The early literacy curriculum must stay close to what a child already knows, and speaks.
But the issue is not one of vocabulary. The challenge here is getting children’s minds to develop a relationship with text in the first place; to see text as something that has meaning, the way eyes makes sense of the physical environment, and ears make sense of speech. To accomplish this, early literacy curriculum must stay close to what a child already knows, and speaks. But presently, this is not the case. What exists today is a highly refined curriculum that subverts the orality of children, and prevents them from seeing print as a reliable interlocutor of their thoughts and ideas.
There is another issue in the way language in the school curriculum is presented. Most Indian language instruction rides on a sequential presentation of consonants, with vowels making an entry somewhere later in Grade I. The issue with this method is that it is not in sync with how children speak or understand language.
Researchers of the LiRIL study analysed state curriculum in Marathi and Kannada, and report the following: “Commonly used words in the child’s oral language naturally include vowels (for example, from Kannada—hesaru [name], mane [house], nanage [me])—and conjunct consonant sounds (amma [mother], nimma [your], akka [sister]). However, the early words presented in the activity cards and workbooks consist largely of rhythmic words (gara-gara, sara-sara) or sanskritised words (arasa [king] or bharani [pot]). This is because these words are easier to write in the local script than more commonly used words; for instance, salaga (tusker) is easier to spell than aane (elephant) and therefore students are made to learn the word salaga.”
The researchers found that about 80 percent of the words presented in the activity cards during the beginning of Grade I were unlikely to be in the spoken vocabulary of children in Karnataka. A telling instance is excerpted from the report below:
photo of conversation in a classroom from the report
Here, one can argue that the teacher also defaults to repetition as a method for re-teaching. But, without knowing the links between language and literacy, or having a curriculum that supports progressive instruction, teachers continue to operate in a rote and repetitive mode. For teacher training to be better informed, curriculum reform is necessary.
Curriculum, context, and culture
A final point around curriculum pertains to its engagement with the context in which it exists. Western research shows that poor readers struggle to connect the text they are reading with their own lives. Indian readers, in contrast, tend to connect text unexpectedly with their lives.
In a text engagement exercise with a Grade III student in Yadgir block, Yadgir district, Karnataka, the authors of LiRIL experienced the following:
Researcher: So now what will happen? Will the rats go to the feast?
Child: The rats will go.
Researcher: Why?
Child: You invite us for dinner, we will come, na? Like that.
Another one from a Grade III student in Wada block, Palghar district, Maharashtra:
In The Catty Ratty Tale, the cats decide to start singing so that all the cats know it is time to attack the rats.
When the cat starts to sing the child is asked:
Q: Why are the cats singing?
A: Because it is Ganapati (puja).
There can be many theories for why poor children give tangential responses to questions that require them to analyse text. One point of view is that children get limited opportunities in school to talk about their thoughts and ideas, so when researchers come to classrooms and create that space, children optimise it by talking about their life.
Early grade curriculum needs to be designed as a bridge between children’s spoken language and the text they are expected to start reading.
The other, more ironic take, can be borrowed from a presentation by former NCERT director Krishna Kumar, who remarks about the disconnect between text and meaning for most ordinary (poor) Indians. Every day, children in India grow up seeing human behaviour in contradiction with the written word. Men publicly urinate on the sign ‘yahaan peshaab karna mana hai’ (‘It is forbidden to urinate here’); garbage piles around places where ‘do not litter’ is written. Unable to discredit their lived experience, children discredit text as a source of information. When questions based on text are asked, children respond by pulling from common sense or what they already know. Whatever be the reason, this fractured relationship between children and reading needs addressing.
To strengthen children’s engagement with literature, early grade curriculum needs to be designed as a bridge between children’s spoken language and the text they are expected to start reading. For this, more classroom time should be allocated for activities like storytelling, show-and-tell, poetry, and unstructured conversation. Needless to say teachers would also have to be orientated on better approaches for language learning as well.
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf.
Indian languages are classified as alpha-syllabaries where they operate both at the alphabet (phoneme) level and the syllable level. (LiRIL, p. 16)
Maatras can be seen as loosely similar to accents in the Roman script.
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