Bengali studies

As the present author is now deeply interested in primary education without institutionalized schooling and money-sign, his concern for children leads to a pedagogical project. A primer was developed and it is meant for the primary Bengali school-teachers, who were introducing Bangla alphabets to the children below six years. The strategy adopted here for introducing target language graphemes to the Bengali children was altogether different from the usual cultural practice of introducing Bangla alphabet with sequential Sanskrit phonetic order of things that created ambiguities and confusion in the mind of learning-subjects as there was no strict one-to-one correspondences between Bangla speech sounds and traditional graphemes. There might be one-many or many-one or zero –one (or vice versa) correspondences. Therefore, altogether different approach was taken to teach language art by introducing art samples already available in the Bengali culture. The simple contours of Alpana (“ritual painting in the floor of the house” mainly practiced by Bengali women at the time of religious festival; the term denotes 'to coat with’. The idea of using Alpana in the context of learning was taken from the understanding of Satyajit Ray’s Bangla calligraphy. Graphemes were introduced to children after teaching straight lines, adjoining straight lines with dots, triangle, rectangle and circle respectively. All the shapes are formed either by the way of drawing or by using clay. These basic shapes were gradually metamorphosed into the graphemic shapes and that was a strange and a new experience to the child learner. Graphemes, on the basis of their homogeneity, e.g., sounds like b, r, k, dh, jh etc. with their atomic triangular shapes or o, t, ou, oi with the basic circular shapes were put together with the contours of “alpana” for executing learning process. Along with this artistic learning, songs containing the sounds related to graphemes were sung with few musical instruments. Later on stories are told and performed as a play (both teachers and students participate in the extempore dramas and relevant musicking) with a view to write stories in the latter stage of learning. Thus the whole process had become a joyful bi-way “learning” process rather than that of one way “teaching”.

In all the cases, the learning process, apart from its context-specific lingua-aesthetic content, depended on the prior knowledge of the linguistic features of Bangla language. By anticipating phonetic features, phonological rules and child language acquisition theory, the whole (open) text was built with the help of a Bengali child-learner. All the sketches of this open text were drawn by Master Akhar Bandyopadhyay (started drawing when he was 3 years old and he finished learning graphemes within one and a half years. In case of above six-year old illiterate learners, it took 20 to 25 days to learn almost all the Bangla graphemes along with few allographs, if s/he is taught in this way.) The redundant and opaque clustered graphemes are avoided in this phono-centric lingua-aesthetic direct learning process.