In Search of a Holistic Approach: Vygotsky Situated in the Rural Indian ESL Contexts

Abstract

This paper argues that it is high time that the teaching of ‘a language of opportunities’ got liberated from the rigid and restricted frame of institutionalized instruction with its fossilized curriculum, syllabus, materials, testing and evaluation and so on. Teaching-learning English must be made a democratic process, a social agenda, which leaves apace for societal intervention. It has been suggested here that those who had been marginalized so far as passive stakeholders, namely parents and public, too should be made active participants in the process of second language education, contributing to the process in their own way. The fifteen-year old search for such a holistic approach to ESL education has now reached a point at which a framework of some degree of definitude has been arrived at. This paper outlines (only) the theoretical framework currently being in use on a massive project in Kerala (south India) which aims at ‘empowering rural India through English language education’. The interim report of the progress of the project will be appearing as a sequel paper.