When English stops connecting

At a meeting, someone asked why students who score above 80- 85% in first-year English often struggle with the English sections of placement tests in the final year. Some students skipped the reading comprehension sections, while others performed poorly. But their academic records suggested that they had done very well in English.Marks vs. abilityThis is not simply an assessment problem but a larger question about what we expect English education to do. We may have begun to confuse performance in an English course with actual proficiency in the language.A grade should tell students something truthful about what they can do. Yet assessment systems sometimes reward completion, participation, and examination performance in ways that do not always reflect a student’s ability to read independently, interpret carefully, or communicate confidently. When marks and actual ability begin telling different stories, the student is ultimately the one who is disadvantaged.At the same time, as Engineering education became more employment-oriented, English syllabi moved towards CV writing, report writing, email communication, presentations, and interview preparation. These skills matter but should not stand in for language education itself.Even literature, where it remained, was made functional. A poem became a comprehension passage. A story became a source of vocabulary questions. Students learnt to skim, identify and retrieve. The poem was not read. It was processed. The story was not experienced. It was mined for answers.But when students genuinely read a story, they start asking why a character behaved in a certain way, whether a choice was fair, what they might have done, or how the same situation might look from another perspective. Without being told that they are practising a “skill”, they are interpreting, questioning, arguing, imagining and listening to another point of view. That, too, is language learning.An experimentTo see what would happen if we brought some of that experience back into the Engineering classroom, students were asked to read five novels in groups and present their responses at the end of the semester. They were asked to enter the text, not to summarise it or repeat a teacher’s interpretation. Add a character from their generation. Change the ending. Enact a significant scene. Reimagine the story through the world they know.The responses were far more inventive than we had anticipated. One group transformed a judgment scene into a live television panel with anchors, reporters, and studio discussion. Another created an alternative ending for the Oppenheimer trial scene.Students reading Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions created an Instagram page around the novel, using excerpts and memes to turn an ancient epic into a contemporary conversation about gender. Then Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni followed the page. What mattered was not the recognition itself. It was what the students had become while doing the assignment.That experience has become even more significant in the age of generative AI, which can now produce a grammatically polished email, a structured report, or a professional-looking CV within seconds. This makes the question — what, then, should language education ultimately teach? — harder to avoid.In the classroomIn my classrooms and interactions, I increasingly encounter students who are accomplished on paper but hesitant in conversation. They can answer a question but find it harder to sustain an exchange, ask a follow-up question, disagree without withdrawing, or speak comfortably to someone they do not know.Language was supposed to connect people. When we teach it mainly as a series of transactions — write this email, prepare this CV, answer this comprehension passage — we risk giving students the vocabulary of connection without enough experience of actually connecting.The answer need not begin with another major curriculum reform. It can begin in the classroom. Talk to students before teaching. Tell them what they are going to learn and why it matters. Ask what they think. Allow them to disagree. Give them room to surprise you.Educational reform does not always begin in policy documents or committee meetings. Sometimes it begins when a teacher notices that something which should be alive in a classroom has gone quiet and decides to ask why.Teachers work under enormous pressure. There is never enough time, but ask not just “What must I finish teaching?” but also “What is happening to the person I am teaching?”Language education may need to begin again there: with the ability to read closely, question intelligently, imagine another life, disagree respectfully, listen carefully, and connect.Views are personalThe writer is Professor and Head, Department of Language, Culture and Society, SRM Institute of Science and Technology.