Failing the lingua franca

photo by Prito Reza

Failing the lingua franca

by Mushfique Wadud

This is a letter from the examination script of a class nine student of Bangladesh Bank Model High School. His teacher reveals that he wrote this after memorising it beforehand. Despite memorising, he still succumbs to such mistakes. ‘If he wrote the letter on the script without memorising, there would be even more mistakes,’ the teacher says, sighing. Like him, many students write incorrect and meaningless sentences in their scripts which are humorous to readers.

While this is funny to read, it is just another unsavoury instance of the nation’s sorry state of English language efficiency. This plague is not only confined to schools, but in every level of education, job applications, invitation cards, texts and even on social networking sites such as Facebook establishing the fact that the whole nation lacks knowledge of the English language. As important books in any subject are in English, students struggle to acquire proper knowledge in science, business studies and other important subject matter affecting the overall education system.

This deficiency is especially unfortunate because people of this region had long been known for their remarkable efficiency in the English language. It is in fact, a widely known truth that before the liberation war, people had a strong command of English. However, after the emergence of Bangladesh, the policymakers adopted education policies which emphasised greatly on Bengali while defocusing on the English curriculum.