20 Years in English Medium (KG to PG)—Still Can’t Speak English? The Shocking Truth

Walk into any average run-of-the-mill private school in a small township/semi-urban circuit anywhere in India, and you are likely to stumble on boards proudly proclaiming 'English Medium Co-Educational Institution'. Parents work overtime and make lifestyle sacrifices to send their sons and daughters to these English-medium institutions, all with the belief that the child will be fluent in spoken English after studying under this system.

After ten to twelve years, though, these children emerge well-versed in physics numericals, board examination essays on history, and are capable of reading out loud from their English textbooks. Put these children in front of an interviewer, though, and ask them to casually introduce themselves or even to express a casual opinion, and you are likely to be greeted with deafening silence.

Employability audit reports, non-governmental education assessments, and standard spoken English evaluations reveal that in mass-market non-elite English-medium schools (the Budget Private Schools/State Supported Schools category) in India, 70 to 85 percent of the students are unable to perform a basic conversational task in English.

Why is it that a supposedly English-medium education model fails spectacularly to enable basic conversational fluency? What are the underlying reasons that explain this? Let's delve beneath the surface:

1. English on paper, Vernacular in the air

In the vast majority of budget private schools (BPS) and regional state schools, the phrase 'English Medium' exists only on paper as an administrative convenience.

There is an unspoken understanding between the student and the classroom that holds true across the country.

The Textbooks are in English: The questions, technical terminology, and board answer scripts are all written strictly in English.

The Instruction is Vernacular: When discussing difficult concepts in science, social studies, or math, teachers tend to automatically use regional language (Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali, etc.")

Since the student needs to pass the written examination, the teachers focus on helping the student grasp the concept through whichever medium gets the information across faster -- regional language, in most cases

The student thus goes through the motions of learning English as a second language, but the process for doing so is highly convoluted: the student listens in their mother tongue, understands the concept in their mother tongue, converts it to English internally, and then memorizes English sentences to reproduce on the exam sheet. Nowhere in this process is the student required to speak the English they are memorizing, and thus, twelve years of school go by without the child acquiring basic conversational English.

2. The Oppression of the Written Board Examination

There is a natural order to how a human being acquires language: Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing (LSRW). A child listens for two years, speaks incoherent words for three, learns how to alphabetize and form sentences after that, and finally learns to read and write properly after the age of six.

Our school examination system completely inverts this learning process.

• The Reading & Writing components contribute 90% to 100% of all final grade allocations.
• Listening & Speaking tests are either completely ignored or reduced to 10-mark internal viva sessions where answer scripts are memorized in advance

When a student's survival depends on the written word, classroom dynamics necessarily take a backseat to the needs of the board examination. A teacher can dictate a question bank to the student and reward the memorization of standard paragraphs on 'Global Warming' with full marks on the board examination, but will fail to reward (and even punish an attempt at) a student asking for directions in clear, spoken sentences.

3. Classroom Fear, Judgement, and Grammar First

In regular classrooms across India, a grammatical error in spoken English is considered an intellectual weakness. Students are taught the Grammar-Translation Method (GTM) before they are encouraged to speak even one page of content in English. Before students can express spontaneous thoughts, they have to understand abstract concepts such as Subject-Verb Agreement, Active and Passive Voice, Prepositions and Modal Verbs, and Tense Tables. When speaking English becomes a process of checking off boxes in the English Grammar Checklist, spontaneous conversation is bound to suffer.

A student makes three-word sentences and immediately stops at the thought of having a tense error and decides it is better to keep their mouth shut. Peers laugh at accents and missing prepositions, creating a vicious cycle of performance anxiety that causes students to consciously refrain from speaking English except when required to. The internal operating instructions for such a student change to: Speak only when called upon, say as little as possible when you do speak, and switch off to the local language as soon as the school bell rings.

4. Teacher Training Bottleneck

A school is only as fluent as its teachers. Budget private schools, outside of the Tier-1 circuit, operate on razor-thin profit margins and consequently cannot offer competitive salary packages to attract quality bilingual educators.

Most teachers who fill vacancies in the mass-market English-medium school sector were themselves trained in regional language or the non-conversational system. While many may possess excellent conceptual depth in biology, history, and chemistry, they may have trouble articulating a four-paragraph spoken English paragraph on a conversational topic for forty-five minutes straight. If the teacher is uncomfortable speaking extempore in English, he is unlikely to encourage spontaneous conversation amongst the students.

5. No Natural Immersion

Children in metro cities pick up English because their home is filled with the language: parents speak in conversational English at the dinner table, the child consumes English audiobooks, podcasts, and TV shows without local subtitles, and the friend group communicates in English naturally.

For a rural/semi-urban child, however, the school is the only place where English exists, and as we know, even the school system is largely English on paper. As soon as the lunch bell rings, the student is in an environment where the mother tongue rules. How is a student supposed to acquire spoken fluency when they have only forty minutes of textbook-based exposure a day to the English language?

6. The Non-Academic Campus Bubble: Where the Vernacular Remains Supreme

Outside of formal classroom instruction, there is an informal setting of the school that entirely bursts an English immersion bubble because every interaction not related to academics immediately draws the students back into their native tongue.

In physical education classes, PET teachers continuously give instructions, practice formations, and officiate matches in the local regional language. Outside of schools, office administrators answer inquiries, give forms, and discuss balance payments in their mother tongue, while bus drivers, ayahs, and cleaning ladies give directions and gossip with the children in their native dialect.

As sports, hallway interactions, and desk work represent the actual physical reality of the campus, students can understand that English is only a stiff academic chore that belongs on the blackboard, while their regional tongue remains the natural vehicle for activities, emotions, and human interactions.

A pipeline that goes on for 15 years: KG to PG and never utter a word!

The silence around the spoken word begins at a very young age and stays put as one grows up, never to leave. Primary school kids read phonics and nursery rhymes but never use the English language to state their simple needs. In high school, the board exam percentages are the ultimate goal; the language, however, is not practiced.

This culture of ignoring the spoken word only grows stronger as one joins college. The semesters spent in degree and post-graduation colleges in Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns are spent listening to professors lecturing in a highly mixed vernacular language. Students prepare for their university examinations by studying printed guides and rote formulas.

A student can be a part of the "English-medium" system for 17 long years! He can clear UKG rhymes, Class 10 boards, a B.Sc. or B. Tech., and an MBA or M.Sc., but be completely unprepared to deliver a five-minute English speech without cribbing from notes to pass an interview at the age of 23!

The Way Forward: How to Bridge the Conversational Gap

Dealing with the crisis of spoken English fluency in the Indian education ecosystem does not require the abolition of regional languages or even massive budget overhauls. It requires a shift in pedagogical priorities towards practical conversational fluency instead of rote academic English.

1. Separating 'Spoken English' from 'Grammar & Literature'

Literature classes analyzing Victorian poetry do nothing to prepare a student for asking for a raise at the office canteen. Schools must dedicate time to conversational speaking exercises that help a student with practical transactional skills. Such exercises should be graded on actual participation and clarity and should avoid punishing minor grammatical errors.

2. Extempore Daily Speaking Routines

Every single school day must have dedicated time for light spoken English exercises that prepare the student for conversational English:

• The 2-Minute Warmup: Before class commences, each student must speak out one sentence each on a topic of their choice or a news headline.
• Paired Dialogue Practice: Instead of individual reading comprehension, students can read dialogues aloud in pairs.
• No-Mocking Zones: Teachers must establish zero-tolerance zones for mocking pronunciation or regional accents.

3. Practical Teacher Upskilling

State education boards and private school associations must allocate resources to creating spoken fluency bootcamps for teachers. When teachers have a repository of 50-100 English instructional phrases to draw from, the classroom can organically move towards building actual bilingual fluency.

Final Thoughts

A student's school certificate declaring their education to be in 'English Medium' should not be a hollow statement made only to appease parents. For millions of working-class parents, an English Medium certificate represents an investment in the dignity and career prospects of their child.

As long as our educational curriculum fails to recognize that a language is spoken before it is written, millions of bright-eyed students will continue to graduate from our English-medium schools with perfect English examination scores but no ability to engage in basic spoken English. It is time to open school windows and put down English grammar tables.