English Proficiency Programme

Interpretation Exercise

(English to Common Local Language: Eng2CLL)

The spirit of this exercise is that those students of English, for whom it is not the first language, tend to follow English text (and even speech) by mentally mapping the information content of each sentence into another language in which their command is significantly better than English. At an advanced stage, we may shun this practice, but in early stages, we cannot avoid it. Indeed, we can utilize it as a strategy in a class in which we can manage to have a linguistic convergence of students at one Common Local Language (CLL).

The process:

Select a running text in English, which may be a story, an excerpt from a novel, a news article or an essay that would match the intellectual level and taste of the class. You may rephrase the sentences here and there to facilitate translation to suit the level (or Module) of the class.
Call a student (in turn) to the board and dictate him/her a sentence of the text to write on the board.
Instruct/guide him to dissect the sentence into its constituent units, e.g. "I", "see", "a single little star", "twinkling", "in the night", "as", "its light", "trickles", "through my window" - by separately underlining them.
Next the student translates (interprets) each of the underlined units into CLL.
The next task is to write "1", "2", "3" etc under the translated units to signify the order in which it will make sense in CLL.
After assembly of the units in the planned order, the assembled matter in CLL may be a fine translation of the original sentence or it may need some final adjustment in some cases to be a correct sentence in CLL.
Needless to mention, appearance of idiomatic expressions and out of turn special constructs (in English or in CLL) may call for special measures.
After two (or three) sentences are processed like this, send this student back to his/her seat and continue the exercise with another student.

At every stage of the process, the class is to be engaged actively with the student at the board through suggestions, criticisms, improvements etc.
As such, there is no harm if every student could not be brought to the board in the limited time allocated for this activity.
However, the selected text may not be over within the time. The remaining part can be covered through home-work or class-work, for which you may decide to demand only the translation - leaving the option of systematic dissection and ordering with the students.

Note:

This literal exact translation leaves no scope of confusions remaining unnoticed and uncorrected.
Without using any grammatical jargon, what students end up doing in this exercise is done in formal grammar under analysis of sentences.
Students will find this technique useful in interpreting long and difficult sentences appearing here and there in the story-books that they read.
Once students develop enough speed and maturity in English, they will start interpreting directly in English and the crutch of the CLL will get discarded automatically.