Stereotypes in Learning English as a Foreign Language in India

Abstract

With the introduction of a foreign language, the teachers or learners of it are forced to deal with the foreign world, their ideologies and their culture. Thus, by learning or teaching a second language, we unconsciously learn or teach the second strategy to encounter this entire world. But, in between this process, hangs the ‘stereotypes’ that we develop towards a particular foreign language and its culture. India, being a country with number of contrasts and contradictions, it beholds itself, a lot of stereotypes. It is very obvious for a multilingual country like India to encase surplus stereotypes based on its lingual platform. And, as the consequence of the colonization, these stereotypes particularly attack the English language. In the mid nineteenth century, as English language slowly starts to creep inside the roots of India, the natives are forced to develop and cope up with the new lingual stereotypes, unfamiliar to their cultural forum. And it still haunts the development of both the English and the native languages of Indians. Thus, this paper focuses on breaking those stereotypes and brings out a few possible solutions, which enhances the better learning or teaching of English as a foreign language in India.