How was the weekend everyone?”

“Awesome!”

Every afternoon after class, children from C block government school in Sangam Vihar gather at the Freedom English Academy, where a young facilitator demystifies the English language with the contagious enthusiasm of a gym instructor.

In the large basement where classes are held, everyone must speak in English at all times: some speak haltingly, others speak in quick bursts.

Very few, such as Nikki Sharma, the most fluent speaker in her school of almost 6000 students, look straight at the listener, smile, and express themselves in sentences enunciated in the cheerful upbeat manner taught at Freedom English.

The power of English, Nikki explained at her home one afternoon after school, “Isn’t just in the sentences. It’s in how you speak, how you make eye contact, your body language.”

English, Nikki explained, is both — language and performance. One day, for instance, when Nikki was in Class 10, a teacher called her a “loser”. “I stared at her and said, how dare you call me a loser? Who do you think you are?” Nikki said.

The teacher stared back, nonplussed. Insubordination rarely passes unpunished. What saved her, Nikki mused, was that her defiance was expressed in English, the universally accepted language of authority in Sangam Vihar.

For Nikki Sharma, a student at Government Girls Senior Secondary School in Sangam Vihar, English is the language of power, authority and self improvement.

The language of dreams

In the cramped lanes of Sangam Vihar, English is everywhere: Posters on shop-fronts, crooked lamp posts, and bustling auto-rickshaws advertising lessons in how to speak the language. In these advertisements, the language appears like a glossy American import, rather than a burdensome colonial legacy.

“Love English, Live English, Learn English,” urges the banner of the Ameritish Institute of English and Education. “Life Time Free Membership,” promises the American Institute of English Language Pvt Ltd.

It pays to speak English: A 2006 study by economists Munshi, Kaivan and Mark Rosenzweig found that, in India, speaking English gave workers a 25 per cent premium in wages over non-English speaking workers. In Sangam Vihar, where taxi aggregators such as Uber and Ola advertise to recruit drivers rather than passengers, and the narrow, airless one-room sets are rented by pizza delivery boys, receptionists, security guards, maids and fitness instructors, the vibrant language market is built on sound business sense.

Yet, the language is absent at the school where Nikki is in her final year of study. While every child is taught English from a young age, it never seems to stick.

This presents policymakers with a puzzle:

Schoolchildren who cannot speak English despite a decade of instruction gain rudimentary fluency in a little over a year at institutes such as Freedom English Academy. Is it time to change the way English is taught at schools?

Part of the problem may be that the curriculum emphasizes reading and writing at the cost of speaking: “More than anything, our children want to speak English,” said Bharati Sharma, Nikki’s English teacher at school.

But it takes years before most students are able to utter their first hesitant sentence, by which time many are convinced they will never learn the language.

“If we began by focusing on speech, it would boost their confidence,” she said, “They won’t see it as a subject they have to pass, but as something that can prepare them for life beyond Sangam Vihar.”

Speaking vs writing

Bharti Sharma, Nikki's school teacher, took to speaking out loud to herself to perfect her spoken English.

When Bharti Sharma, a schoolteacher, sat for her first job interview, she realized that her education had let her down.

“I always came first or second in exams,” said Sharma, who graduated with a Master’s degree in English literature from DU. But at the interview for the post of an English teacher at a Kendriya Vidyalaya (KV) school, “I suddenly couldn’t speak.”

So, in her early twenties, Sharma taught herself to speak. “I’m from Sangam Vihar as well,” Sharma said.

“I started by speaking to myself,” she said, explaining that she spoke out loud every action as she performed it. It took time, but she found she was doing better with every interview until she landed a job as a guest teacher at a KV.

Literacy theorists such as James Cummins at the Ontario Institute of Language Studies, University of Toronto, distinguish between basic skills like speaking and listening, and the more difficult work of “cognitive proficiency” — where a student must read, write, and perform academic tasks in a new language.

Training programmes like the one at Freedom English Academy can impart these basic skills with relative ease. But the difficult work of cognitive proficiency — which can take up to seven years — must be taken up by schools. India’s schools, however, are doing neither the hard work of building proficiency, nor picking the low-hanging fruit of teaching students the basics.