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Difference Between Home Language and School Language B.ed Notes
The language used to educate children is referred to as a “school language.” It might be the mother tongue or any other language that the State has designated as the primary language of instruction. For instance, the J&K State has chosen Urdu as the major language of instruction since it serves as a lingua franca or link language between Jammu, Ladakh, and Kashmir, which are home to the three distinct languages of Kashmiri, Bodhi, and Dogri (Jammu).
As a result, Urdu replaces English as the second language in these areas. However, English is the language of teaching in the Kindergarten education system, demoting Urdu to the third spot. Since the second or third language should not be the language spoken at home, educational institutions must educate students in these languages using a specific curriculum (syllabus) and teaching approach.
The acquisition of a mother tongue or home language is easier than learning a second language. We don’t need a tutor or a textbook to learn our mother tongue or L1. We experience it as we physically mature, and by five years we are proficient language users. However, to teach a second or third language at various stages of school, you need teachers, textbooks, teaching materials, and aides.
What part does classroom instruction play in the acquisition of a second language? This topic is up for debate. Stephen Krashen, a practising teacher and theoretician from California, thinks tutoring has little impact on learning a second language. For toddlers or adults to “take up” a language on their own, he supports the development of language through conversation.
He claims that learning serves as an editor to fix any grammatical flaws that the learner may encounter when talking, but this shouldn’t be done frequently because it reduces fluency. It is crucial that the instructor see the students as active participants and gives them the freedom to “research, develop, and enhance their notions rather than merely express them.” The student could become excessively passive and reliant on the teacher if language usage is promoted in the classroom or provided time to be used for communication.
Older methods of teaching second languages (Methods of teaching) placed too much focus on the language’s structure and disregarded its communicative side (sending meaning and messages across). Modern approaches, in particular Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), place more of a focus on the student than the teacher. It asks that classroom instruction be less teacher-dominated and more student-centred (also known as learner-centred). The teacher must still be there as the manager, monitor, helper, and knowledgeable person who understands how to promote the learning of the second language virtually in the same way as the first or home language. This does not render the teacher unimportant in any way.
