One on English: a Letter from the Daydreamer

Dear Richie,

I hope you are alive. Like every other Friday, I was anticipating your usual text announcing that you have published another article. Quite a feat for a medical doctor, I must say. Some of us whose bread is 'won' in related fields our pens are becoming dusty. Not that we do not have ideas to write about, but this 'bread winning' game is taking most of our precious time, leaving us completely battered that the pen is too heavy to lift. From past experience, I could tell it's either that your sorry gadget was misbehaving, or today's 'doctoring' could not let you have time to tell us one of those random thoughts playing gendaball in your mind (there is a new game in town, gendaball, invented by Malawians. I am hoping maybe this one we can be world number one, after all it's our own creation. But we'll talk about that another day).

If I didn't know you that personally, I could have thought wagoba mafulasi after getting your MSCE results. I could have understood you, most people are very frustrated right now. For the first time since I started following these things, there is no one who has scored 6 points. The examination administration gurus have told us that, in summary, this is as a result of poor performance in English.

Personally, this is no surprise to me. We keep claiming that English is not the measure of one's intelligence. Now look at the MSCE situation. No one has 6 straight points because no one scored a 1 in each and every subject including English. Those who did, the highest they got was probably a 2. At least it has shown that it is a measure of something, probably not necessarily intelligence.

For a long time, I have been observing the trends the Queen's language is going through. I suppose you have heard about, or even chanced one or two people who did not go beyond the old time's Standard 6. If you compare those people and how a Form 4 student of these days writes or speaks English, you would really appreciate how much the graph has tipped.

These days you find even a graduate who can barely speak two consecutive sentences in English without scampering for extra vocabulary. Many of us sound like that guy who calls himself Mr Broken English. I find it a lame excuse when people say English is not a measure of one's intelligence. Whether it is a measure or not, it is not reason enough to run away from learning it properly and mastering it.
In my line of duty, I often become a fly on the wall in different gatherings. Just this week I found myself in a very high profile gathering where one of the participants was also lamenting about deteriorating levels of English. This lady, a former academician herself, was challenging fellow academicians to take deliberate efforts in ensuring that the teaching and learning of English is resuscitated.

This got me thinking: who is to blame? Student? Teachers? Policy makers? I feel everyone, even myself, should take a fair share of the blame. Thanks to the world's advancement in various technologies, students these days are so obsessed with games, social networks, and such other stuff. Gone are the days when students could boast amongst themselves about how many novels they have read. These days you would rarely find students who have time for novels that are not part of their academic prescription. Students prefer to use their free time, which is usually any time they are not in class, to waste time on Facebook and Whatsapp or in various cubicles they have turned into music studios. If not, then they are in one of these shacks showing Ackila movies, treating themselves with the now popular Chichewa translated movies.

Language acquisition, my language specialists tell me, doesn’t only dependent on what you learn in class. In class we get the grammar and all that technical stuff about language, but it is through hearing and reading that we get to learn most of the vocabulary and usage. I do not think the Facebooks and Whatsapps of this day are helping matters. I mean, with the heavy usage of contractions and emojis, and of course message forwarding, we are fast losing the grammar and vocabulary. In the end we are all speaking like Mr Broken English. Even when we attempt to text in English it is so flabbergasting.
I can also blame the teachers for not being as vigilant as they need to be. There are schools that take special initiatives to promote spoken and written English. I would be mean if I can’t commend their efforts. But then there are some teachers that when you listen to them speak or read the English they have written, you wonder what kind of English would their student speak or write. You remember that letter supposedly from a headmaster of a secondary school that made rounds on various social networks? You remember that school which boasted of teaching a British syllabus yet their poster was a defilement of the language of the Britons? These are just tips of the iceberg, but some of these teachers themselves struggle to find appropriate verbs and adjectives.

And for the policy makers. I wonder which devil commands them to be changing syllabi like they are changing diapers of a baby with diarrhoea. If you have been observant enough, you’ll find that some of the elements they put into or remove from the syllabus do not deserve to be inserted or removed. Maybe am just a layman, but these other things do not require rocket science expertise to understand. Of course, I would commend them for coming up initiatives such as the National Reading Programme which seeks to promote reading culture among students.

In all this kulubwalubwa the point I am trying to make is that as we are putting more effort in other subjects, we should surely think about English. You see, Richie, from Standard 5 to whatever education level we get to, the language of instruction is English. We can’t run away from it, we are Anglophone. Our official language is said to be English (though Chichewa and Tumbuka are also mentioned sometimes). The situation is so bad that even journalists, those we thought could be custodians of proper English, are busy besmirching it on radio, television, and sometimes even in the papers. At the rate we are going, we will soon be embarrassing ourselves like that footballer on some foreign television channel several months ago. We can do better, and we surely need to do better. And maybe not too good as our dear Minister of Information whose interview he did with BBC in English had a voice over in English too!

Koma kodi ukwatira liti? Ukuwachedwetsa ana ku sukulutu! Komanso achina ABJ Junior akufunikira amnzawo oti adzicheza nawo.

Kindest regards,

The Daydreamer.