Teachers lack skills for language problems

Most teachers are trying their best, but unfortunately they may lack the requisite skills to deal with the language problems in their classes.

This may be due to the training they have received, to the teacher trainers they were exposed to, or to the strategies they employ in their teaching.

Firstly, many teachers who have taken English at the university level may have been exposed largely to literatures in English, and not to language courses or the teaching of English. They are therefore not quite equipped to deal with the severe language problems, emanating not only from our bilingual situation but from our lack of reading.

Secondly, many teacher trainers might be under the impression that student-teachers who have passed English at the Caribbean Examinations Council and the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examinations levels have no need for any further grounding in the mechanics of the language.

But my own observation of student- teachers has revealed that they have serious problems with the basics of the language, eg punctuation — use of full stops, commas, capitals, and apostrophes.

Other grammar problems such as subject-verb agreement, modifiers, and sentence fragments are quite common throughout the system.

Finally, we may need to examine the strategies employed by teachers in the teaching of English.

Many teachers teach students the way they themselves were taught — through the textbook.

Language studies have therefore been removed from everyday communicative experience and from the notion that we need language in order to survive.

It is only when teachers see language as the tool we use in understanding and expressing ourselves that it will become meaningful to them and their students.

Dr Patrick Quan Kep via email