Modern Media A Tool

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

ABSTRACT

This paper looks at the modern media to find out some innovative techniques for English language teaching. I discuss the importance of media with a new perspective presenting it as a tool for English language learning. Proper use of the strategy must be taken care in this regard for its implementation. The wide spread of media, the multilinguality of Indian students, and the need of globalization promote English language to the pinnacle, but also develop the need of new teaching styles and pedagogies that can impart knowledge and reduce learners’ feeling of burden towards a new language as well. These techniques should be dynamic so that it can be handled with less mental energy. Media, especially the news media, is the part of everyone’s daily life, and I reflect on some aspects of news media as the effective way of English learning avoiding the mental pressure of the students. It can be used as a modern pedagogy where learning happens naturally. This paper brings out the consequences of technology for language learning.

Keywords: Discourse, English language, Intercultural Communication, Media, Pedagogy, Technology.

MEDIA AS A LENS

Institutions’ strong aspects are frequently spread through the discourse of their members. We just need to think of the new media in this respect. The electronic media, also known as ‘new media’, of the modern time is certainly different from ‘old’ printing media as it makes available on a mass scale forms of knowledge which are not necessarily encodable in written language (R. Amritavalli 1995) [i] . We are currently living in a proliferating image and media culture in which new technologies are changing every dimension of life from the economy to personal identity. In a postmodern media and computer culture, fresh critical strategies can be found to encourage the researchers of ELT (English Language Teaching). Today, media that promote globalization, digital technologies, and an unrestrained market society is becoming prevailing ideas, and fortunately is largely reflected through English.

Media is ordinary, a familiar part of everyday life, yet its special artifacts are extraordinary, helping people to see and understand things they’ve never quite perceived, like certain novels or films that change one’s view of the world. There is no pure entertainment that does not contain representations and in a dominant media culture, we get the boon of reading and watching most of the things in English, willingly or unwillingly, which helps us a lot to create an atmosphere of English among the people whose native language is not English. Today it is not the only function of the media to amuse, entertain, and inform, but also to impart education and information in a specific way making it clear that media serves the ends of a dominant elite. This approach enjoins seeing communication as a locus of cultural milieus between different groups who have the power to provide and promote and who have the need to acquire it. Hence, particular cultural artifacts and practices help us in order to ensure smoother understanding and interpretation. The situation of English teachers in today’s world in the country like India is not what it used to be in eighteenth or nineteenth century where only the elite class and students could have its access. A number of computing tools have been developed by leading MNCs to facilitate the learning of other branches as computers and technology, but the accuracy, relevance, and utility is questionable as before. Therefore, English comes out to be the only successful language for media. The moment is worth-mentioning when Google Hindi Translation was tested after it came in the market. With childlike curiosity I typed a sentence in Hindi to see its English translation. Result was unexpected too-with childlike accuracy. It was a mentionable achievement for computing machine though. The sentence was "Rɑm ɑm kʰɑtɑ hɛ" which simply translates into "Ram eats a mango". However, the result was "Ram is a general account". It revealed the fact that it’s really difficult to teach machine the semantics and relevance of a culture in some time.

If we agree with the opinion of Marx in Selsam and Martel (1987) [ii] , the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. English in the world of Media has the means of material and consequently mental production as students who really appreciate good quality, accuracy, smoother understanding, and perfection in learning still prefer English; and in a world of e-learning, one cannot avoid internet and media especially for higher studies. The propaganda model, advanced by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988) [iii] , posits how propaganda functions in mass media and ideas are "manufactured" in the public mind. According to this model, Forces of production such as media technologies and creative practice are shaped according to dominant relations of production such as the profit imperative, the maintenance of hierarchical control, and relations of domination. Hence, the system of production as market or state oriented is important in determining what sort of cultural artifacts are produced and how they are consumed by the people. In this paper, as it is concerned with the language of the media, the political issues and biases are avoided, and we try to see how the language of media is strong enough to spread English everywhere. English is not only manufactured through media but also transferred responsibly to the people like the ideas set by Chomsky. Media and culture, according to this, bring out changes on the individual and personal level relating text to context where the prevailing medium is English. Media sets a discourse situation before us where one could be able to learn more than one wants, and therefore it supports M. Bakhtin’s (1981) [iv] idea of language where dialogue in discourse is the real essence of language learning.

The aim of this paper is to show that media brings important changes in the private mental lives of learners. Media helps them in adopting the similar means for medium for their diverse professional goals irrespective of their diverse background and cultural setting serving as a boon for ELT. In this paper, I examine the innovative pedagogies for ELT with the help of media.

MEDIA AND MEDIUM IN EDUCATION

Medium is a mode of conveying or transferring something, whereas media is a mode of conveying information (R. Amritavalli 1995). The interrelation between media and medium require a language whether it is in spoken, written or in signs. Thus this media needs a language or a medium to transfer its information to the people. Today the rapid development of mass media is not only for amusement, it provides various ways and means for education. Even the technology today has itself become a core branch of study; its role in learning and teaching the other branches of education is none the less important. The corporate media, communications, and information industries are actively scrambling to provide delivery for the wealth of information, entertainment, and further services that will include increased internet access, cellular telephones and satellite personal communication devices, and computerized video, film, and information on demand, as well as internet shopping. Hence, study of the medium of media can be immensely useful for describing the infrastructure of the media, information, and communications industry and their effects on culture and society. Although the focus here is largely on news media, all other media and its importance to develop the technique have been discussed in brief.

Selsam and Martel (1987) sound innovative while saying that "technology discloses man's mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them."‎ Today media can be seen as providing new techniques in dealing with human language which is a part of nature. The news media lays bare man’s needs and his mental horizon to his social relations. Opposed to what were seen as overly empiricist and conformist approaches to the study of communication and culture, more critical approaches emerged. The present approaches under this perspective analyze media and culture as part of society which brings out changes on the individual and personal level. Presenting its prevalence as part of society, the impact of media is not unknown to anyone today. Every house and every student has access to some kind of media irrespective of their social, cultural and economic background. In such a situation, successful techniques can be created through media. English is the dominant language of media because of the failure of enough resources of Indian government to produce it in every language. The multilingualism of India is also a major reason to use English as a language of everyone’s communication. It at the same time avoids the cultural biases of speakers.

After fifteen years of Independence, Hindi became the sole official language of Indian union from January 26, 1965 discontinuing the use of English as the associate official language. English got almost a total banishment with so many movements emerging mostly in the North India entitled ‘Angrezi-Hataao Aandolan’ and so on. The ‘Nai-talim’ or ‘basic education’ system of Mahatma Gandhi, propounded in 1937, was also one of the major reasons for the devastation of English education in India. It was believed that the education of English and education in English would make people dishonest to their own country and language. English thus wasn’t seen as a part of education and knowledge but an alien force which could cause/harm the freedom. The darkness of their mind and ignorance to English caused illiteracy in many Indians and kept them miles away from modern science, technology and knowledge. In a global scenario, the need of English is realized amongst them which sprouted a major change in the education system of India. The new education system of India, apart from all its intricacies and indifference, focuses on English and has made it a compulsory language in all the primary schools. Not only this, all the central universities and most of the state universities of India have started using English as the medium of education. This brought interest in researchers and scholars of SLA (second language acquisition), and English has been studied a lot from every perspective of acquisition. Regarding the appropriate time for the exposure of English to the students, Gupta (1995) has discussed the advantages of early instruction of English to the children [v] . The results of the French immersion programmes (Gardner and Lambert 1972) supported the argument [vi] , and Penfield and Roberts (1959) [vii] presented the biological reasons for the better early instruction because of the greater plasticity of brain in small children. The ‘uniquely well-adapted brain’ of a child and the ‘optimum age’ of the first ten years suggest the little efforts while learning any other language for a child. But the social setting of the students and their psychological effects still produce hindrances to learn English. Consequently, innovative techniques, techniques that should not give much pressure to the minds of the learners, are needed. It suggests more elaborated study in this area. If we utilize media with some care, its prevalence would serve as great strategy for English language teaching. Scrutinizing media, I have discussed in the further section that it presents all aspects of a language before the learner. I refer to M. Bakhtin,  a Russian philosopher, literary critic,  and scholar of 20th century who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language, to discuss the major aspects and ways in which a language should be seen, analyzed and learnt properly.

DISCOURSE IN LANGUAGE

Discourse is simply defined as ‘written or spoken communication’ or ‘debate’. It is also defined as the ‘totality of codified linguistic usages attached to a given type of social practice’ like legal, medical, religious discourse and so on. According to Carlson (1985) [viii] , discourse is "any sustained stretch of speech or sequence of individual sentences". The analysis of discourse helps us to know the extensions to which language can be studied. Its insightful results indicate the inadequacy of the traditional grammar where a sentence is considered as the "longest extension with which Grammar has to do" (Z. Harris 1952) [ix] . The detailed studies in discourse analysis has argued for the perspectives discussed by Aristotle that great Extensions such as Syllogism, Paragraph, Sections, and complete works are part of Arts of highest order not of grammar because they are all "Sentences repeated" (Carlson 1985). The topical question it addresses makes it different from other disciplines. Coherency of a discourse, utterances after utterances in a rule-governed manner, and its understanding to the listener are important questions to be studied. Labov (1970) [x] gives a good example to understand what a discourse actually means. Is it just the repetitions of well-formed grammatical sentences or something more than that?

A: What is your name?

B: Well, let’s say you might have thought you had something from before but you haven’t got it any more.

A: I’m going to call you Dean.

A: I feel hot today.

B: No.

It’s apparent to notice here that the sentences uttered by B are breaking the rules for producing a coherent speech because the idea of the topic or the "topical question" is no more in a sequence. If presented to someone to identify the topic, one would hardly be able to find out if we remove the fourth sentence from here.

The similar conventions can be seen in Wittgenstein’s second major work, Philosophical Investigations (1953) [xi] to find out the idea of discourse with more accuracy. In his PI he goes on to say that the meaning of a word lies in its use; when we look at the color yellow we feel it as yellow because in picture its different than the other colors as red or blue, but let’s take water for example. The shape of water would change if we change the container, or the meaning of the words often change in a different context because of its use, therefore in his present work he adopts the theory of use which is set in the ‘social’ milieus. Similarly meaning of the sentences lies in its use; if one cannot define the appropriate meaning of a word without knowing its use, he would encounter the same difficulty for giving the appropriate meaning of a sentence without knowing its context. Wittgenstein gives an example in the very early part of his book where a shopkeeper gets a slip written ‘five red apples’; he takes a sample of red, then he opens up the box of apples and takes five apples for giving it to the boy. Wittgenstein takes it by surprise that how could he interpret the meaning of ‘five’ there which is mere a numeral irrespective of anything. But its meaning can keep varying depending on the given situations and use, it is at this point that he lays emphasis on his ‘use theory’ of language which goes far beyond from his first book in which he deals with ‘picture theory’ [xii] . He reports that just as the shopkeeper understood the meaning of the word ‘five’ without being instructed, it would have meant ‘five balloons’ for the one who sells balloons. And likewise it would keep changing in the different context. The metaphors he has used to show the heterogeneity of language are remarkable in the sense it associates language with different ‘forms of life’; it’s worthwhile to note that it’s only in the social background that he describes all his metaphors. Analyzing his idea in discourse, a clearer picture can be drawn. For example a person accidently meets his friend in a conference after a long time and says: "You didn’t come to me yesterday". The reaction would obviously be odd as there was no plan of meeting at all, but notice the further sentences spoken in response.

A: You didn’t come to my home yesterday?

B: What? Are you crazy?

A: Why?

B: You know I have been out of the city for a month, and I am still not there at our home place, so it’s nonsense to ask this question.

A: I was joking.

B: Was a bad one.

The first sentence was nonsense according to the given context for we cannot provide a topic to that as long as it was not answered by B, but the moment B responded to his sentences, a topic emerged as a "joke" and it became a discourse.

DIALOGUE, DISCOURSE AND MEDIA

"The discourse is coherent if it can be extended into a well-formed dialogue game" (Carlson 1985). In the further studies, discourse has been discussed as collective well-formed dialogues by various great philosophers of language. Although Dialogue has been the pivotal word or learning pattern among those English language learners and teachers who wish to acquire and impart aready-made and purpose-serving English, its essence is vehemently different than those of Carlson, Bakhtin, and Faucoult. Plenty of books in this regard can be found with the titles as "English for Specific Purposes", "Dialogues for English learning" and so on. Once, while going through the catalogue, I found a book in the JNU central library entitled "Everyday Dialogues in English: A Practical Book in Advanced Communication" by Robert J. Dixon (1971) [xiii] . I read the preface by the author with some curiosity. The first line was "these dialogues cover a wide range of everyday situations from buying groceries to flying in an airplane with idiomatic constructions heard wherever American English in spoken". The contents contained a few situations like "John at the post office", "Two Youngmen at a Broadway Movie, "Mrs. Harris Buys a Hat at a Woman’s Speciality Shop" and so on. Curiously enough, I went through a few dialogues and was amazed at the way the turn-taking took place from the buying of a hat to the story of the buyer’s husband. I was thinking what would happen with the person if he gets a totally different answer and context. And well, there is one more important thing to notice, this situation may not occur in one’s life. Parroting words, to some extent, can work but parroting of sentences should not be promoted for English learning in my view. It consequently narrows down not only the capacity to speak but also the capacity to think. No wonder if one comes across the speakers who speak English mechanically and that too in a limited way being ignorant of what they are actually producing. The methods of these types for learning English snatches the freedom of the speakers’ mind to think in a new way and show the ever-generative capability of languages. Whenever they get a situation, they think and speak in a way they have parroted and looked at these situations.

The dialogue we are discussing here is that of Bakhtin who gives an insightful and philosophical touch to the subject. Dialogue is a literary and theatrical form consisting of a written or spoken conversational exchange between two or more people as the root ‘dia’ means through or across. Manjali (2000) [xiv] asserts that "for Bakhtin, all language, even from the moment of initiation, is dialogical, that is to say, the other’s voice is always and already part of one’s own voice". Bakhtin (1930) [xv] , this book has been written under the name of his student V. N. Volosinov, discusses that language is always dialogue because it is neither subjective nor objective, but it occurs in the "inter-individual territory". His dialogism is not just the face-to-face vocalized communication of two persons but the "linguistic communication of any type". He affirms Saussure’s (1916) [xvi] â€˜concrete use of language’ in langue which is not purely individual but an intersubjective phenomenon and dialogical for Bakhtin. The interaction between utterances which consists of ‘dialouge’ is not a mechanical kind but of ethical kind with human responses. As he puts, the utterance is an exceptionally important node of problems. He uses the terms ‘collective language’ or ‘the plurality of speakers’ to bring into light that it is true for the speaking of language but it’s not adequate enough to define the essence of language [xvii] . So, one’s referring to language as ‘the spirit of the people’ for collective personality doesn’t have any real essential significance. Speech is always cast in the form of an utterance belonging to a particular speaking subject, and it cannot exist outside this form. He goes on to describe that the change of speaking subjects or the speaker determines the boundary of concrete utterances. One speaker finishes his speech and leaves the floor for the other; it is only where the change takes place, the boundary of the utterances is set. And the change of this speech subjects varies in nature and acquires different forms in the heterogeneous spheres of human activity and life. He, for this reason, emphasizes on the compositional structure of language for its study.

Media, nevertheless, presents this compositional structure of language where different topics are the different speaking subjects. The end of a topic sets the boundary and leaves the floor for the next topic. The news media may not be the face-to-face vocalized communication but it fits into Bakhtin’s "linguistic communication of any type". This communication is not purely objective though it transfers the information of the world, it adds its own opinions and objects to the world. The well-formed dialogues in each topic are apparently not just the grammatical sentences; they are coherent to the topical question of the subject. The news media proves the crucial consideration in the well-formedness of a dialogue set by Carlson (1985) as whether its individual moves have bearing on the topic or subject matter of the dialogue, or whether they are irrelevant, idle, or beside the point. Examining carefully, one may find it relevant to notice every sentence having a bearing on the topic in the news media.

MEDIA IN ENGLISH LEARNING: DISCOURSE PEDAGOGY

Dick Allwright (1996) [xviii] , while distinguishing ‘internal’ and ‘external’ socialization, asserts that language pedagogy is more complex than other subjects. He emphasizes on the role of the socialization process in language pedagogy suggesting the language teachers to provide "the world outside the classroom" unlike the mathematics teachers who are mainly concerned with "internal socialization" or more appropriately "subject-oriented internal socialization" minimizing the extent to which they are concerned with "external socialization", with the everyday world outside the classroom. He criticizes the language teachers approaching their subject in the same setting, and reflects on the idea of accumulative socialization for language learning. Language learning is actually not an area where one can purely be guided to his aim and look for the demands of the subject. It’s a practice strongly guided by one’s society outside the classroom, and media comes as a part of the society serving its role in the form of pedagogy for English language learning or teaching. It suffices in providing all the necessary aspects of a language starting from "sentence" or "utterance" to the larger units in the form of dialogues and discourses. Media emerges as a new pedagogy namely discourse pedagogy for the learners and teachers of English in today world. It mediates between the private sphere of an individual with his opinions and the public of the world, serving as the locus of what is described as "the public sphere".

As we know, language plays an important role in thinking. Whether people’s native language is covertly involved in all manner of seemingly nonlinguistic tasks, or whether aspects of grammar are able to influence nonlinguistic representations directly, it appears that thinking involves collaboration between many different linguistic representations and processes. This means that the private mental lives of speakers of different languages may differ dramatically—and not only when they are thinking for speaking their particular language, but in all manner of cognitive tasks. Despite their dissimilarity, the perspectives that we have discussed above are transdisciplinary in terms of their practice. Standard academic approaches are discipline oriented, with English Departments typically analyzing cultural forms as literary texts, Sociology Departments focusing on the social dimension of culture, Political Science Departments highlighting the politics of culture, and so on. By contrast, transdisciplinary perspectives subvert existing academic boundaries by combining social theory, cultural analysis, and political critique.

A body of evidence suggests that people’s thinking about objects can be influenced by aspects of grammar that differ across languages. A series of studies found effects of grammatical gender on people’s descriptions of objects, their assessments of similarity between pictures of objects, and their ability to remember proper names for objects. Another set of studies showed that differences in thought can be produced just by grammatical differences and in the absence of other cultural factors. It is striking that even a fluke of grammar (the arbitrary designation of a noun as masculine or feminine) can have an effect on how people think about things in the world. Considering the many ways in which languages differ, my arguments suggest that media in the present world can be a major shield for the oneness of people’s ideas with the connectivity of English language.

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