Professor C.P. Shivdasan addresses the national seminar on problems with spoken English at the Tribal Welfare and Research Institute. Picture by Hardeep Singh

Ranchi, Nov. 20: English pronunciations are not easy to master, especially if one is only trained in a vernacular language.

Pronunciations for simple words like pleasure get metamorphosed into “plejure”. The ‘s’ in this word is pronounced as ‘z’. The tongue should produce a hissing sound,” pointed out Keertiwas Kumar, a faculty member of the English Language Training Institute (ELTI).

Kumar attempted to correct the pronunciation of 60 schoolteachers during a two-day workshop.

“I started with something as easy as ‘good morning’. Now, most people stress on the ‘r’, which should be silent. Similarly, in ‘pneumonia’, the ‘p’ is silent,” said C.P. Shivadasan, a teacher from Kerala, who was also here to train teachers in the language.

The workshop was jointly organised by the Jharkhand Education Project Council and ELTI.

“We are habituated to speak in a certain way. We have to first unlearn what we know and then relearn the words afresh again,” said Diwakar Pandey, a participant and teacher of Ratu Middle School.

The first language a child learns leaves a deep impact on his reading of words. But this can be changed through regular practice, felt S.K. Tripathi, a teacher from Ranchi College, who was here to train the participants.

State human resource development minister Bandhu Tirkey has ambitious plans of converting at least one Hindi medium school in each district into an English medium school by the next academic session. Then he plans to employ the trained teachers to help in the conversion of all Hindi-medium schools.