Friday, June 26, 2009

Conflict

In Pakistan, mostly Linguistics is taught with respect to or in association with English literature studies. BZU Multan is the most biggest institute regarding Linguistics education in Pakistan. The students of BZU whether they are mastered in literature or language they have the basic knowledge of the other discipline. MSc Linguistics know the basics of literature and genres and, on the other hand, MA English Literature students have a basic knowledge of the major areas of Linguistics.
Linguistics at GCUF is trying to establish its roots. The Applied Linguistics Department was established in 2006 and after some time it was merged with Department of English. It was run under the head of English department of almost 4+ years. Here at GCUF, we have typical problems of management, favoritism and other such social evils of our society. People cannot see something progressing so linguistics students were suppressed in the department. Thus a dichotomy and tension was created among the two discipline's students. There is a fair state of hatred among them.
The department of applied linguistics is now a separate department but still we do not have equipment, managing staff and sufficient teaching staff. We share everything with department of English. The cream of university, the higher management is also in favor of English department. We need a language lab and today the controller examination of our university announced that department of English should re-submit the proposals etc so it may get the hosting of this language lab. I was wondering what is the need to have a language lab for an English Literature student.
I am not against the merger of these two departments. But the problem is what I mentioned above. The poeple are not ready to accept our existance in university. So we had to separate. Although it looks strange in Pakistani context that linguistics department is separate from english literature department. We should accept the existence of each other in every field of life instead of cutting the roots of each other.