CLELEjournal (May 2013)
Playing with Nonsense: Toward Language Bridging in a Multilingual Classroom
Abstract
To meet the academic and educational needs of first generation school-goers, the Government of India has launched mother tongue based multilingual education for tribal education under the national flagship program of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Universal Elementary Education). In the current multilingual education programme, education starts in the home language. But as the grade advances, curricular subjects begin to be divided between the home language and the school language in a realization of parallel monolingualism in which languages remain closed from each other. This paper proposes the introduction of nonsense texts, including children’s rhymes and folk rhymes and riddles, into the curricular content of language as a bridging subject. For this, I draw upon theoretical perspectives of language awareness, language play and the theories of nonsense. My focus is on the kinds of play that could be attempted with nonsense texts. School education envisages a mere cultural role for nonsense, as a homely, familiar game, and hence, teachers rarely make use of nonsense to initiate experiments with language or to open conceptual doors. I employ the help of some Indian multilingual nonsense texts to illustrate language play – from mimicking sounds and sound patterns to making linguistic connections and discoveries.
