think the same way about the people around. I also realised that I was endowed with this thing called sociological imagination. Earlier I also had read a compendium by Amitai Etzioni in the Rajagiri Kalamassery library on sociological imagination.

I attribute the development of such from the English litetrature days as also the social science background of Rajagiri. Here is the assignment in full reproduced from the manuscript that I had preserved.

Defoe's England

The age of Daniel Defoe the great journalist, pamphleteer, poet and novelist is from 1660 to 1731. He was one of the greatest of English writers in whose works are clear, the social conditions of the early eighteenth century. Literally the age is often referred to as the Augustan age noted for refinement and classicism of the English literature.

This topic is a deeper study of the English society as depicted by the writers of England, especially Defoe.

The period is noted for its sense of man as a social being divinely intended to collaborate in a great task. The task special to the age was to live in widespread harmony, abjuring the hazards of war and fanaticism of the seventeenth century. By instinct and intention men strove for a perfect society pondering over the principles of a civilized community and hoped to extend the doctrines of sympathy on both a Christian and rational basis.


The tide of social sympathy yet did not bind the whole society in fraternity. There was much hardship and suffering and the clash of conflict in the early 18th century was less violent than the seventeenth century since the scheme of things was unrebelliously tolerated. Yet the age did something to put its thoughts to practice. The British combination of moral persuasion and practical energy turned towards a sensible society.

The belief was that Ggod had appointed the structure of society and that though the rich should ease the burden of the poor, poverty like pain and death was part of the mystery of creation. It was not hypocrisy. If God had created gradation of wealth he had ordained also the duty of labouring in one’s vocation and reach the highest level one can. The social conscience of the age was superficial, the debtors were brutally imprisoned, the mobs rioted when crops failed.

Poets journalists and novelists drew grim pictures of suffering. Yet with all the evils of the age it strove to become less brutal and gave to many the sense of strong humanity bearing good fruit in art, letters, philosophy and social life.

Life in London

London signified the growth and activity of capital, a channel of that full tide of existence, as Johnson puts it. Pastor Wendeborn’s praise of London goes thus:

‘There is no place in the world where a man may live more according to his own mind or even his own whim than London. For this reason I believe that in no place are to be found a greater variety of original characters. The friend of arts and science, the friend of religions, liberty the philosophers, the man who wishes to be secure against political and ecclesiastical tyrants, the man of business, the man of pleasure can nowhere be better off than in the metropolis’.

These kind of tributes prevail on the whole over objections to dirt, rowdyism and poverty. London had its perils as well. Thugs infested the city. They bludgeoned their victims by day in Fleet street and the Strand and lurked in Covent Garden piazzas to catch playgoers emerging from the theatres. At least one violent crime was presented in the journals in a week.

Defoe in his ‘tour through England’ got attracted by the city’s growth. Yet he spoke of a crisis that ‘the great and more eminent increase of buildings, about the city of London becoming streets, about the nobles becoming great.

The capital had about 500000 citizens in 1700. Its nearest competitors like Bristol and Norwich and Manchester and Liverpool were so small in the magnitude of population. Defoe was perturbed at times and this great and monstrous thing at times daunted him. London had grown greatly since the restoration and was encroached on the rural surroundings.

In the crowded city took place the Hogarthian comedy and tragedy with its unruly populace, its sewage and offal in the roads, cobbles slippery with mud, shop signs hiding the sky and cracking in the wind, young drunkards reeling , bailiffs dogging. Old strumpets plying, beggars scrounging, fat grey men squabbling, rascals rattling, pick pockets crowding, were not unfamiliar to that age.

By degrees the streets were widened, old houses demolished, creaking signs removed, illumination improved, cobbles and kennels changed for paving stones and gutters. Thus London was modernized in line with Paris.

The citizens could if Anglicans pray in the churches of Wren, Hawkmoor, Gibbs and the rest. Dissenters come close among a hundred or so meeting houses and they were humbler but more zealous than Anglicans. They were powerful in their speech, powers of oratory well chosen epithets, strong expressions desired with an audible voice.

One of the attractions was the pleasures of the pleasure gardens and coffee houses. It was indispensable not only to social life but to that kinship between literary men which comes form their recurrent dealings with the same material. Augustan social life was indispensable with coffee house. With the inn, the tavern and the club, this created much of the mental world in which literature lived and it contributed to advance conversation and friendship. The coffee houses though differentiated by social or professional distinction fertilized societies intermingling. There were many coffee houses for the different categories. Famous were Caraways, Jonathan’s and Turk’s head. Lloyd’s the Chapter, will’s Buttons’ Bedford’s Whites, St. James and so on. The ladies often counterpoised this male monopoly and they could prove that nature shared her intellectual gifts fairly between the sexes. Clubs were signs of a community conscious of similar tastes and ready semi formally to organize its growing sociability.


The life on the surface was deep, strong and dark in which many were immersed in a struggle for survival. The poor were remarkably law abiding.

Defoe at the time praised the Thames light men for their honesty. Violence was frequent though not as in Paris, a symptom of conditions which for the submerged tenth must have been all but unendurable and of which the general public was ignorant. Fielding expressed in his proposal for making an effectual provision for the poor says the sufferings of the poor are indeed less observed than their misdeeds not from any want of compassion but because they are less well known.

The slums were in poor disposition. Some were in the cells underground other people in their garrets half starved with both cold and hunger. The common objection was so wickedly false that they are poor only because they are idle.

Public dispensaries helped to some extent to improve the lot of the poor. Drunkenness was denounced by Defoe. Moreover, the tolerance to drunkenness was despised. In the true born Englishman Defoe says

Good drunken company is their delight
And what they get by day they spend by night
In English ale their engagement lies.
For which they all starve themselves and families
Slaves to the liquor, drudges to the pots
The mob are statesmen and their states men sits

The prison system was abominable and administrators of justice were erratic and sometimes execrable and the underworld lived under the threat of transportation. The state of the poor was entirely ignored though some underwent more real hardships in one day than the whole their lives.

In Boswell’s phrase London did indeed comprehend, the whole of human life in all its variety the comprehension of which is inexhaustible and the literature which kept most of it in view was by necessity robust.


Life in the country

What did the country mean to the Augustans? To most it meant a place to live and work in to improve and enjoy. From many sources comes the impression of a bucolic England with some mental vigour and with that steadily accepted relationship of classes which is typical of country society. As a whole, a desire to improve was widespread. The community was of good sense and character as reflected by Augustan writing.

Following the rise of the new rich was the decline of the new poor.

The whole country yet shined with a luster. To foreign men London was not like other countries but it was all a planted garden. The quality most cherished in the country was not its romantic grandeur but the beauty of its ordinary face which was distinguishable.

Though the country was beautiful it did not render everyone hale and jollity. A steady price rise made landowners richer and labourers poorer.

The country had an uncorrupted heart though men are generally bound to love the cities. As shebeare remarked good order and sobriety and honesty marked the village as against the anarchy, drunkenness and thievery of the town. (letters on the English nation).

Augustans took pleasure in the country though generally in its more cultivated aspects. The country presented other pleasures than landscapes like meditation and good living literature paintings and prints. They were interested in sports like hunting.

The country sides building reflected a general well being adopted new styles with such windows pediments and classical orders. The new houses as signs of a new way of life deserved the interest travelers took in them as symbols of social improvement.

Augustan provincial life had been little investigated yet evidence abounds that larger towns were organic centres and that country gentry as time went on hibernated in their neighboring metropolis.

Country folks to a Londoner’s eye were fair game uncouth addicts of dialects, ludicrous sports and superstitions. There was embarassing contrast between country’s hospitality with restraint of good town breeding . The men who could make a tolerable living from the land tended to be sturdy in character as well as physique, resourceful but not rash practical in opinion and settled in opinions seasoned by experience of the past busy in the present and looking towards an inscrutable bit not unfriendly future.

There was this sharp contrast between country folk from town bred people.

The Augustan sense of society, a complex and varied but marked with the unmistakable character is one of its best sources of strength. Though riddled with poverty and thievery the sense for improvement prevalent and this is represented through the works of contemporay writers. Defoe through Robinson Crusoe revealed the zest for survival common to the English which paved the way for the uplifting of the society from all of its drawbacks’.


References

The Augustan world – A R Humphreys
A History of Britain E H Carter and A F Mears

The mystery of a celebrated life

How life turns out

In 1993 I was for a brief time with the Pai and Co as an executive in their Trivandrum show room opposite the Ayurveda College. The showroom has since been demolished when the roads were widened. On an ordinary day my staff about five of them were hush hush and whispered to me Rajmohan Pillai, Rajmohan Pillai..., the brother of Rajan Pillai. Rajan Pillai was often in the media as a successful BUsinessman, Perhaps the only one from Kerala so well celebrated. He was a second or third generation businessman with a flamboyant lifestyle according to the media.

Rajmohan had a very close resemblance to his eleder brother Rajan almost ten years his senior. My curiosity was bordering on amusement.

In 1995 when I was in Bihar, the newspapers carried news of the untimely death of Rajan Pillai in unfortunate circumstances. He owned Brittannia at that time. My theorising at that time was not about the person but about the whole of Mallu community who in my opinion are incapable of the business world. The Mallu is too naive in a highflying business world, but more importantly there is a little bit of a communist in its essence of social justice, in every Keralite which makes him too less of a killer.

This looks a little contradictory since the idealogy in discussion swears by bloody revolution but here I am making a distinction between the essence of the ideology, social justice and the turn that it has taken in practice which is nothing short of sheer impractical rhetoric. Both ends have a bit of utopian naivete.

In September 2010, I had an opportunity to interact with Rajmohan Pillai when the Academic Staff College invited him along with two other entrepreneurs to be in a panel discussion on enetrepreneurship for the benefit of the participants of the 27th Refresher course in Commerce and Managament of which I was also a participant. I had asked him a question about managing a conglomerate since we knew as teachers what a conglomerate was. He gave a simplistic answer saying it is only a matter of a few more zeroes.

Saji, a participant asked me later about the answer not being to the query. I said I did not have an answer in my mind rather wanted to have a glimpse into his mind coz I could learn about Conglomerate, SBU and BCG matrix from textboks even otherwise but getting to know the thought process of an entrepreneur that too third generation or for that matter any one moving in a different circleis a rare stuff.

Rajmohan left a book 'A wasted death' about Rajan PIllai's life and death and I read it in one sitting on 17th Sept, 2010. What shook me most was the assertion that if Rajan had not fled Singapore, he would not have died of lack of medical attention in judicial custody. At the most he would have been convicted of a breach of some of the Singapore laws which he could have pleaded guilty and got out with a penalty of a few millions.

I visited the otehr Paico in Trivandrum statue jn, in the same month. I enquired about the old man Kamat who was manager at the showroom and had a mild heart attack while I was there. The kind of amiable person with little or no guile that he was, I expected that him to be long gone after leaving Paico. To my amazement I was told that he was doing well having become an LIC agent and his elder son was in England and his younger son was a teacher. He was doing good business and had become kodipathi many times ..... I wonder which is a celebrated life; Rajan Pillai's or Kamat's?...

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