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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mag123" data-source="post: 20181562" data-attributes="member: 73975"><a href="http://www.sundaytimes.lk/010311/plus3.html" target="_blank">http://www.sundaytimes.lk/010311/plus3.html</a>Ups and downs of a trail blazer in the English language Book Review A Bilingual English Course: English Through Controlled Use of Sinhala - by Dr. D. Walatara.No other English textbook was besieged by such intense controversy and bitter recrimination as Dr. Douglas Walatara's "Reconstruction" text book, which he produced under the auspices of the Secondary Education Division of the Ministry of Education in the late sixties. It broke new ground and was based on years of experimentation when Walatara was lecturer in English at the Government Training College, where he spent decades training and, more importantly, educating teachers of English. Waltara called his new method of teaching English the "Reconstruction Method", which was a commonsense approach to taking English to rural children whose exposure to English was minimal or totally absent except within the four walls of the English classroom presided over by a teacher who had learnt English as a foreign language, and for whom it was foreign!Walatara designed his down to earth approach to help the rural learner reach the unknown language (English) through the known languages (Sinhalese and Tamil). "From the known to the unknown" and "from the immediate to the distant" are time honored principles of imparting new knowledge and skills. Would it be possible to offer rural children an opportunity to acquire an acceptable degree of English proficiency in their rural setting? Walatara's "Reconstruction Approach" was an exciting, trailblazing answer to the problem. Rural English teachers and their pupils lapped it up fervently. "Reconstruction" is a simple technique. Pupils are presented with a Sinhala/Tamil passage which they are required to "reconstruct" in simple English. This is followed by copious structural drills, at the end of which pupils master a given set of English structures beginning with the simple present tense verb forms.Most unfortunately, however, when the book was published and ready for distribution among schools, it was disposed of into limbo with scant regard for the time, labour and cost spent on it. Walatara however did not renounce his faith in the efficacy of his method. He went on to publish his book at his own expense and used it in several institutes where he and some of his former faithful students taught English under his guidance such as at the Sri Lanka Institute of Development Administration, the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Education, several state corporations, the Department of Wildlife (under the GEF project of the World Bank), the Postgraduate Institute of Management, the Colombo North Medical School, private companies and in the schools where his University of Peradeniya Bachelor of Education students did their teaching practice. The response to his material and method was both favourable and encouraging."Reconstruction" was both a success and a failure: a success because it was a single man's effort to deliver a meaningful English teaching programme to students who did not have the privilege of an exposure to English and a failure because it was ruthlessly denied the patronage of the Ministry of Education because of the wicked machinations of mice and men."And now after several makeshift editions of the book on Walatara's own steam, one of his former GTC teacher trainees A. K. Hewage has published a reorganised version of the book with an attractive cover, under the title of "A Bilingual English Course".The demerits of the book, nevertheless, need to be mentioned not in a spirit of criticism, but because there is always room for improvement, where 'tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection". One glaring weakness is the plethora of typos that deface what is in many ways a good publication. An errata sheet is not the best thing for students to see at the beginning of a textbook! Neither does it cover the entire rash of errors that sully the book: spelling errors such as grammar and incorrect punctuation and run on words such as "Give the poor man a drink of whisky" a little ladysaid', omission of whole sentences, and even misquotations. The correction sheet does not even give the correct page on which some of these errors occur. For second language learners this is a major worry, annoying and distracting. Dr. Walatara must not take all the blame for the many errors in his book, but his publisher must. One wishes that before the rural second language learner picked up the errors that abound in the book, they would be corrected - in the interests of professionalism, if of nothing else.By C.N.S.</blockquote>

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