6 AM Pacific

English Medium Education Can Lead to Poorer English

Giridhar Rao has a new essay out From Mother Tongue to Many Tongues which makes two interesting points

One that English medium education can lead to “poor educational outcomes”

“It is now well established that when a child begins learning in his or her first language that child is more likely to succeed academically and is better able to learn additional languages.”

I blogged about this in my post More English and More Non-English.

But the other interesting point made is that English medium education can lead to general “language impoverishment”. (L2 here is English and L1 is the mother tongue.)

Starting L2 as early as possible, and teaching as much of the curriculum as possible through the L2 does not result in effective or widespread L2 acquisition. At best, this results in “subtractive bilingualism”: an L2 acquired at the expense of L1. Most often, the result is simply language impoverishment; not being able to use either L1 or L2 adequately.

The essay cites many references. Please go read it if you can.

The second point, that an early start or transition to English medium education, can actually lead to communicating in all languages poorly, including English, is counter intuitive and some of you may disagree with it just based upon your own personal experience or the people you know. But I would argue that the readers of this blog likely had a privileged environment – exposure to English at home and with friends early on etc. – or may have been gifted enough to overcome the disadvantage. So you are not exactly a random sample of India’s population.

Across the cross section of India, I think English medium education works to disperse educational outcomes. For a small minority, it results in better English skills but no better general educational outcomes. This small minority, who have an “English friendly” environment, an English medium education poses no hurdle, or a very small one. But the rewards are linked to opportunities in the global marketplace for higher education and jobs, including the export oriented service industries in India.

For the large majority, however, according to the research, English medium education works differently and leads to poorer educational outcomes and poorer language skills. If this is the case, it must be a matter of great concern to education administrators.

Whether there is language impoverishment in India compared to other countries, is a tough question to answer. In the companies I have worked in, American employees in the same role have uniformly had better English skills than Indian employees. But language impoverishment would imply that the English skills of the American employees were better than the Mother Tongue skills of Indian employees, which I wouldn’t know. My guess is they are.

Make Work Homework

A few years ago my son who is now in middle school got some vocabulary homework for English. It was a pretty long list of words. He was supposed to write the meaning of each word and then use it in a sentence. And then, get this, draw or download a picture from the internet that illustrates the word. The homework took thrice as long as it would have without the illustrations.

Now if you think about it, if the child has learnt to use the word in a sentence, there is little value in an illustration. Especially, since most of the words pertained to intangible things like “blatant”. If it were an art class I can still see some value in an exercise where students reflect and then draw a picture depicting “blatant”. But not for 50 such words and not for an English class.

There is a phrase for this kind of work. Its called “Make Work”. Basically teachers are giving homework just to make up the 3 hours or whatever of homework they need to give per day. Like many issues, there is economics behind Make Work Homework.

Public schools and most private schools in the US have a student-teacher ratio that has gotten higher and higher over time. Obviously, there are cost reasons for this. The primary driver of cost efficiencies in a school is the average number of students in a class.

A teacher spends time on preparing for class, grading homework and other small activities. The time required for preparing for class does not vary by the number of students in class. It also goes down with experience. But grading homework varies directly with the number of students. And it can add up to quite a lot of work. If the teacher is hard pressed for time, she can’t reduce the amount of homework given to students. But she can give the kind of homework that takes less time to check. The example I cite above is exactly that kind of homework – with asymmetric workloads for student and teacher.

I believe this is the root cause of Make Work Homework. It takes a lot of time for the student to draw an illustration and very little to eyeball it while grading. This asymmetry works in favor of the teacher. She can give the prescribed amount of homework and still keep her grading workload low.

This is not to say that anything requiring an illustration is Make Work. Not at all. Sometimes it is absolutely necessary. Visual learning can be very powerful. And sometimes it can be justified with the argument that children learn in different ways and at different paces. What may seem like gratuitous drawing and coloring to one student may be essential reinforcement of what is being taught in class for another student.

But a lot of what passes as homework for our children, is the product of a teacher trying to reduce his workload.

Career Advice to the IIM Ahmedabad Graduating Class

Last week I was at IIM Ahmedabad for my 20 year reunion. For two days and three nights we had non-stop fun reliving all the special memories from our times at IIM. Reunions, some say, can be quite a let down. Your classmates and you went down different walks of life, they’ll say, and you don’t quite have that connection anymore. Our reunion was, if possible, even better than the high expectations we came with. The reconnection was instant, as if no time had gone by. Needless to say, a good time was had by all.

During one of the few serious sessions on campus, we talked to some of the current PGPs and PGP Xs about careers and career choices. (PGP is the Post Graduate Program, which is the regular two year MBA. PGP X is a 12 month program akin to an Exec MBA). Given how bleak the job scene out there looks, and how concerned the students were, I thought I’d do a post for IIM A students graduating this year or the next. More »

Trip to IIM Ahmedabad

Last weekend I made a trip to my alma mater – IIM Ahmedabad. Prof. Arvind Sahay who teaches Marketing and is the Chairman of the PGP X program, invited all the entrepreneurs from my batch (and his). Ten entrepreneurs from PGP 89 came to campus and participated in various classes, panel discussions and presentations. It was great fun. With hugely successful entrepreneurs like Sanjeev Bikhchandani (naukri.com), R. Subramanian (Subhikhsa) and Rahul Bhasin (Barings Pvt. Equity) in the class, the students got a massive dose of ‘from the horse’s mouth’. More »

My Government School

I grew up in a small town called Hisar in Haryana. My father was a Professor at Haryana Agricultural University and I did most of my schooling at Campus School. As the name suggests, the school was meant for the children of University staff.

I left Hisar after my 10th boards. On trips back to Hisar to see family I would drop in for a chat with my school teachers. Then my family left Hisar and I never went back until recently the internet brought some of my old school mates together. On this trip to India I went back to Hisar and to Campus School after more than 20 years. It was quite a trip down memory lane. More »

Back to school

I am on a trip to India. We just closed our funding. Now the action in India is going to be thick as we build our team in Mumbai. The quality of people we hire is going to be the single most important determinant of our success. And so the opportunity to go talk to students at the premier business school in the country was almost impossible to turn down.

One of us was invited to go talk to a forum at IIM Ahmedabad that comprises of students interested in startups. Either doing a startup or joining one. Since I was in Mumbai and this was over the weekend, I decided to go as well. I hadn’t been there for over 10 years (I graduated in 1989) and needed just an excuse to visit the alma mater.

I went there with some trepidation. IIM A is not known to produce your entrepreneurial sort. Most students have little or no work experience, and perhaps rightly so, seek to get some. And there are all kinds obscenely high-paying jobs in India and abroad in investment banking, management consulting and other spheres that are just waiting to be landed.

I was pleasantly surprised by the turn-out. There were about 40 students from both PGP I and II (first year and second year). They were engaged and had good questions. In the break I learnt that many of them were choosing not to take up jobs but instead start a new venture immediately. I thought that was just great.

I also caught up with Prof. Arvind Sahay who teaches Marketing at IIM A. Arvind and I were in the same graduating class from IIM A. Since then he had done a Ph.D from UT Austin and had taught for a while at London Business School. Next stop – Ahmedabad. It seems many Indians abroad who are doing well in academia are heading back to quality institutions like IIM A. Arvind reeled off an impressive list of recent hires. This is great news. The 1990s weren’t the most exciting times for IIM A. Now a new generation of faculty is injecting much needed change. There are new courses, new programs (like the PGP Ex on the lines of ISB) and a lot of investment in the right things. The new campus is still not done but it looks quite impressive. Different architectural theme from the old campus, but retains some of the old flavour.

It felt good to go down memory lane a bit too. For those in the know, the magic of Louis Kahn Plaza at night does not diminish with time.