Skip to main content

Participial Phrase


“What is a participial phrase?” asked a teacher who was preparing for an interview because her school was being shut down by vested interests.

“No clue,” I said.  “Never heard of such a thing.”

She wondered how I had mastered the art of lying so quickly.  She refused to believe that I had not heard of such a thing as participial phrase.  She opened the grammar book she had brought (a fraction of which is here in the picture) and showed me the phrase. 


It was a grammar textbook for grade 8.  I flipped through the pages and realised how ineffective English language teaching is in our country.  My memory went back to my childhood when they taught me things like Vocative Case and other Cases all of which disappeared without a trace from English grammar eventually.

“See, dear,” I told the teacher, “I didn’t learn English by learning the grammar.  Did you learn your mother tongue by learning its grammar?”

She pondered a while and said, “No.”

“If I ask you about things like sandhi and samasam will it make much sense to you?”

“What are those?”

“Yup.  I think they are rules about how you join letters or words together to make sentences.”

“Aren’t I making sentences in my language without knowing these rules?”

“Of course, you are.  More significantly, you are speaking your language fluently and efficiently without knowing most of the rules that grammarians have made for it.”

She paused again.  Good student, I thought.  She must be a good teacher.  Only good students can be good teachers.

“Which came first then?  The language or its grammar?”  She asked.

“Isn’t the answer obvious?”

“Are you saying that grammar is immaterial?”

“Not really.”  I cited the example of an architect in my village in Kerala who has constructed umpteen houses.  He is illiterate.  He started working as a bricklayer and eventually became the master architect.  The buildings he makes may last longer than those which are made by architects trained professionally in some reputed universities.  You know, the Taj Mahal was not built by any university-trained architect.  Yet the builders knew the grammar of construction.  Without that knowledge they could not have built anything.  They leant the rules naturally.  The rules were in their blood in fact.  Of course, a teacher can be of much help.  To help them discover the rules which are already in their blood... Language is no different from architecture or any other art and craft.  It is much more natural, in fact.  Natural in the sense it comes to you automatically whereas architecture can come naturally only to those who have it in their blood.  Language is in everybody’s blood.  The child will speak even if you tell it to shut up.  The child speaks primarily for three reasons: (1) to express a need; (2) to draw attention to itself; and (3) to draw attention to something else.  These are all basic human needs.  Language is the primary tool for these.  It doesn’t need a teacher really.  It needs the environment.  Just like the architect in my village got the right environment for materialising what was already in his blood.  You know, language flows into the veins of the child along with the mother’s milk.  That’s why it’s called mother tongue.  And for learning another language, you have to become a child again.  Sucking it into your veins.

“How do I tell these things in the interview?” asked the teacher.

“Tell them that if they want their students to master a language they should create an environment that is bathed in the language.”

She was convinced.  But she thought I was crazy.  When she left I googled for participial phrase.  There it was staring at me like some missionary who was determined to baptise me with yet another unholy water.  



Comments

  1. Loved it.. especially the last lines :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sometimes me think so...most of the good grammarians can not big in natural flow of writing..!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Not really. Grammar can be an interesting hobby or passion for those who have an aptitude for that. But for mastering a language grammar is not the real way any more than is bookish knowledge of different strokes is for mastering swimming.

      Delete
  3. Brilliant point, brilliantly made

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My experience as an English teacher helped. Thanks for the accolade.

      Delete
  4. Rightly explained the difference between Knowledge & Knowing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Our education system is highly skewed in favour of knowledge!

      Delete
  5. Wow! The difference between grammar and language is so wonderfully shown in the story.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. All those technical terms which are there on the page reproduced as well as the numerous others in the book will kill whatever desire a student may have for learning the language. There's a huge difference between language and grammar. Thanks for you Wow :)

      Delete
  6. Well cited by examples, this really provokes a question to our teaching methods / the module set and approved by the authorities for understanding subjects in school and collages, where a student studies to get a better life by achieving high scores not by achieving the pinnacle of understanding the subject !

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We are killing the students' creativity with unnecessary jargon. Why can' language be taught through reading, writing, speaking and listening? Simple but creative and productive. Effective too. Shakespeare was no university product.

      Delete
  7. Thanks a lot for sharing this blog. I was searching for this topic for a while. Glad that I came across your blog. Great effort. Do share more. Looking for professional guidance to improve your English language proficiency? Join Ziyyara's highly interactive and comprehensive online English classes in Kuwait.
    For more info visit Teaching english language in kuwait

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Book Review Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Author: Manu S Pillai Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2024 Pages: 564 (about half of which consists of Notes) There never was any monolithic religion called Hinduism. Different parts of India practised Hinduism in its own ways, with its own gods and rituals and festivals. Some of these were even mutually opposed. For example, Vamana who is a revered incarnation of Vishnu in North India becomes a villain in Kerala’s Onam legends. What has become of this protean religion of infinite variety and diversity today in the hands of its ‘missionary’ political leaders? Manu S Pillai’s book ends with V D Savarkar’s contributions to the religion with a subtle hint that it is his legacy that is driving the present version of the religion in the name of Hindutva. The last lines of the book, leaving aside the Epilogue titled ‘What is Hinduism?’, are telltale. “Life did not give Savarkar all he...