Anandan considers conventional ELT a grand narrative alongside other grand narratives that have lost their credibility. The early sprouts of his skepticism in ELT came out while he was doing my research at CIEFL (now EFLU). It grew more and more along with his research in the Chomskyan paradigm. When he left the campus in 1991 he was convinced of the futility of ELT practices which were presumably woven around “dubious” claims on language and language learning.
Anandan started exploring how the notion of innateness could be made use of in second language pedagogy. This was not an easy task especially because, by proposing his innateness theory Chomsky had no intention to design a pedagogical model based on the claim. Nevertheless, anyone who reads Chomskyan theory on language and language acquisition will not miss to notice its pedagogical implication. Despite this a major chunk of ELT practitioners seem to maintain that Chomsky’s theory on Universal Grammar might be relevant in the context of acquiring mother tongue but is not much useful for second language pedagogy. Nor do they endorse SLA theories as proposed in Steven Pinker, Vivian Cook or Stephen Krashen. Since the ELT practices in vogue are strongly rooted in behavioural theories, the evolution of cognitive theories and their pedagogic implications have hardly reflected in ELT packages.
Anandan started developing pedagogic models for teaching English and trying out them deriving insights from Chomsky. The first model, ACE (Acquiring Competence in English) came out in 1995. This was tried out in Pariyapuram Central AUP School, Tanur of Malappuram District in Kerala. The major input for the learners in this model was interaction between two teachers based on selected pictures that were linked thematically. There was no intention to teach children anything. The programme avoided the practising of LSRW. No one compelled the learners to read, speak or write English. The prime objective was to give them authentic listening input which, they would be able to make sense of. The teachers did everything to make the children feel secure in the class. Eventually, children started performing all these skills. The District Institute for Educational Research and Training (DIET), Tiryur, Malappuram District and the Block Resource Centre (BRC) of SSA and the school extended their support to the programme. The world bank team who visited Kerala to see DPEP interventions visited the school and observed how children were learning English. As an innovative pedagogic model ACE received a lot of media coverage in those days.