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0. Introduction 0. INTRODUCTION “The children seemed totally disinterested in the teacher’s monologue. They stared vacantly at the teacher and sometimes at the blackboard where some alphabets had been written. Clearly aware that the children could not understand what he was saying, the teacher proceeded to provide even more detailed explanation in a much louder voice. Later, tired of speaking and realizing that the young children were completely lost, he asked them to start copying the alphabets from the blackboard. ~” (Jhingran 2005: 1) Although this description is upon a classroom in a primary school in a remote tribal area in Chhindwara district in Madhya Pradesh, the picture in Hindi medium primary schools in the Pattani language community in Lahul & Spiti district, Himachal Pradeshm is not very different. Throughout this dissertation I will investigate what makes a teacher’s discourse so incomprehensible to children and what can possibly be done to rescue the situation. In chapter one, the objective and the hypothesis of this research are stated. Most teachers in Pattani language community use Hindi as a sole medium of instruction for primary education although the Hindi proficiency of the children is not good enough to understand the instruction. As Jhingran (2005: 44) points out, the reasons for using Hindi may be as follows: 1) Using Pattani may be against the official policy of use of Hindi for instruction in official Hindi medium government schools. 2) They seem to believe that 1 the exclusive use of Hindi may help to provide maximum exposure to that language, which may help the children learn Hindi quickly. On the other hand, some teachers in a few schools use oral Pattani for communication simply because Pattani is the only language that children can understand. Thus, the study primarily aims to investigate linguistically and academically the educational effect of two different medium languages, i.e. Pattani and Hindi. Chapter two introduces the background information about the Pattani language community. This includes the geography, history, people and languages spoken in the area. Since Pattani language community is a part of wider identity group, Lahuli people group, first, information about Lahuli is given followed by that about the Pattani community. In chapter three, I examine the theoretical support for mother tongue education and bilingualism for the linguistic and academic achievement. The first part is regarding the implication of learning through mother tongue in order to achieve academic excellence while the second part deals with the positive effect of bilingualism for the better academic achievement. In the second part of this chapter, I divide the related research into two kinds: research in pre- and post- 1960s. I point out the problem of both internal and external validity of the pre-60s research. As for the post-60s’ research, bilingualism’s effect on cognition, divergent thinking, meta-linguistic awareness, field independency, etc. is discussed. The relevance of Pattani oral medium to mother tongue education and bilingualism is discussed in chapter 6. 2 Chapter four is devoted to the methodology. It provides a clear picture of the sample, the medium of instruction, parents’ occupation, teachers’ qualification, their teaching method, multi-grade class condition and school facilities. Five different tools were used to elicit the data from the student sample, i.e. Hindi Sentence Repetition Test (HSRT), Hindi Cloze Test, Hindi Writing Task, Annual Exams and participant observation. The first three tests were administered by me and the annual exam was carried out by Himachal government. The annual exam includes the following subjects: Hindi, English, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies and Moral Education & History of Freedom Struggle. Chapter five is concerned with the data elicitation and analysis. HSRT marks are compared among three different schools, i.e. Hindi medium class V, Pattani oral medium class V and another Hindi medium school in another language (Gahri) community. Following HSRT, the result of Hindi Cloze Test, Hindi Writing Task and annual exam reveals differently according to the medium language in class V. A Hindi medium class V is composed of three different groups of students, i.e. Hindi, Pattani and Nepali home children, and these groups of children are analysed. The rest of the chapter is devoted to a discussion of HSRT for class X and test scores according to age and sex of the children. In chapter six, I discuss the implications of the findings under study in chapter five. I emphasize linguistic and academic effect of the oral medium of Pattani (oracy). Regarding the different socio-cultural support from the three different groups in a Hindi 3 medium class V, Thomas and Collier’s Prism Model (1997) is discussed. A few more words are added for long term effect of Pattani oral medium, special benefit of mother tongue for girls and more probable grade repetition among Hindi medium class V. 4 1. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study is to examine whether learning through one’s mother tongue, along with learning other languages, enhances both one’s linguistic and academic achievement. I propose to work in two kinds of primary schools of the Pattan valley. In one type of school, the teacher is a native speaker of Pattani and uses Pattani in class while textbooks are written in Hindi; in the other kind of school, the teacher, though a Pattani speaker, uses only Hindi as a medium of instruction. My hypothesis is that primary school children who learn different subjects through their mother-tongue, Pattani, will be linguistically better both in Hindi and English and academically more advanced in other subjects, i.e. Science, Math, Social Studies, etc. than those children who receive all their education only through an unfamiliar language, Hindi. 5 2. BACKGROUND OF THE PATTANI LANGUAGE COMMUNITY 2.1. Geography The term Pattani is used in this paper to refer to the first language of the people mainly living in the Pattan valley of the Lahul area. And it is also used to describe the people in Pattan valley. Lahul along with Spiti, constitute the Lahul and Spiti district of Himachal Pradesh, India. The Lahul area is remote and surrounded by towering mountain ranges. The district is generally considered rural and even its district headquarters, Keyolong, is considered a rural area (Atwal 1991: xi). The district of Lahul-Spiti is separated in the north from the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir by the Baralacha range which has an average height of 5500 meters from the sea level; in the east is situated the Tibet region. In the south-east the district is separated from Kinnaur district by tall mountains with an average height of 5000 meters. In the southwest and west the district is separated from Kulu and Chamba districts by the lofty range with an average elevation of 4500 meters (Bajpai 1987: 1). Lahul & Spiti is the largest district (13,835 sq. Kms accounting for 24.85 percent area of the State) in the state whereas it has very small population compared to other districts in 6 the state. The density of population in the District is just 2 persons per sq. Kms whereas that of the State is 93 (Atwal 1991: 3). Pattani is spoken throughout the Pattan valley, which is located on the banks of the river Chandra-Bhaga in the Lahul side of the Lahul-Spiti district. The Chandra-Bhaga river was named so because the two rivers, the Chandra and the Bhaga join and become the river, Chandra-Bhaga. Thus the Lahul side of the district is distinct from the other part of the district, Spiti. And it is composed of three rivers (valleys), the Chandra, the Bhaga, and the Chandra-Bhaga. The Chandra and the Bhaga rise on opposite side of the Baralacha Pass, which is situated at an elevation of about 5,200 meters (Bajpai 1987: 5) and known as ‘Pass with crossroads on summit’ (Bajpai 1987: 3). Both rivers flow down from their common source, for 181 kilometers (the Chandra) and 72 kilometers (the Bhaga) and meet each other again at Tandi to become the Chandra-Bhaga river, popularly known as Pattan (Bajpai 1987: 2-3). The main occupation in Lahul is agriculture. But from almost October to early April, Lahul is covered with snow, thus agricultural operation begins in April and ends in September each year. Although there is not a large amount of level land, the river valleys are fertile. In particular, from the village Tandi to Tirot, the valley is wider, fertile and thickly populated. So it has been termed the “orchard and granary of Lahaul-Spiti” (Bajpai 1987: 2-3). Potatoes are one of the major cash crops in Lahul. When I went up the Pattan valley to visit schools, most Pattanis were busy in harvesting potatoes before 7 the first snow falls. The cultivation of potato was first introduced by Moravian missionaries in the middle of 19th century. Additional main crops include Kuth and hops. 2.2. History Lahul has a long and turbulent history and it played buffer’s role among the surrounding areas, i.e. Ladakh, Tibet, Kullu, and Chamba. Consequently there was intermixing of people belonging to different races and culture in this land. Sahni (1994: 50) points out, “the most common arrangement seems to have been for Ladakh in the northeast to rule the Tod [Stod] and Gahr valleys, Chamba in the west to rule Chamba-Lahul beyond Thirot, and Kullu in the south to dominate the Ranglo and Gondhla valleys. The Pattan valley in western Lahul was disputed by all three”. However, there has been no particular community which inhabited the whole of Lahul at any time. Nowadays Mongolian Tibetans from Ladakh and Tibet, and Aryans from Chamba and Kullu, form the main population in Lahul (Kapoor 1993: 113-114, referred in Chamberlain 1996: 6).
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