With great interest I read the recent article by Evarist Bartolo in The Times of Malta on the decline in English in schools. The Education Minister, not surprisingly, deplores this fact in no uncertain way. In fact, it should not only be the concern of our dear Education Minister but of each and every one of us, both the educated classes and the uneducated.
The educated classes, and thank God that includes me as a past teacher, are the lucky ones – at least in my time – to have been given the opportunity of learning three languages, the emphasis being put on Maltese and English, at high school with, one must say, equally fruitful results. All those that emigrated or went abroad to continue their studies gained prominence as they were accepted with open arms.
The social reality was that while Maltese was on the syllabus of private schools, it was overshadowed by a strong emphasis on English being spoken at all costs, even among the students. Speaking English came more naturally to us because we heard it spoken by foreigners, while Maltese – being a Semitic language – was more difficult to read and write. In the sphere of tourism, it became imperative to be able to speak English.
This is where the uneducated classes both employed and unemployed, in tourism especially, had to resort to their knowledge of English to the detriment of Maltese. Those that shed their Maltese for English did so out of sheer laziness and a whole new dialect became the norm. The outcome of this is still with us. A child saying: “Ejja ha naraw il-fish,” or a mother telling her five-year-old – as she left him alone in the car: “Don’t touch my parts”, (referring to the steering wheel) are now the norm. This neglect of good colloquial English is quite rightly a worry.
On the other hand, children who were spoken to in Maltese at home did not have this problem. Maltese came easily to them. They had a solid background in a difficult language that enabled them, like other bilingual and multilingual children, to retain their native language. As the Minister quite rightly stated: “It is the adults who mess things up”. In fact, it is the semi-educated who, in trying to help their children speak English, do so to the detriment of Maltese.
Our Minister’s vision of developing the English language and cognitive skills of children at kindergarten level is an idea that has been practised from the start with the chants of children. We are not behind in any of this in the realm of pedagogy, because books written in English, such as The Lore and Language of School Children by Iona and Peter Opie and R.A. Close, have inspired new writers in this field, yet these efforts have remained buried, unpublished and unnoticed.
My letter in The Sunday Times of 3 March 1991, entitled Why Grammar? deploring the suppression of grammar in schools and bewailing the fact that children have not inherited our wealth of language, did not seem to realise that even native speakers of English have been deploring the absence of a sound grounding in grammar. The question now is not “Why Grammar?” but “How Grammar?” New methodologies began being resurrected. Essential Grammar in Use by Raymond Murphy rapidly established itself as a bestselling title. Having in my possession English as a Foreign Language by R.A. Close, I succeeded in writing Lucid English, based on this book, teaching the rules of the verb system to teachers by the use of diagrams.
Towards this end, I approached Cambridge University Press, which respectfully gave me permission to adopt diagrams in the proposed book restricted to the local Maltese market. Lucid English overlaps substantially with our recently published Essential Grammar in Use. Lucid English is still on my bookshelves, unpublished. It is earmarked for teaching the rules of grammar on television or elsewhere.
Doris Vella Camilleri