Every Bangladeshi student studies English for twelve years. At the end of those twelve years, most cannot hold a basic conversation in the language. They can parse a sentence, identify a gerund, and reproduce a paragraph from memory. But ask them to speak freely, and they freeze. This is not a failure of the students. It is a failure of the system.

Bangladesh has built an educational system in which English is treated as an academic subject rather than a living tool of communication. The consequences are severe, and the irony is painful. In a world where English has become the currency of global opportunity, Bangladeshi students are being handed counterfeit notes.

Walk into a classroom in Bangladesh, and you will find a familiar scene. Students sit in rows, copying grammatical rules from a blackboard. The teacher speaks mostly in Bangla. English appears on the page but rarely in the air. Students memorise, reproduce, and move on. Nothing is actually communicated. This is the grammar-translation method, a relic of colonial pedagogy that treats language as a code to be decoded rather than a living system for human connection. It was designed in the nineteenth century to help European scholars read Latin and Greek texts. It was never designed to help a Bangladeshi student negotiate a salary, write a research proposal, or present at an international conference.

The brain does not learn language solely through memorisation. Research in second language acquisition suggests that the left hemisphere of the brain handles formal linguistic processing, including grammar rules, vocabulary recall, and analytical tasks. But the right hemisphere is equally involved in language use, helping us understand context, tone, humour, and social meaning. Real language learning requires both hemispheres to work together. The grammar-translation method addresses only one side of the brain, leaving the other largely untouched. Aphasia research makes this even clearer. When people suffer brain damage affecting Broca’s area in the left hemisphere, they lose the ability to produce fluent speech. When Wernicke’s area is damaged, they may speak fluently but without meaning or comprehension. Language, the brain tells us, is not a single skill. It is a network of functions. Teaching only grammar addresses just one node in that entire network.

Bangladesh does not have an English-learning problem. It has an English-teaching problem. The students are capable. The language is available. What is missing is the will to redesign a system that has confused exposure with acquisition for far too long.

Communicative Language Teaching was introduced into Bangladesh’s curriculum years ago. On paper, it was the right move. CLT emphasises real communication, meaningful interaction, and the use of language for practical purposes. But CLT in Bangladesh has largely remained a theoretical promise. Examinations still test grammar and reading comprehension. Teachers, who themselves learned English through translation methods, often struggle to deliver communicative lessons. Class sizes of sixty or seventy students make pair work almost impossible. The result is that CLT exists in the syllabus but not in the classroom.

A more promising direction lies in Task-Based Language Teaching. TBLT asks students to complete real-world tasks, including negotiating, planning, and solving problems using the target language. The language emerges from the task rather than from a grammar table. When a student must actually use English to do something meaningful, the brain engages differently. Motivation rises. Retention improves. Language becomes functional rather than decorative.

Content and Language Integrated Learning offers another path. In CLIL, students learn a subject such as history, science, or geography through English. The language becomes the medium rather than the message. This approach mirrors how children naturally acquire their first language: through meaningful engagement with the world, not through grammatical drilling. In countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, CLIL has been expanding in schools and universities precisely because it produces genuine bilingual competence rather than superficial test performance.

English in Bangladesh functions as a gatekeeper. University admission, competitive employment, and international scholarships all require English proficiency. But the key is unevenly distributed. Students from affluent families attend private English-medium schools, receive after-school tutoring, and emerge genuinely proficient. Students from government schools, especially in remote areas, emerge after 12 years of study with next to no real communicative ability. This is not progressivism. It is the reproduction of class inequality under the cover of education.

A well-designed curriculum would adopt TBLT principles at the classroom level, integrate CLIL approaches in higher secondary and university settings, reduce the high-stakes examination pressure that forces teachers to teach to the test, invest seriously in teacher training so that educators themselves possess genuine communicative competence, and bring class sizes down to a level where meaningful interaction is actually possible.

Bangladesh does not have an English-learning problem. It has an English-teaching problem. The students are capable. The language is available. What is missing is the will to redesign a system that has confused exposure with acquisition for far too long. Twelve years is more than enough time to produce a confident English speaker. Other countries have done it in far less time. The question is not whether Bangladesh can afford to change its approach. The question is whether it can afford not to.

Anika Tahsin Hafsa is a Trainee Sub-Editor at Arts & Entertainment and Star Showbiz of The Daily Star, and an MA student in Applied Linguistics and English Language Teaching at the University of Dhaka.

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