All speak one day per week in English.

Many higher education colleges are not set in urban backgrounds. A lot of students and teachers struggle to speak in English and fall back to the local medium very easily. The college I work for is also in rural background. The college has an English teacher who help students to improve their English. I think learning good English needs to be attacked from many sides. For the same reason I initiated a Toastmasters Club (see http://toastmasters.org for those who don't know what Toastmasters is) and about 9 students have signed up knowing its benefits. The second activity I initiated was, why not all speak at college in English once in a week and that activity came out as following details on the notice board. Read through.

25th May, 2009.
My Dear All (Staff and Students),

I don’t want to steal your heart away from your mother tongue, I don’t want to steal the tunes that you hum from songs in your mother tongue. Just want you to add ENGLISH to your ever growing quiver (a case for holding arrows).

ACTION: Can we all SPEAK In ENGLISH one day per week, consciously?

WHY: STUDENTS wake up to harsh realities of the real world NOW! Tomorrow never comes! A day is not far when you will be sitting on an interview table.

WHEN: Every WEDNESDAY of a week, morning 8:30am onwards.

HOW: Staff-to-staff, staff-to-students and student-to-students converse in English ONLY.

PARTICIPANTS: Principal, Lecturers, Administrative Staff, Librarian and Students.

COST: No money, no time. It costs you getting in an UNCOMFORTABLE ZONE of grappling for words, struggling to make sentences and asking for help from friends and teachers.

LEARNING: Speaking and Vocabulary are primary benefits, Reading and Writing are secondary benefits.

MISTAKES: Perfectly acceptable. Staff and friends help the defaulter. They help him orally and morally!

CAUTION: Don’t laugh at others if you cannot help. They are helping themselves. A group can decide to defeat the idea if they want to. Can you be wary and stick to the rule, not for yourself but for your friends!? I know its all hard, but not impossible if you decide to bring about a change.

SCORE: Participants who have helped others or themselves put one green token in a jar and pick out one chocolate out of the same jar. The quality of the chocolates will improve from Alpenliebe to Dairy Milk to Roasted Almond if I see improvement in the number of people speaking in English :)

Lets have some fun, belittle our ego and get out of this mess called ENGLISH which has only 5 vowels (against a dozen vowels in Indian languages) which is one of the primary cause of our confusion. It’s a language where ‘but’ and ‘put’ sound different, where no vowel is pronounced the way it is e.g.
‘a’ is pronounced as ‘e’pple (apple),
‘e’ is pronounced as ‘a’ as in aliphant (elephant),
‘i’ is pronounced as ‘e’ as in ‘egloo’ (igloo),
‘o’ is pronounced as ‘au’ in ‘aulive’ (olive),
‘u’ is pronounced as ‘a’ in ‘altimate’ (ultimate). It’s all messed up.

If you might find me grappling with Kannada please help! naan Kannada kaliyuttene, adikke.
Thanks and regards,Ashirwad.

We had only 2 Wednesday's when above experiment was tried. I look at it as just sowing a seed. A lot of energy is required to take it through which I am seeing in many students...

All the best!