ACQUIRING INTERNATIONAL INTELLIGIBILITY IN ENGLISH

ACQUIRING INTERNATIONAL INTELLIGIBILITY IN ENGLISH

            The English Language has become the richest and the most powerful language to enrich and empower any individual, a society or a nation. Developing countries struggle to teach quality English to their citizens. Developed countries like Chinese, Japanese and Russia vie with each other to make their people learn the language to promote their business and educational opportunities.

            Information Technology (IT) revolution has been creating new job opportunities like Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Services and Medical Transcription Services. These internet-based job opportunities are executed through the use of English.

            IT boom has become a boon to India and as a result our youngsters can get foreign job opportunities in India itself. Nevertheless, the lack of quality English education pulls them down and they remain jobless inspite of a number of job opportunities around them.

            Multi-National companies (MNCS) in India expect their employees to have an excellent listening and speaking skills. “Get trained; get placed!” has been the slogan of the Call Center and Medical Transcription Training Centres. They expect their employees to obtain International Intelligibility in English (IIE). Whereas the students at the school and college levels learn English only to read and write and memorize a few passages and forget them immediately. This type of rote learning and parrot learning of English spoil their future job opportunities.

            English is the language of the computer, e-learning and Internet learning. The students should be trained to the e-voice of the machine language. Today different types of English like, British English, American English, Cartoon English, e-English, etc. threaten the ordinary learners. Most of the Net based jobs are from America and hence our students should be given training to master the American English.

            According to the levels of school and college learning, Indian students possess three types of intelligibility in English.

They are the following :

1.    State Level Intelligibility (SLI)

2.    National Level Intelligibility (NLI)

3.    International Level Intelligibility in English (ILIE)

            All mother tongue medium students and the first generation learners learn English for more than twelve years. Inspite of learning for so many years, they are able to utter a few words in English with their friends and relatives. This may be described as “Good – morning” English. It is full of their mother influence. Their English is intelligible only in their state. These students are the majority in different parts of India. They remain unemployed or underemployed due to their lack of fluency in English.

            The second category of students are having the National Level Intelligibility in English (NLIE). All English medium and matriculation school students come under this category. These students learn their subjects in English and the constant exposure in English makes them fluent in English. This is an added advantage over the SLIE students. These second category of students speak English without fear but yet commit grammatical errors in English. Their English is not free from their mother tongue influence. They can comprehend the English spoken by other state students. Other state students can also understand their English. For these students INIE remains a dream.

            The third level of students are the most brilliant students coming out of the central schools like Kendriya Vidhyalayas, Navodhaya Vidhyalayas and International Residential schools. These students enjoy hi-hits in English and feel at home while watching any English movie. They can converse freely with any foreigner and their English can also be understood by foreigners. These students with ILIE obtain job opportunities very easily. Most of these students possess personal computers (PCS) with internet facilities owing to their English fluency, they resort to individual learning and go beyond their syllabus and improve their knowledge.

            What are the strategies to acquire ILIE? The first step should be to stop teaching English in Tamil. The English Teachers should be given training in ILIE. They should know that language is a habit, a skill and it has to be acquired by the students. Hence the prime duty of the teachers is to teach the students how to acquire the language in different ways.

            Spoken English is considered to be the school subject. But the practical life skills of listening and speaking in English are neglected at the school level. The school students should be taught to memorize some micro and macro dialogues useful in their life situations. To suit this purpose, the existing syllabus with essays, stories and poems has to be replaced by text books of micro and macro dialogues.

            The students must be trained to listen to radio and T.V. news bulletins and increase their own language skills. This practice will help them to overcome the problem of the lack of Native speaker’s model of English. The language teachers have to teach the mother tongue influence in mastering the second language.  The students must know that English is an unphonetic language whereas Indian languages are phonetic in nature. Indian languages are spoken with the speed of two to three syllables a second. Whereas English is spoken with the speed of five to six syllables a second. Another striking feature is that Indian languages are syllable-timed whereas English is a stress-timed language.

            Those who would like to obtain ILIE should memorize the forty four sound symbols. They have to pronounce the vowels and diphthongs correctly and keep the length of the diphthongs and long vowels in their speech. Correct stress of meaningful words and the use of weak forms for unstressed words will help the learners to get the necessary fluency to acquire ILIE.