English language teaching in India: Issues and innovations Ed. by R. K. Agnihotri and A. L. Khanna (review)

BOOK NOTICES 887 ogy (63-80)—in general, careful philological comparison of all known manuscripts of a given text, and in specific such practices as giving all manuscript variations with the exception of 'bloss graphischer Varianten' (such as sc vs. sk) and the exclusion of names unless they function as designations (such as franko) or adjectival derivatives (such as judeisc). This section also contains a list of dictionaries consulted (although not always with assent). The 258 pages of entries represents 8 pages more material than contained in the third edition (the fourth edition was not available to this reviewer). The new edition reproduces facsimiles of the Kölner Inschrift and the Wessobrunner Schöpfungsgedicht und Gebet. S's dictionary neither is nor aspires to be a substitute for the ongoing Berlin Académie-Verlag' s Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch (Berlin: Rudolf Große, 1970-94), which supplies full grammatical and textual citations. It provides instead an easily portable basic reference guide for students based on 'der strikten Beachtung der zugrundeliegenden philologischhistorischen Prinzipien', which, according to S, distance it from other 'pseudophilologischen Sammelungen ' (7). A competing option recently appeared in Gerhard Kobler's Taschenwörterbuch des althochdeutschen Sprachschatzes (Paderborn: Schoninghaus , 1994), a condensed version of his 1993 Wörterbuch des althochdeutschen Sprachschutzes (Paderborn: Schoninghaus, 1994) which provides OHD variants, the Latin glossarial equivalents where available, as well as Modern English and Modern German translation. In the Taschenwörterbuch, Kobler includes a sketch grammar of OHG and uses all the sources which he drew upon for the larger version . Thus it has the advantage of including glosses, laws, capitularies, and personal names still lacking in the fifth edition of S; Kobler's material does not include, however, the range of manuscript variants consulted by S. Kobler gives the number of times a word appears in his corpus but does not name sources, this crucial information is supplied by S. Pending the inclusion of the glosses and legal material in a future edition of S, the choice is between the more extensive listing of entries provided by Kobler, which includes some postulated readings, vs. the smaller, more conservative corpus with its list of citations for each entry provided by S. One only wishes that a dilemma of this nature existed for students of Old English. [Lisi Oliver, Louisiana State University.] English language teaching in India: Issues and innovations. Ed. by R. K. Agnihotri and A. L. Khanna. (Research in applied linguistics, V 2.) New Delhi: Sage, 1995. Pp. 338. The place of English in post-independence India has long been the subject of heated debate. This collection of 22 papers by English teachers and linguists focuses on several aspects ofEnglish language teaching (ELT) in India. The collection begins with an introduction (12-28) in which the editors point, among other things, to the linguistically and socially crippling effect of the perpetuation of the (now irrelevant) preindependence role that English played in British India. They conclude by proposing a restructuring of ELT that would involve setting up a language institute which would be responsible for bringing about improvements such as those suggested in this book Part I, 'Problematizing ELT in India' (33-81), begins with N. Krishnaswamy and T. Sriraman outlining the history of English teaching in India, with a critique of the current situation and some broad suggestions for improvement. In Part II, 'Nature of ELT materials' (85-138). Usha Nagpal points out that literary works are unsuitable ELT material and proposes using real-life texts instead that are graded by difficulty Raja Ram Mehrotra provides evidence of the damage that a literature-based ELT program may cause, citing student confusion at the lexical and syntactic levels due to poetic license in literary works. In this context, he also discusses the dangers involved in using premodern English texts in a contemporary ELT context and the cultural imperialism inherent in using non-Indian literature to teach English in India. S. C. Narula offers a solution to this last problem by suggesting that Indian literature m English, whether original or in translation, be used for ELT. PartIII, 'Learner profiles' (141-78), has papers by Khanna, Mohammad Aslam, and S C. Sood which underscore the need for...