Finding Filipiniana
By Butch Dalisay, The Philippine Star

October 24, 2011—One of the things I look forward to when I visit the United States, apart from seeing family, is picking up a small trove of treasures (to me, that is — junk to most others) that I would have accumulated over the preceding months at my sister’s place in Virginia. Typically, these would be old pens and watches I got off eBay in the US, often for next to nothing. I’m coming home this week with a few pretty baubles to add to the collection, and my friends can look forward to some showing and telling in the days ahead.

But there’s been another collecting area that I’ve been dabbling in and should really pay more attention to — old books and documents about the Philippines, many of which are just lying and moldering out there with very few people knowing what they are. This interest of mine in recovering Filipiniana began two decades ago when I was a graduate student in the American Midwest, where I stumbled across the odd book celebrating America’s acquisition of a new territory in the Pacific (such as Murat Halstead’s The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions) or a literary journal with a Filipino author among the contributors. I picked these up for a dollar or so, and over time I had a shelf full of them back in Manila, worthy of some academic paper in the future, and certainly of immediate reading.

Sometimes I don’t even keep them. As I’ve mentioned here before, one such favorite find was a copy of Story — America’s premier prewar fiction journal — from 1936, featuring Sinai Hamada’s classic short story, “Tanabata’s Wife.” I spotted it in a stack of papers in the basement of Milwaukee’s fabled five-story Renaissance Book Shop, whose floors, even in 1990, were already tilting to one side…

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Will the teacher become obsolete?
By Butch Hernandez, Philippine Daily Inquirer

October 21st, 2011—Dr. Onofre Pagsanghan, the quintessential teacher, once said that he knew of no other profession, other than teaching, where so much is asked and so little is given.

In their manifesto which now languishes in what probably is the quintessential dustbin of history, our public school teachers once said that “it is a sad commentary of our times that our low compensation and low morale have forced us to work even as domestic helpers in other countries, which can provide us with higher salaries and benefits to feed our families and to keep up with the rising cost of living. We [who] comprise almost half of all government workers remain [among] the lowest paid and most overworked in the country today. Our salaries are lower than our counterparts in the military and police, many of whom do not possess the college degree, qualifications and eligibilities required of us.”

At the time this manifesto was made public in April 2009, the big teachers’ groups like the Philippine Public School Teachers Association took issue with the fact that a private in the Armed Forces of the Philippines makes more than a Teacher I.

I suppose that the meager compensation is one of the reasons why teaching is not a prime career choice for our best and brightest graduates. This partly explains why the few who do make it into our education system tend to seriously consider working abroad. The working and living conditions overseas might be tough, but for these intrepid souls, the pay makes the sacrifice worthwhile.

Still, many are wondering whether the iconic image of the teacher standing in front of the classroom might turn into a relic from the 20th century.

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Filipino students experience “technological shock” abroad
By Andrea Chloe Wong, Philippine Daily Inquirer

October 23rd, 2011—The poor standing of Philippine universities among the world’s top institutions is truly unfortunate. In the 2011-2012 Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings, none of the country’s premier schools made it to the top 300.

There is indeed a wide disparity between universities in the Philippines and those overseas. Aside from the extent of academic resources and quality of facilities, the difference also lies in the learning environment that shapes and influences the students’ academic development.

This observation is based on personal experiences studying here and abroad. After graduating with a Masters degree in Asian Studies at the University of the Philippines (UP), I had an opportunity to pursue another graduate program at the Australian National University (ANU). I completed a Masters degree in International Affairs through the Endeavour Awards, one of Australian government’s merit-based scholarship programs.

My experiences in UP and ANU, gave me insights into the differences in the two countries’ educational systems. This made me reflect on how Philippine universities can improve.

One of the obvious disparities between Australian and Philippine education are resources. Unlike in ANU that enjoys adequate government funding, UP has to eternally contend with budget cuts. This is evident in the lack of academic resources and low support for research and development. Students at the UP often make do with dilapidated facilities and out-of-date technology.

Given this condition in UP, classroom experiences are more conventional, relying heavily on traditional communication between professors and students…

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How to write (Part 1)
By Isagani Cruz, The Philippine Star 

October 13, 2011—Last Oct. 1, I was a speaker in a panel on “So You Want To Write a Book” at the Filipino American International Book Festival held in the San Francisco Public Library. The other panel members were Juanita Tamayo-Lott, Marivi Blanco, Paulino Lim, Jose Dalisay, and Criselda Yabes. Oscar Peñaranda was the moderator.

For those not able to attend that session, here is a summary of my tips on how to write:

When should you write?

Anytime as long as it’s the same time.

If you read the biographies of famous writers, there is one thing most of them had in common. They all had their favorite time to write. That time is called “writing time.” Writing time is sacred. Whether it is early in the morning, late at night, sometime during the day, every weekend, during November (during National Novel Writing Month or “Nanowrimo”), or even every other year, that time is sacred. If you want to be a writer, you should not allow any distractions during that time — not phone calls, not text messages, not Facebook, not even regular meals.

The extreme example is American playwright Arthur Miller, who would shut himself in his study all day and not allow his wife Marilyn Monroe to disturb him (needless to say, that marriage did not last!).

A recent example is Samantha Sotto, who wrote her novel “Before Ever After” while waiting for her son who was attending prep school.

Where should you write?

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Winning poets, writers, and books
By Alfred A. Yuson, The Philippine Star 

October 3, 2011—Congratulations to the winners of the Maningning Miclat Poetry Awards handed out last Thursday: Mikael de Lara Co for the English Division, Enrique Villasis for the Filipino and Pan Weili for the Chinese.

Our friend Kael Co, an Ateneo graduate, Fellow at the National Writers Workshop in Dumaguete, and member of the late lamented (hopefully resurrected) Los Chupacabraz band, continues to reap awards for his excellent poetry in both English and Filipino.

He also won the Miclat Poetry Grand Prize for English the last time out, in 2009, as the contest alternates annually between poetry and painting (to honor multi-genre artist Maningning Miclat). So it was a successful title defense for him, heh heh. A hat trick he can’t accomplish, however, as he will be over the age limit of 28 the next time out. Which is just as well, to make way for younger poets.

In 2007, Kael won the Palanca First Prize in English, and the following year, the Palanca First Prize in Filipino. Quite a feat. He’s also won third prize in the Philippines Free Press poetry contest.

All of these distinctions confirm that he’s one of our foremost young poets, together with his buddy and bandmate Joel Toledo (now enjoying the International Writing Program in Iowa City), who has also dominated poetry contests over recent years.

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Remembering a teacher
By Elmer A. Ordoñez, The Manila Times

October 01, 2011—I had the good fortune of having excellent English teachers in high school after the war, particularly those who inspired me to pursue my writing inclination and love for literature. I remember specially my English teacher in my third year at the FEU Boys High school (1946-47). She was a pre-war BSE graduate from UP and a contemporary of poet Trinidad Tarrosa and law student Abelardo Subido, who were known as the Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, respectively, of the Padre Faura campus. The two wrote sonnets to each other in UP publications. From this teacher, Mrs. Remedios T. Coquia, I first learned about the Literary Apprentice.

On our first day Mrs. Coquia was an unsmiling lady, perhaps to impress on us, all males, that she would brook no nonsense in class. We were mostly overaged, having missed three and a half years of schooling during the war; a few still wore fatigues and packed .45 cal. pistols of their guerrilla days. She was methodical in her teaching of grammar and the literary pieces. When she did let out a smile in appreciation it was the Mona Lisa kind. She readily won our respect.

I was one of two in our class who were already staff members of the school paper dominated by seniors. The other was Leland, the son of a bureau chief. I sensed he was the teacher’s favorite. In effect we were rivals trying to outdo each other in theme writing and vying for the teacher’s attention.

When she had a class rendering of The Merchant of Venice my rival was given the role of Shylock while I had to play the lesser Launcelot Gobbo, the foolish sidekick of the Jew. Teachers from other schools came to watch selected scenes from the play, cast in our own words. I must have been such a ham that the visitors later told the teacher how convincing I was as Launcelot Gobbo…

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To be free like a bird
By Ed Maranan, The Philippine Star

October 3, 2011—Miss Philippines-Universe Shamcey Supsup, weeks before her stint on the world stage, was asked by columnist Ricky Lo what kind of creature she would want to be, if she were to be reincarnated. Her reply was: “A bird, so I can fly high above the mountains and the seas.” How one wishes that this had been the question popped at her during the finals of the competition, instead of the bias-laden question on religion. Her answer would have been not only uncontroversial, but full of innocence, a sense of wonderment, with a universal resonance.

History and mythology are replete with examples of humans desiring to have what must be the most marvelous capability possessed by a living being  flight, freedom from gravity and the ground  and this exclusively belongs to the avian species. Human beings already possess what humanists would consider the crowning feature of creation, the human brain with all its attributes, but still, we have always yearned to be able to fly, and I suspect that not a few would be willing to trade places with a bird on wing, freed from the burdens being human and earthbound entails.

From the cautionary tale of wing-maker Daedalus and his ill-fated son Icarus, to the fantasy stories about Buck Rogers and other rocketeers with jetpacks, Chinese kung fu films with flying swordsmen, to the present-day real-life practitioners of flight with the aid of aerodynamic wingsuits and kerosene-fueled wingpacks, men have always had visions of taking to the sky.

My thoughts came to dwell on these flights of fancy because of several events not totally unrelated to one another…

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Moondogs barking in the tropical sunshine
By Jessica Zafra, The Philippine Star 

September 26, 2011—There aren’t many novels by foreign authors set in the Philippines. There’s Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson’s massive, genius novel about a crypto-hacker who plans to build a data haven in the Philippines. The description of the protagonist’s walk from the Manila Hotel to Luneta tells us that the author was in town to research his location.

The Blue Afternoon, a novel by the British author William Boyd (A Good Man In Africa), is set in Manila at the turn of the 20th century, but we’re not entirely convinced he was here. Years ago we heard that Brian De Palma wanted to do a film adaptation — Mr. De Palma, call us. The Tesseract, Alex Garland’s novel set in Manila and reportedly written in Quezon province, was adapted for film (Yay!) but relocated to Bangkok (Booo…).

Now there’s Moondogs, a novel about the kidnapping of an American businessman in the Philippines that readers have described as “Tarantinoesque.” For starters the perps are a taxi driver on meth and an evil rooster, and the crack force that is out to find them is endowed with supernatural powers. That sounds Pinoy all right, but how well does the author, Alexander Yates, know the Philippines? Has he even been here?

Oh yes, Alexander Yates has been here. He lived here, went to high school at IS Manila, and worked as a contractor in the US Embassy, where his job included reading stacks of Philippine newspapers dating back to the early years of the Marcos era. We spoke to Yates at the 32nd Manila International Book Fair, where he was one of the featured authors.

PHILIPPINE STAR: When did it occur to you that your novel would be set in the Philippines?

ALEXANDER YATES: At the point that I started writing, Manila was the city I knew best. I’m an American and when I went to the University of Virginia, people looked at me and assumed a certain level of shared experience…

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Befriending William
By Randy David, Philippine Daily Inquirer

September 17th, 2011—William Shakespeare is the English world’s greatest poet and playwright. Though he lived in the 16th century, his works have shaped the way students everywhere use the English language in declamation and think of drama as a literary form. His plays and sonnets are taught in high school and, whether or not they are correctly understood, every other line of English verse students get to memorize usually comes from Shakespeare. Yet, in many Filipino classroom settings, Shakespeare remains as distant as literature itself, and as intimidating as mathematics. Who is Shakespeare and why study him?

These are the questions that the Philippine Educational Theater Association (Peta) set out to answer in its most recent offering, simply titled “William.” My wife and I caught the afternoon presentation last Saturday, and I have to say I have rarely been impressed and delighted by a play like this. The audience of mostly high school and college students screamed and laughed and wept as the actors sang and danced and recited Shakespeare in a way never before seen on stage.

On an almost bare set, as it might well have been in Shakespeare’s time, it was the lines, sometimes delivered in sparkling rap and hip-hop, that took center stage. Here is a sampler from the opening scene:

“Sino ba si William/ Ba’t ang hirap niyang basahin
Para lang pumasa/ Mga dula’y halos lamunin
Di ma-gets kung anong pinagsasabi niya
Nalunod sa talinhaga ng kaniyang salita
O William please lang magpakilala ka sa’min
Mula sa langit ibulong mo sa akin
Alam mo bang hanggang dito sa sa’min sa Pinas
Kinikilala ang iyong talino’t tatas”

The situation of a group of Filipino high school kids in their junior year struggling to put together a meaningful report on Shakespeare speaks to every student who has ever had to face an alienating subject. As presentation day nears, they are gripped by panic…

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Ed Maranan—A writer for all seasons
By Elmer A. Ordoñez, The Manila Times

September 24, 2011—At age 16, Ed Maranan topped a national essay competition and was sent as Philippine delegate to the 1963 New York Herald Tribune World Youth Forum. From St. Louis College high school in Baguio he went to UP Diliman and finished a bachelor’s degree in foreign service. He remembers fondly his tutelage under professor and poet Gemino Abad who must have inspired him to write poetry.

In the 60s, idealistic youth immersed themselves in activism. Young Ed joined Kabataang Makabayan in 1966 and upon graduation, he taught political science in Diliman. During the First Quarter Storm in 1970 he became a member of PAKSA (Panulat para sa kaunlaran ng sambayanan), and SAGUPA (Samahan ng mga guro sa pamantasan), national democratic groups. It was then that I came to know him.

When martial law was declared he went underground. He was arrested in 1976, released in 1978, and taught in the UP Asian Studies Center. In the underground and in prison he wrote poems in English and Filipino —which appeared in his first books Agon and Alab and in a Canadian anthology of Filipino poetry titled The Guerrilla is Like a Poet. In 1985 he was the Philippine fellow in the Iowa International Writing Program, and in 1992 a British Council fellow in the University of London and Oxford University.

In 1993 he became information officer of the Philippine embassy in London and served until 2006.

From his travels since 1983 he has put together his poems about places and seasons in his 2007 collection Passage. He now sees himself as a free-lance writer.

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Tongue and root
By Danton Remoto, The Philippine Star

September 19, 2011—That is the title of the essay of the Chinese Malaysian writer Shirley Geok-lin Lim appended to her collection of prize-winning poems entitled Monsoon History. Born in Malacca of Chinese immigrants, she learned English in school, took her PhD in the United States, and decided to stay there when Bahasa Malaysia became the regnant language in her homeland.

Thus, she became a hyphenated writer: a peranakan Chinese-Malaysian-American, feminist writer of postcolonial texts, growing up speaking in Chinese but later writing in English. She descends directly from the line started by Maxine Hong Kingston, whose The Woman Warrior, published in 1975, kicked open the door of Asian-American writing in English to the world. She also belongs to the illustrious company of non-native speakers of English who — by dint of hard work, if not the brilliance of their genius — produced some of the most enduring works in world literature. Among these were Joseph Conrad (The Heart of Darkness), Isak Dinesen (Seven Gothic Tales), Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita), and Jamaica Kincaid (Lucy).

What about the kind of English they spoke, if not pinned down in their books? Generally, it was a melodious and lyrical kind of English. Because transplanted from the soil of a non-English or American imagination, the prose is luxuriant, colorful, and even strange. The grammar is perfect, but the rhythms glide and roll and fly, as if to capture the tropical weather, or the baroque tradition, from which the writers sprang.

In the case of Geon lin-Lim, she says that “English is my calling. I make my living teaching it to native speakers, I clean up the grammar of English professors, I dream in its rhythms, and I lose myself for whole hours and days in its words, its syntaxes, its motions and its muscled ideas. Reading and writing it is the closest experience I have ever had to feeling infinity in my presence.”

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Why we are shallow
By F. Sionil Jose, The Philippine Star 

September 12, 2011—I was visited by an old Asian friend who lived here 10 years ago. I was floored by his observation that though we have lots of talented people, as a whole, we continue to be shallow.

Recently, I was seated beside former Senator Letty Shahani, PhD in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne, watching a medley of Asian dances. The stately and classical Japanese number with stylized movements which perhaps took years to master elicited what seemed to me grudging applause. Then, the Filipino tinikling which any one can learn in 10 minutes; after all that energetic jumping, an almost standing ovation. Letty turned to me and asked, “Why are we so shallow?”

Yes, indeed, and for how long?

This is a question which I have asked myself, which I hope all of us should ask ourselves every so often. Once we have answered it, then we will move on to a more elevated sensibility. And with this sensibility, we will then be able to deny the highest positions in government to those nincompoops who have nothing going for them except popularity, what an irresponsible and equally shallow media had created. As my foreign friend said, there is nothing to read in our major papers.

Again, why are we shallow?

There are so many reasons. One lies in our educational system which has diminished not just scholarship but excellence. There is less emphasis now on the humanities, in the study of the classics which enables us to have a broader grasp of our past and the philosophies of this past. I envy those Hindus and Buddhists who have in their religion philosophy and ancestor worship which build in the believer a continuity with the past, and that most important ingredient in the building of a nation — memory.

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How my sons lost their Tagalog: “Sulat kay” James Soriano
By Benjamin Pimentel, Philippine Daily Inquirer

SAN FRANCISCO, September 10, 2011—My wife and I decided early on that Tagalog was going to be our sons’ first language.

It wasn’t easy.

In his first days in preschool, our firstborn was miserable, intimidated by a world in which pretty much everyone spoke English.

But his pediatrician said not to worry about it. Experts said not to worry about it. They even said that it’s good for kids to be exposed to many languages, that they, eventually, will adjust and adapt.

And my son did.

It didn’t take long for Paolo to be fluent in English, although he later, sadly, lost his Tagalog.
His younger brother grew up with a kuya who spoke to him in English. They had some funny moments. Anton would struggle to tell his big brother, “Eh kuya, I just ano … uh … because … maglaro naman tayo.”

But like his kuya, it didn’t take long for Anton to shift from Filipino to English. And sadly, he, too, lost his Tagalog.

Well, they didn’t actually “lose” it.

It’s still there. They can understand, but would not speak it.

But the spirit of my mother tongue is still part of them. I hope someday that they get a chance to use it again, to be immersed once again in that world. It’ll be up to them.

Which brings me to James Soriano, the Ateneo senior, whose essay on his own struggles with English and Filipino sparked a heated controversy, especially on the Web…

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From a fish tank to a boat
By Butch Dalisay, The Philippine Star

September 12, 2011—Many, many years ago, as a high school junior, I read a newspaper announcement inviting everyone interested to join an essay contest on the topic of the Manila Aquarium. The subject perked my interest because, as luck would have it, I had paid a visit to the aquarium in Intramuros and had been fascinated by the fish (I still am hypnotically drawn to fish in a tank, which literally gives me a window on another world).

I thought of joining the contest, which was a cheeky thing to do, given that it was open to all Filipinos and I was all of 15. But I guess teenagers have nothing if they don’t have hubris, so I typed up my essay, mailed it off to the organizers, and forgot about the contest. On May 20, 1969, I received an RCPI telegram in school, care of our principal: “CONGRATULATIONS YOUR ENTRY ZONTA CLUB ESSAY CONTEST HAS BEEN ADJUDGED FIRST PRIZE BE AT THE MANILA AQUARIUM 9:30 SUNDAY MORNING MAY 24.” It was my first writing prize on a national scale, and it whetted what would become, over the next couple of decades, a ravenous appetite for competitions of the writerly sort.

I remember those exact details, because — bless our mothers who keep every scrap of filial achievement they can lay their hands on — I still have that telegram, along with a yellowed envelope that once contained P50, which was part of first prize. The P50 was pocket money for the real treat, a round-trip ticket for two to Iloilo, in a cabin on board one of the Negros Navigation ships…

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Writing for the Palanca
By Scott Lee Chua, Philippine Daily Inquirer

September 11, 2011—In March, I chanced upon the homepage of the Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature and saw this question: “What is the greatest lesson you have learned from the Internet?”

I was then attempting to edit a Wikipedia page on Philippine history on another window. I took the query as a sign from heaven and decided to join the Kabataan Essay Division, English Category. An avid Netizen, I had many things to say.

To prepare for the Palanca, I underwent two major stages: fire and ice. During the first stage (fire), I alternated between bursts of activity, banging away at the keyboard, and sitting still for hours, looking out into space, simply thinking about what to say next.

I jotted down all ideas as quickly as I could, entering them into the computer in a jumbled, frenzied way. I would not let anyone look at the draft. My family said I looked like a man possessed.
After completing 12 pages, I was shocked to see that contest regulations set five pages as the limit. Perhaps it was the small font, or my weak eyes. I thought the page limit was 15. How could I cut my precious work in half?

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A review of Perlmann’s Silence by Pascal Mercier
By Alberto Manguel, Guardian.co.uk

October 21, 2011—Plagiarism – the word, not the concept – did not enter the English language until 1597. Some 20 years earlier the crime of plagium, meaning kidnapping or, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “man-stealing,” became recognised in English law. Therefore the taking of another person’s thoughts, writings or inventions and calling them one's own seems to have been considered in the 16th century a kind of identity theft, a material metonymy in which stealing a person's work is equivalent to stealing that person's being. And yet, until well into the 18th century, writers were stealing from one another freely.

In our time, however, plagiarism has become a dirty word, especially in academic circles. In the case of the widowed, unhappy and lonely Dr Philipp Perlmann, a distinguished linguistics professor and the protagonist of Pascal Mercier's new novel, it is the breaking point that allows the troubled scholar a deep, rich, complex search for the meaning of self.

During one of many learned conferences, Perlmann is approached by a representative of the Olivetti company, who wishes to engage his services to set up a research group with a linguistic theme. Money and means are available, and the choice of participants will be Perlmann’s. The meeting of the team will take place at a quiet seaside town near Genoa, a beautiful resort overlooking the sea. Reluctantly, and not quite certain why he is reluctant, Perlmann agrees. But as the day of the first conference approaches, as the participants begin to arrive, his meagre confidence fails him. He no longer knows why he is here, what he is supposed to be doing, what he is expected to say. Perlmann falls into a mental and physical silence from which he painfully draws a few words and gestures…

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Euro-English: Blasting the bombast
By Johnson, Economist.com

LONDON, September 30, 2011—Preaching the gospel of plain language is a hard task within the European Union, a set of institutions famed for their serpentine sentences and eurocratic waffle. The Commission’s Clear Writing Campaign is trying a different tack: it is using the power of song to garner support for its initiative. “Good news—clarity’s a-coming!” extol choristers from the Hot Air Ensemble in jouncing Harlemesque euphony, in a clip that the campaign has posted on YouTube. Unfortunately, with fewer than 4,000 views at the time of writing, few of the Commission’s 25,000-odd employees seem to have watched it.

The Clear Writing Campaign, launched in March last year, is the Commission’s latest attempt to spruce up its communication. It made laudable efforts to improve after the launch of the Fight the Fog initiative, back in 1998, by providing “citizens’ summaries” of policy documents and creating an in-house editing unit. But the persistence of official obfuscation, and the previous campaign’s exclusive focus on English, left room for improvement. Now, the linguistic spring-clean is set to encompass 23 of the Commission’s working languages—although that move seems largely political, since the majority of text at the Commission is written in English before being translated.

Which goes to the heart of the problem: few drafters are crafting their documents in a language they grew up with. A survey of 6,000 Commission employees found that 95% wrote in English, but only 13% of those were native speakers. Over half said that they rarely or never ran their documents by someone whose mother tongue was English. Although editing is available, it seems few employees take advantage of it, probably because of work pressures and time constraints. In these circumstances, nasty neologisms and unwieldy constructions are inevitable.

The hilarity of some of the slip-ups gives this clash of tongues a silver lining. Mistakes are often the result of “false friends”—words or phrases in English that bear a deceptive resemblance to some linguistic cousin…

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Stephen Fry’s Planet Word, BBC Two, review
By James Walton, Telegraph.co.uk

September 25, 2011—Another week, another new series by Stephen Fry. This time, in Fry’s Planet Word (BBC Two, Sunday), he’s investigating language—a subject he’s long tackled on Radio 4, possibly with a rather smaller budget. Last night, for example, after an awestruck hymn to language as “the very core of our being”, he was able to begin his investigation wandering amiably among the Turkana people of rural Kenya.

These pastoral nomads have, we learned, a language with rules surprisingly similar to English, and which their children pick up around the age of two, usually starting with the Turkana for “Mummy” and “Daddy”. And with that, Fry returned to London to meet 15-month-old Ruby, whose linguistic development the programme would supposedly track over the course of the following year.

In fact, we saw Ruby only twice more: a flying visit on her second birthday, when she was already combining words, and an even shorter one three months later, when she was using full sentences. In the meantime, Fry headed to Leipzig to find out from assorted evolutionary linguists why chimps can’t talk. (Basically, because they’re chimps.)

The trouble was that this strange restlessness didn’t pass. Naturally, Fry was never less than engaging company and there’s no doubting that his awe is genuine. Yet, the overall result was what – if presented by a less revered figure – might well be described as a weird mish-mash.

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An inquiry into the finer points of translation
By Michael Hofmann, Guardian.co.uk

September 22, 2011—A frolicsome cover, and a title and subtitle that perform in two different registers of cool, mask a disquisition of remarkable freshness on language, speech and translation. In short, punchy, instructive chapters that take in such things as linguistics, philosophy, dictionaries, machine translation, Bible translations, international law, the Nuremberg trials, the European Union and the rise of simultaneous interpreting ("the Soviet delegate has just made a joke"), David Bellos, Princeton professor and translator of Georges Perec, Ismail Kadare and others, makes a maximalist case for translation as perhaps the definitive human activity.

The great Australian poet Les Murray says simply: “We are a language species.” There are some 7,000 languages currently in use in the world. Were there to be parity among them – which of course there isn’t – that would give rise to 25 million different pairs of languages, and therefore twice as many “potentially separate translation practices”; French into English not being the same as English into French. Suddenly, a new 49 million-ply international industry looms. In fact, though, there are only around 50 languages that participate significantly in the give and take of translation – resulting in a paltry 2,500 language relationships (thus winnowing the field by a factor of a handy 20,000) – and those not particularly equally.

There is a top table of a dozen or so languages (Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, and so on) which will obtain access to most of the world for you, and then there is English, which is the “inter-language” of choice.

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Language is vital, not just to communicate
Prof. Peter Kruschwitz, Guardian. co.uk

September 16, 2011—Jobseekers who don’t learn English may have their benefits cut, David Cameron and work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith announced this week. Cameron is quoted as saying: “We’re saying that if there’s something you need to help you get a job, for instance being able to speak English and learn English properly, it should be a requirement that you do that study in order for you to receive your benefits.”

Whether or not one agrees with Cameron’s punitive rather than rewarding measures to enforce employability, this is a remarkable statement. The media have largely focused on the impact of this statement on migrants. However, it would appear that this policy also covers natives whose language skills are not up to scratch.

It would be perverse to argue that, in a modern society, one could leave it at individuals' liberty to learn the majority language. It is an essential skill, enabling individuals not only to survive, but to participate and engage constructively in political, social, cultural, and economic life. In that respect, the measure seems politically reasonable, even if the form of enforcement may seem questionable.

However, there are further issues at stake here, and these tend to get lost in this important debate. It may be a commonplace, but it is true regardless: language means power…

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The Issue: English as a second language
By Jeremy Sutcliffe, TES Magazine

August 26, 2011—Contrary to some press reports, underperformance is by no means inevitable among pupils whose first language is not English

Earlier this month the Daily Mail put the spotlight on a Bradford primary school where only four out of 417 children spoke English as their first language. Describing it as “one of Britain’s most extreme cases”, the article said the school showed how many of our cities were becoming “racially segregated”, with many pupils leading “parallel lives”.

More than 90 per cent of pupils at the school, Bradford Moor Primary, were from Pakistan and many arrived at the school “unable to speak a word of English”, claimed the article. It went on to quote local Conservative MP Philip Davies, who criticised Asian parents for allowing their children to start school “with scant knowledge of their adopted home’s language”.

The Mail reporter does herself few favours by getting her facts wrong, claiming more than half of Bradford primary pupils speak English as an additional language (EAL). In fact, the true figure is 43.5 per cent, according to the latest school census (January 2011). The figure for EAL pupils in Bradford secondary schools is 29.7 per cent.

Nationally, the number of EAL pupils has been rising steadily for more than a decade and stands at 946,580 pupils in England - 14.5 per cent of the school population. This is almost double the figure in 1997, when there were 500,000 EAL pupils.

While this rising trend is a concern for schools that have to deal with an influx of children starting reception classes without a solid grasp of English, there are two reasons why Mr Davies and the Mail are wrong to claim the language barrier is a key reason why areas like Bradford are underperforming academically…

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How I learned to stop worrying and love “bad English”
By Eric John, ImpactNottingham.com

August 20, 2011—When it comes to the English language, I turn into a purist — and I don’t just mean cringing at the odd misplaced apostrophe, but full-on, wretched ‘grammar-OCD’. I probably wouldn’t resort to text-speak even if I had life-or-death-determining seconds to contact friends and family, and any conversation in which a participant offhandedly punctuates their sentence with “innit” ends with me shunning them as if they had committed theft in an Oxfam store. So, it’s really just an accident (namely, a movie adaptation starring Halle Berry; curse you beautiful Hollywood goddess) that I ended up reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Already, from page one onwards, you learn that you are definitely not in for one of those mushy, curling-up-on-a-sofa-while-munching-a-bar-of-Galaxy-type reading experiences, and coincidentally, that Halle Barry starring in a movie is no suitable barometer for literary enjoyment. And to be honest, there were plenty of times while reading it that the temptation to put it down and never to pick it up again was almost overwhelming. It was simply out of die-hard bibliophilia (let the stereotypes ensue; if you guessed that I wear glasses, you are correct) that I could not leave the novel unfinished.

Now, let’s get to the plot, because you’ve probably been wondering for quite a while. Essentially, Their Eyes Were Watching God introduces us to early 20th century America through the eyes of its black protagonist, Janie Crawford. The book starts where it also ends, with a childless, thrice-married Janie facing an onslaught of gossip about the circumstances of her third husband’s death…

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Which words should be thrown out of the English language?
By Ed West Politics Last updated: August 23rd, 2011

August 23, 2011—In the news this week – experts at Collins Dictionary have compiled a list of words that have fallen out of use in the past half-century.

Among them are “wittol” – a man who tolerates his wife’s unfaithfulness; “drysalter,” a dealer in certain chemical products and foods; and “alienism,” the study and treatment of mental illness.

While I think the English language can do without “succedaneum” or “woolfell”, and words always come and go, what has been tragic is the way that some other words have been zombified, changed to something altogether different to their real meaning. And while this happens naturally in language – “artificial,” “awful” and “nice,” for instance, all once had completely different meanings – what’s different is that these changes were deliberately made, by institutions and individuals, with the aim of distorting the political discourse. As the saying goes, 1984 was supposed to be a warning, not a manual.

Last year I wrote about words that had evolved completely different (and often contradictory) meanings, and which should officially be on the banned list, among them:

“Clients” – to mean criminals (when described by members of the justice system).
“Diversity” – Lots of middle-class people of various ethnic backgrounds who all went to the same schools, the same universities, watch the same programmes, read the same books and vote the same way.

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Butt out America! Stop Americanisms from invading our language!
By Matthew Engel, DailyMail.co.uk

August 7, 2011—Hey, you guys! Listen up! Remember the Say No to the Get-Go campaign that started in The Mail on Sunday a year ago to try to curb the use of American vocabulary in British English? It has suddenly got a bit more serious.

Last month I was invited to give a talk on the Radio 4 series Four Thought. I said I wanted to bang on about Americanisms. The BBC managers involved had their doubts about whether the subject would engage their audience, but eventually gave way.

Well, in terms of audience reach, this 15-minute programme – in the middle of a warm midsummer evening – will not go down in radio history as a rival to Neville Chamberlain’s of war on Germany or the Terry Wogan Show.

Taking liberties: Have Brits lost their grasp on the difference between our form of English and America's?

But a version of what I said appeared on the BBC website, and got more than three million page impressions, which apparently is every bit as impressive as it sounds. And from there things went a little crazy.

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A challenge to Britain’s new “Speak English” rule
By Patrick Cox, TheWorld.org

August 1, 2011—Imagine you’re married to a Chinese citizen. You want to move to China to live with your spouse. But the Chinese government won’t let you because you don’t speak Chinese.

In reality, there is no such language requirement in China. Nor is there one for immigrants to the United States. The only language proficiency test in the United States is for citizenship.

But there is now such a test in Britain.

It has been introduced by Britain’s Conservative-led government, which has vowed to tighten immigration and reverse policies of multiculturalism.

“Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we’ve encouraged different cultures to live separate lives apart from each other, and apart from the mainstream,” said British Prime Minister David Cameron in May. “We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values.”

Cameron’s government has introduced a new English language proficiency test for some would-be immigrants.

Anyone applying for a visa for long-term residency— roughly equivalent to a U.S. green card— will now be tested to make sure they have a basic grasp of English.

As a result, Rashida Chapti, a naturalized British citizen, cannot get a visa for her 58-year-old husband, who, like her, was born in India.

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When I didn’t know owt about posh speak
By Vicki Woods, Telegraph.co.uk

August 5, 2011—Tonight on Radio 4 I shall mostly be listening to Melvyn Bragg as he wanders down the routes of the English language yet again. He is doing one of his routine checks on whether or not Received Pronunciation (RP, aka BBC English, Standard English or the Queen’s ditto) has finally come to the end of its 400-year reign in the southern half of these islands.

The Blessed Melv has trod these paths before, but I never mind the repetition because I am a fellow Northerner, whose own speech has changed (softened, you might say, or even “mellowed”) over the years as much as his has. And I am as fascinated by RP as he is.

I like it. I don’t see why one shouldn’t prefer one regional variation of a national language over another. An Italian sculptress I met at a friend’s house near Lucca told me to listen hard to the prevailing accent if I wanted to improve my Italian pronunciation. “Molto, molto Toscano,” she said. “The best.”

Of course, the problem with RP is that it doesn’t strike people as regional variation but rather a social one. That’s because they don’t notice the difference between boring old straight vanilla RP (which Jeremy Paxman speaks) and URP, where U means Upper-class, as it has done since Nancy Mitford wrote her essay.

I love listening to real, proper URP when it pops out of Radio 4 occasionally – Lady Antonia Fraser reading her memoir of her husband Harold Pinter, for example, or Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, talking about hens or Mitfords.

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Languages open door to understanding
By Rachel Martens, PostCrescent.com

October 29, 2011—I recently had the privilege of meeting a foreign exchange student from Moldova. In talking with her, I, along with many students and teachers at my school, was shocked to learn that she spoke seven languages fluently.

She’s not alone. Millions of children throughout the world become fluent in a minimum of two languages at a young age, usually in their native language and English. Many of these kids master numerous languages in their lifetimes.

What really got me thinking was her experience versus that of American children, who in the age of technology have difficulty speaking English fluently, much less other languages.

The United States is far behind the majority of the world in foreign language studies for several reasons. First is a sort of American nationalism that has grown strong in recent decades, partly because of foreign wars and the loss of jobs to immigrants.

America, once a safe haven for people of all cultures, has grown close-minded over the years. We no longer respect what other cultures have to offer in the way that we once did. We're victims of a simple lack of understanding and, as seen repeatedly throughout world history, a lack of understanding leads to prejudices.

As Americans, we have trouble seeing the value of foreign cultures because we don't understand them. While our nation should be a place of tolerance, diversity and progress, many of us can't move past prejudice. One of these prejudices is against foreign languages.

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Bilingual and struggling
By Fariba Nawa, ChristianScienceMonitor.com

NEWARK, October 18, 2011—My daughter Bonoo Zahra, age 3, began preschool in August, and my worst fear about her education in the United States is coming true – English is invading her speech.

Before she began school, she exclusively spoke Farsi, our native Afghan language, but now she shuts the door to her room and prattles in English with her imaginary friends. She prefers to watch cartoons in English and wants me to read her books in English.

My husband, Naeem, and I decided our language at home would be Farsi so that our two daughters could learn to speak it. They would learn English in school and outside the home. After watching dozens of relatives’ and friends’ children in the US forget their native language, we are determined to teach Bonoo and Andisha, 5 months, the importance of bilingualism. But it’s a battle many second-generation immigrant parents have lost to the pervasiveness of English.

Besides preserving cultural heritage, a second language can boost careers, sharpen analytical skills, and encourage communication with a world outside one's own.

The loss of language is a deep-seated fear among many immigrants. The US has been dubbed the graveyard of languages by some academics for pushing English and excluding other tongues. Currently about 55 million Americans speak a language besides English at home, but by the third generation, the home language tends to atrophy, according to various studies. American society supports a rhetoric of multiculturalism but not multilingualism, experts say.

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English influence on other languages
By Harold Raley, GalvestonDailyNews.com
 
September 25, 2011—We could pick almost any modern language to illustrate what could be called the linguistic “imperialism” of English: Japanese, Russian, Portuguese or Spanish, to name but a few.

In this case, let us consider two — German and Italian.

Unlike the French, who resist — though often not successfully — the pervasive influence of English, the Germans seem to fear that opposition might remind people of the Third Reich and the restrictions Hitler placed on foreign words.

As a result, English expressions appear with ever greater frequency in German conversations and writing. German advertisements even appear entirely in English.

Here is a partial list of common English words one hears in German: “cool,” “management,” “sorry,” “T-shirt,” “shorts,” “warm-up,” “jogging,” “harddisc,” “online,” “flat-screen” and “meeting.” Sometimes it is a matter of using German words in an English-manner.

“Das macht sinn” — that makes sense — really does not make sense unless one understands it imitates an English construction.

As one would expect, some Germans have pushed back against English. The Association of the German Language is a group dedicated to preserving the purity of German speech.

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Putting our minds to helping immigrants learn English
By Steve Lopez, Los Angeles Times

September 17, 2011—In my back-to-school column two weeks ago, I wrote that parents ought to look in the mirror before pinning all the blame for the state of education on schools and teachers.

Readers were with me on the idea that parents ought to be more engaged in their children’s education, whether they do so at home, on campus or by marching on Sacramento. But reactions split over my suggestion that parents who make no effort to learn English aren't helping their kids or themselves.

As promised, here’s the follow-up.

And let me begin by saying that lack of parental involvement is a problem regardless of income or race. Are any parents more annoying than those who impose no discipline at home, then blame their child’s disruptive antics or lousy grades on the school, the curriculum or the teacher’s inability to recognize what a genius the child is?

Now to the subject of language. In the Sept. 4 column, a parent volunteer told me that she’s attended meetings conducted in Spanish, with an English translation for her. I said that struck me as ridiculous, because what incentive is there to learn English if you don’t have to?

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Where the wild things learn language
By Matt Ridley, Wall Street Journal

September 24, 2011—There are many mysteries about Ray, the 17-year-old English-speaking "forest boy" who walked into the city hall in Berlin on Sept. 5, claiming to have lived wild in the woods for five years with his father—until his father recently died in a fall. Judging by his rucksack and his speech, he was not a fully feral child, reared by wild animals and unacquainted with language.

Among many legends, from Romulus to Mowgli, only one feral child from the woods might be genuine. Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron in France, who was discovered in 1800, was believed at the time by Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, the medical student who took him in, to have "lived in an absolute solitude from his fourth or fifth almost to his 12th year." Yet despite Itard's efforts, Victor never learned to speak, and Itard eventually gave up and "abandoned my student to incurable dumbness."

But there are urban equivalents. In 1828, the year Victor died, Kaspar Hauser was found in Nuremberg, Germany. He had apparently lived not in the forest but in a dark room with virtually no human contact for his 16 years. Like Victor, he adjusted to most things, but not to speech. Even after years of coaching, his syntax was "in a state of miserable confusion." The filmmakers François Truffaut and Werner Herzog turned the stories of Victor and Hauser, respectively, into striking fables.

In 1971, a 13-year-old girl named Genie was found in Los Angeles after a childhood of painful deprivation. The daughter of a blind mother and an abusive father, she had been kept in silence in a single room, mostly either tied to a chair or caged. She was deformed, incontinent and mostly mute. Her only words were "stopit" and "nomore." Although she improved rapidly and developed a good vocabulary, elementary grammar and syntax remained beyond her reach.

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Business politics and the English language
By Katherine Bell, TodayOnline

September 16, 2011—In 2009, three professors published a Harvard Business School working paper about a Germany-based technology multinational that had adopted English as its official language.

The policy requiring English for all work-related communication among employees was intended to improve efficiency and collaboration, but Tsedal Neeley, Pamela Hinds and Catherine Cramton found that it created anxiety and resentment instead. Some of the Germans felt awkward communicating in English.

They avoided speaking in meetings, left native English-speakers out of discussions and sometimes “code-switched”—ddrifted back into speaking German—during a conversation or an email thread to more efficiently make a point. Meanwhile, English-speakers interpreted their German colleagues’ avoidance of English as rude and exclusionary.

Language is the medium through which we understand one another and ourselves, and we are brought up to believe that our own is special. In the United States, an active band of English-only advocates is one manifestation of the country’s larger struggle over immigration policy. Look to the Facebook group—currently 275,552 members strong—that “likes” the suggestion that bilingual customer service (“Press 1 for English, 2 for Spanish”) is an affront, if not an outright threat, to English-speaking Americans.

A handful of recent books on the politics and economics of language make it clear just how out of step with global realities this fear is…

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Woes about the free speech issue in America
By Leah Garchik, The San Francisco Chronicle

CALIFORNIA, September 16, 2011—Driving on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, Richard Holden overheard a Highway Patrol officer using his megaphone to address a motorist who was parking: “You are pushing the limits in the realm of unsafe backing up.” Puzzled Holden asks, “Whatever happened to ‘Hey, look before you back up, (expletive)!’”

On the other hand, a saucy sign in the window of the downtown Diesel store made use of the f-word (herein reinterpreted for a family audience)—“Diesel Island, the least tucked-up country in the world ...”—and one reader says when she went in “to register my dismay over this tasteless public vulgarity,” she was told, “This is America and it’s a free speech issue.”

Did they get complaints? “None, directly” (huh?), Diesel told The Chronicle.

The courtyard of the San Francisco Art Institute on Chestnut Street—nestled around a pond, surrounded by arches, a Diego Rivera mural in a gallery to one side, the bay’s best view to the north—provided a warm backdrop for Monday’s reception for the institute’s new director, Charles Desmarais, and his wife, Kitty Morgan.

Artists, art collectors, connoisseurs, historians, dealers and educators—“the swells of the art world,” said one, many with generations of ancestors who’d studied at or supported the institute—turned out in full force, with brimming wineglasses and matching hopes for the future. The gathering, said one longtime supporter, was about reinvigoration.

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The Power of a Bilingual Brain
By Mariela Dabbah, HuffingtonPost.com

September 6, 2011—I've been an English language learner since I was 6-years-old, first in my native Argentina and then as a young adult in the United States. I studied the language in an academic environment, thus my almost perfect fluency. "Almost" being the operative word here.

A few years ago when I began my career as a writer and public speaker, I decided to publicly acknowledge that I am prepositionally challenged. That's right. On and in—two apparently innocuous monosyllables—have been at the forefront of my ongoing tango with English.

My friend and personal editor, Susan Landon (by now, my not-so-secret weapon), has had the biggest belly laughs and hair pulling episodes while editing my blogs, columns, books and anything else I throw her way. And, as I believe in the literary adage "show, don't tell," here is one of our latest exchanges to help you fully appreciate my grammatical handicap.

I sent Susan a new Op-Ed, which I had originally entitled: "Black Woman on the Golf Course." (Admittedly, I had previously checked via phone with her that it was "on the golf course.") My subject line, however, read: "Black woman in the golf course."

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What happened to English?
By Jay Wince, ZanesvilleTimesRecorder.com
 
September 4, 2011—The current Old Navy goof of omitting the apostrophe on the company's new line of college apparel featuring the slogan "Lets Go (fill in the sports team)" very publicly brings to the surface the growing problem of many Americans' misuse of the English language and the rules that govern it.

Slang always has been a part of any language, and subtle shifts of word meanings are evolutionary in some cases, but in our country, the appalling degradation of the correct use of grammar and spelling, especially in our mainstream media, has become unacceptable. Listen to conversations in public, and you'll find use of the correct forms of words, tense and person are fleeting. Don't even get me started on what texting has done to the language. It dumbs down words into single letters and symbols and could be the single most destructive element in degrading the knowledge of our youth in English grammar and proper spelling.

Now let me be clear, I am not an English major, and I definitely make my share of grammatical errors, but my wife and I tend to notice business signs, print advertising and headlines in major newspapers. The elementary mistakes in spelling, grammar and punctuation that we see are becoming more and more common. A few examples among many we often see are incorrect usage of "to" and "too," "than" and "then" or "there" and "their." As to the misuse of apostrophes and punctuation, we notice that is a whole other epidemic in itself.

Beyond English and grammar, our society seems to have lost sight of what we are teaching our children and the function of our schools. Sports are the focus, and learning to pass proficiency tests has become the goal…

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Debate: Should U.S. kids learn Chinese?
BusinessWeek.com

PRO: A Business Plus
By Patrick Supanc, Pearson

We live in a global and interconnected economy and we need to prepare our kids for it.

That preparation includes such skills as speaking outstanding English, since English remains a key language in global business, science, and technology. We must continue to address the alarmingly low levels of English proficiency we see in many of our students. Only 30 percent of U.S. students are proficient English-language readers, according to state test data.

We also need to prepare our kids to navigate a global workplace in which knowledge of languages and cultures other than our own will provide a key competitive advantage for higher-paying jobs.

China will inevitably be a major economic, political, and cultural force in our children’s future. We should prepare our students to engage, collaborate, and compete with their Chinese peers…

CON: A Wrongheaded Expense
By Matthew Stewart, Millburn Parents Against Charter Schools

The language of business is money, not Mandarin. Only a small percentage of Americans currently speak Mandarin, even in the business world. This has not prevented us from doing business with China. In fact, our liberal trade with China has spiraled out of control to the detriment of our own economy.

The U.S. government owes Chinese investors more than $1 trillion, a result of their heavy investment in our debt. In addition, our manufacturing base has been replaced by outsourced labor and domestic unemployment now exceeds 9 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Our fiscal deficit has surpassed $1 trillion per year and our nation’s total debt has jumped to more than $14 trillion. We should not be using scarce tax dollars to teach American students to speak Mandarin.

China also practices mercantile trade policies, including a pegged exchange rate, artificially deflated currency, and a notoriously lax regulatory environment. Teaching Mandarin will only provide extra incentives for U.S. companies to continue supporting these irresponsible policies…

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How many English learners are there in China?
Economist.com

NEW YORK, September 1, 1011—“Seeing  Red in China,” a blog by an American teacher there, makes a provocative argument. Behind the eye-catching number that 300m people either are learning or have learned English in China is a depressing reality. Classes are extremely poor, the teachers themselves not fluent in English. Rote memorisation is the norm—a fact Tom, the blogger, buttresses with his own experience of reading Chinese texts out loud, for hours every day, at Beijing's specialist university for foreign languages.  He says he was never once asked to produce his own sentences. Shocking if true.

By the by, he makes another provocative point: that rural literacy in Chinese (not English) is in fact far worse than authorities say. Farmers simply don't use the written language enough to maintain their knowledge of thousands of characters.

I don't have anything like the experience to judge, but Victor Mair, who does and who passed it on to me, believes it rings quite true.  Any Sinophones or Sinophiles in the audience care to comment or disagree?

(A long discussion thread follows)

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Web content in local languages
By Amarjit Batra, Hindustan Times

October 30, 2011—India has one of the fastest growing internet populations in the country. Market researches reveal that the Indian internet user base could touch 250 million by 2015 from the 2010 estimates of about 81 million of user base. And digital content consumption can further rise as high as $9.5 billion with rising adoption of mobile internet.

However, if we look into the demographics of the country, factors such as the high illiteracy rate and the population with a lack of familiarity with the internet space are perhaps big loopholes in the growth of internet consumption.

The mobile internet space is taking the digital content consumption market to altogether different heights. The mobile internet market space, flooded with infinite number of low cost phones along with the extended reach of networks by mobile operators, are actually fuelling demand in tier 1 and 2 cities. However, the more exciting story is the devices that are increasingly being used to have access to content — mobile phones with 3G and subsequently 4G capabilities.

The significantly lower access cost of mobile phones has already resulted in a teledensity of over 60% (on population) and penetration into nearly 150 million households. Mobile penetration today has already caught up with TV penetration and is set to scale past effortlessly. Users around the globe have shown quick adaptability to the mobile interface for accessing the internet, and there is no evidence to show that India will be any different.

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English language in India is becoming “glocal”
IndiaTimes.com

NEW DELHI, September 30, 2011—The English language in India is becoming “glocal”—a cross between global and local, says noted writer-columnist Jug Suraiya who has written about his early years in a new book, JS & The Times of My Life.

“We are evolving our own kind of Rashtriya (Indianised) English which is as legitimate as the Queen’s English,” Suraiya, identified with his column, “Jugular Vein,” said.

“English is a very flexible language...and extremely adaptable. It is an international language,” he said.

And the brand of new Indian English is becoming acceptable in the media, he said.

“Journalism has become more chatty, informal and interactive. It speaks to people. More than television, this is due to the Internet," Suraiya said.

“Journalism is also all about people. I keep my ears open to what people are excited about—one  one cannot write in a vacuum," he said.

The writer believes in the “power of print, need-based subjectivity in journalism.”

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Now for some Inglish
By Karan Thapar, HindustanTimes.com

October 2, 2011—English is a delightful language and I never cease to marvel at its richness as well as its winning eccentricities. I’ve often written about the vagaries of its pronunciation, the peculiarities of its spelling and the contortions of its grammar. Today I want to share with you a few fresh insights into how the language is spoken or, in places, distorted. First, are you aware English can be moulded to say significantly different things while using the same words on each occasion?

The credit for what follows goes to my old school chum, Praveen Singh, who’s sent me an email about a certain Professor Ernest Brennecke of Columbia University. The good professor has “invented a sentence that can have multiple meanings” simply by changing the location of a single word. Of course, catching the changed meaning depends critically on how you speak the sentence. Try for yourself:

“Only I hit him in the eye yesterday” (that is, no one else did). “I only hit him in the eye yesterday” (that is, I didn’t hit him elsewhere). “I hit only him in the eye yesterday” (that is, I did not hit anyone else in the eye). “I hit him in the only eye yesterday” (that is, he doesn’t have more than one eye). “I hit him in the eye only yesterday” (that is, either as recently as that or not today).

These five sentences illustrate that your meaning doesn’t simply depend on the words you use but also where in the sentence you place them and, then, when you speak, how you stress the critical word.

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Tricity schools to take up phonetic teaching soon
By Kamini Mehta, IndiaTimes.com

CHANDIGARH: Learning English language through reading and writing in elementary classes is soon going to be history as most of the schools in the city are soon catching up with the trend of teaching the language through phonetic methodology, wherein more stress is laid on teaching sounds and symbols. Though, the learning method is not new to the city, but it is surely attracting more and more schools, lately.

There are two ways of teaching reading English, using phonics or using the whole language. Teaching through phonics means that a student will learn each sound and syllable pattern individually, whereas learning the whole language means developing reading skills through learning sight words and memorization. The consensus among educators is that there are many advantages to using a phonetic approach.

Principal of Sukhmani International School Ajay Nathwani said, “The phonetic method has many advantages, the biggest being that by learning phonetics the sound and symbol recognition becomes stronger and sounding of unfamiliar words becomes easier. Another advantage is that children find the approach exciting and in turn helps them master pronunciation at a very small age.”

Counting advantages further, one of the school principal said, "When a child, who is taught through phonetics, spells a multi-syllabic word such as "conversation", he will know that there is a prefix "con", a suffix "tion" and four syllables, each starting with a consonant and ending with a consonant. This will help him spell it right. Now, on the other hand a whole-language learner would have to memorize the word and would not understand how to break the word in order to read or spell it. This is one of the major advantages of phonetic method."
Anjali Sharma, whose daughter is studying in school said, "My daughter is in nursery and is being taught English through phonetics. She has already learnt the art of breaking words and pronouncing them correctly. In our time it was more of rote learning. We focused on learning the vocabulary instead of getting the pronunciation right."

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Linguistically speaking – English becomes India’s “Numero-Uno” language
By Sonal Jaitly, Washington Times

WASHINGTON, September 23, 2011—India has a rich linguistic history with more than 22 different national languages spoken throughout the length and breadth of the country. The 1991 census recognized 1576 mother tongues and grouped them into 114 different languages. Imagine the plight of a linguist trying to study all the languages of the country.  So how does English survive in this linguistic cauldron?

India’s tryst with its “own foreign language” (English) dates back to the 17th Century, when Emperor Jahangir welcomed the East India Company into the country. Considered a language of the elite in the pre-independence era, English managed to gradually percolate down the complex, multilingual and multireligious Indian society after independence and reached its peak in the post liberalization period.

Languages almost have a biological existence, they are born, live, breathe, reach their youth and die too. English seems to be enjoying its youth in India, with the ubiquitous middle class of the country embracing the language as their own. It now serves as an integrating force and a link language which unites the country and provides a beacon of hope to youth.

India has more than 100 million English speakers, not taking into account others who can converse in English but are unable to read or write in English. It is a common site to find tourist guides in Agra fluently explaining the history of Taj Mahal in English to tourists from different parts of the world…

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Relax, “txt mssgng” won’t doom the English language
By S. Subrahmanya Sarma, TheHindu.com
 
September 24, 2011—There appeared a short note on English Usage in The Hindu.

The sentence in question was — “Hopefully the eggs are fresh.”

Purists of the English language took objection to it and maintained that people should say: “I hope, the Eggs are fresh.”

Their objection was to the word “hopefully.” But it is difficult for the purists to stand in a market place and teach people how to ask questions. But still, the purists tried to maintain what they said was correct. The matter was referred to a professor of English who understood their anguish and told them that their stand was correct but added that the sentence—“Hopefully the eggs are fresh”—also can be accepted.

The purists became incensed and retorted, “You are like a priest practising celibacy for yourself but advocating adultery to the parishioners.”

When I read the article in the Open Page, September 18, “—God save the English Language,” with comments “have some consideration—for someone who prefers not to butcher the English language,” I could as well understand the anguish of the purist in her.

Mobile messages have various aspects although the messages that we collect for analysis do not represent the whole range of people...We hear people say:

“Language in the internet is a huge disaster.”

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A ready reckoner on idioms
By M. S. Nagarajan, TheHindu.com

September 27, 2011—English is perhaps the most difficult language to gain mastery of. For one thing, it is the most unphonetic language in the world. As for its usage, since its linguistic and structural variations are far too many and far too complex, there is always the danger of slipping into a pitfall.

It is quite easy to write and speak faulty English. We have standard, authoritative reference books which are meant to guide us in proper usage and expression. Fowler’s King’s English (1906) and its sequel Modern English Usage (1918), which were considered a benchmark for correctness in the language, are deemed rather outdated in the present context, with the language continually evolving, growing, and enriching itself with additions to its vocabulary.

These books offer proper — often prescriptive — advice on syntax, style, choice of words, etc., with illustrations drawn from literary and popular writers.

Fowler’s wise counsel runs thus: “Anyone who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous and lucid.” Mcmordie’s English Idioms provides comprehensive information on a large number of chosen idioms. There have been scores of books on English style, grammar, and composition which are being used as manuals by students as well as avid learners of the language.

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Stingy texts in vogue, God save the English language!
By C. N. Ashwini, The Hindu

September 17, 2011—You aren’t going to get a Nobel prize for spelling words the way they are; yes, but you aren’t going to get a prize for omitting letters either.

We all know that English is a funny language. Because it is the only language where your nose runs and your feet smell. But what has become of this language now? Especially in a country like India, where people are known to speak English well? Thanks to the SMS feature in our cell phones, people are redefining the ways in which a word can probably be spelt.

Cn u plz tke dis wid u n w8t fr sumtim der? Ey rply fst, I hve wrk.

This is how people, not just a few, but a majority send text messages (I’m not talking about Twitter, because we still have the 140 word limit). Sometimes, when I get such texts from my friends, I find it difficult to resist the temptation of deleting that message and not bother to leave a reply. Curbing my irritation, I try not to get irritated and try to read what they could have possibly wanted to convey. And, somehow, I find myself getting these messages when the situation is tense.

Not all are to be blamed, actually. Some people are better; they are a bit more generous with the usage of alphabets than the other stingy ones. It at least makes some sense. I heard from someone that the letter ‘E' was the most widely used alphabet in the English language. Not anymore, is my guess…

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The art of acquiring English language skills
By Olympia Shilpa Gerald, The Hindu

September 19, 2011—The mantra for effective learning of the English language is to adapt the content module wherein cognitive academic language proficiency is combined with basic informative communication skills.

College students who can reproduce excerpts from Shakespeare but cringe at the idea of carrying a simple conversation in English? Graduates from various disciplines sporting seventy plus scores in English but struggling to frame simple questions?

All is not what it seems when it comes to language, as marks are poor indicators of competency in language. We may have moved from mere textbook reading to assignments, seminars and viva-voce in teaching the English language in our colleges and universities but how many students can use the language in real-life situations?

A recent workshop on best practices in English language teaching organised by the U.S Consulate General in Tiruchi for college teachers brought to light that English language teaching in our classrooms focuses more on ‘learning' the language rather than ‘acquiring' language skills. For the latter to materialise, the language must be used as much as it is heard as senior English language fellow Mary Kay Seales put it: “A noisy classroom is a good classroom as you cannot be quiet in a language class – you have to practice what you learn. I call it controlled chaos- it might be chaotic- but there's a lot of learning happening.”

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It’s not just a play thing
By Kamini Mehta, The Times of India

CHANDIGARH, September 7, 2011—Being able to speak in English proficiently is one of the prime considerations of parents sending their wards to English medium schools. And schools on their part are keen to fulfill this aspiration of parents and try their best to give the students a leg-up in the language. There is a trend among schools of staging plays from English literature, be it on founders day or annual functions. The play could be a fairy tale or a classic by Shakespeare, schools are open to everything as far as it is staged in English.

City schools which are missing out in this area are in search of theatre directors and school teachers who could prepare a play from English literature and if not that, then just a play in the language. These days even students of nursery, KG, class I, II and III are made to mug up the script of the play in English which they do not even understand.

Sonia Mehra, a teacher from Ryan International School, Chandigarh says, "The main reason for making children prepare plays in English is to improve their proficiency with the language, so that they have command over it. I came here from Calcutta and found that most children do not have the right accent in English. Parents have got them admitted to English schools so that they can learn the language and doing English theatre helps in getting the accent right."

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India gained independence from the British but prosperity with English
By Sanjaya Baru, Business Standard

NEW DELHI, August 15, 2011—At Oxford in 1931 Mahatma Gandhi was asked, “How far would you cut India off from the Empire?” He replied: “From the Empire, completely; from the British nation not at all, if I want India to gain and not to grieve.”

India’s struggle for freedom, which was also a “national” movement for the creation of an Indian Republic on the Indian subcontinent, sought the end of British rule, but not the end of the use of the English language.

No language spoken by the pre-European inhabitants of this vast subcontinent could become the language of communication and governance across the length and breadth of India. So English survived and thrived. To be sure, the English language – or the many variants of it – that is spoken in India, through many and varied tongues, is not the English language that the British left behind. It is not a language that many would easily comprehend in England!
Yet, like Australian English, American English and Singaporean English, there is an Indian English. Indeed, a Bengali English, a Tamil, Telugu, Malayali, Punjabi and many other variants of English that would often require translation when two Indians converse. Every Bengali would know what exactly “pheesh” means, but no Malayali would “zimbly” understand it! I knew exactly what my English teacher meant when he said “Jed”, but would you?

In what manner did Gandhiji believe India would “gain” from a continued association with Britain? Clearly, Gandhiji had a good appreciation of what was happening in the world and what was likely to happen as the 20th century progressed. He, like Jawaharlal Nehru and many other leaders of the Indian national movement, had benefitted personally in terms of his own professional training in various institutions in Britain. Gandhiji had grasped the essence of an idea that Sir Winston Churchill was to articulate much later when the latter said, “the empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”

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A common language
By Nitesh Dhawan, Russia Profile

August 11, 2011—Modern metropolitan cities like Moscow have been witnessing a steady rise in English language acquisition, especially among children and young adults. In the corporate world, English is not only a welcomed addition to one’s skill set, but is also quickly becoming a necessary prerequisite for officials in mid and high-level positions. Increasingly, state policies and directives are requiring federal officials like politicians, bureaucrats and diplomats to be able to converse in a foreign language, of which English is preferred and English will also become a requirement for newly hired civil servants starting 2012.

Examples of the steady expansion of English language into Russian life can be found all over Russia. In Sochi, for example, pensioners who volunteered to partake in servicing the upcoming Olympic Games are taking up English lessons. By 2014, thousands of such volunteers will be ready to show their city to visiting foreigners in their native, or at least a shared, language.

For many students of English in Russia, the process of language learning begins in elementary school. “I feel more comfortable understanding English. It helps me browse the Internet and understand games and foreign movies if there is no Russian translation,” said Daniil, a seventh grade student at an athletics-focused school in Moscow that nonetheless keeps English on the curriculum and prepares pupils to speak the language at a high level.

While casual interest in conversational English draws in many new students, Russians are also increasingly turning to English lessons to hone professional skills like maintaining business correspondences and giving presentations…

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Pakistanis thriving in Afghan market
By Ahmad Fraz Khan, The Dawn
 
KABUL, July 5, 2011—With the Americans and their subsidiary companies – construction, supplies, telecom etc. – now running the show, Afghanistan has emerged as another labor market for the Pakistanis.

Security in Afghanistan is precarious and even Kabul wears the look of a war zone. The Afghan officials waste no opportunity to show their dislike, even hatred, for anything Pakistani. Yet underneath the political tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the market appears to define and rule the relationship between Pakistani labor and their employers in Afghanistan. There are, according to unofficial estimates, over 70,000 Pakistanis working in different sectors – hotels, telecom and banking – and some are even running printing presses.

According to the Pakistanis working in and around Kabul, two factors – dollarization of the Afghan economy and prevalence of English language – have opened the Afghan market to labor from Pakistan.

The Americans, one way or the other, are pumping over $100 billion into Afghanistan. “Even if three to four per cent of this money trickles down to a common man, it is more than enough to lift his economy,” says Haris Ali, country head of Aircom International in Afghanistan. Artificially pegged to dollar, the Afghani has improved to 45 Afghanis to a dollar; meaning that an Afghani is almost worth two Pakistani rupees. This exchange rate, though artificial as per economists’ claims, has become major attraction for the Pakistani labor, he concludes.

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A red card for “foul” language
By Percy Zvomuya, Mail&Guardian (Zambia)

October 28, 21011—In a classic essay, Politics and the English Language, writer George Orwell railed against bad English, imprecise ­diction and “general abuse of language.”

“Modern English, especially ­written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble,” Orwell wrote.

One cannot say the same about the Frenchman Arsene Wenger’s use of the English language. The fact that he's from Alsace—a a region that has, over the centuries, moved borders between France and Germany—must surely help.

Wenger, Arsenal’s manager, has conjured up new words, phrases, sayings—Arsenisms—that didn’t exist until he set foot in England. This was in a game afflicted with clichés and dull expressions.

Football has everything that Orwell railed against. Talk about dying and worn out metaphors, the game boasts plenty.

Some common football stock phrases such as “ring the changes” and “swan song” were even used as examples by Orwell in his famous essay.

How many times have we heard of a “coach ringing the changes”? Or, before a match between a big club and a smaller one, a player saying, “there are no easy games”? Or the game being a “game of two halves”?

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Language versus concept defeats SA’s progress
By Vuyo Jack, Iol.com.za

September 30, 2011—Language is one of the most important tools to express thoughts and even to generate thoughts. Whenever one is thinking, this is done using language as a medium. So our language is inextricably linked to our thoughts, which are an important source of creativity. Therefore, when you interfere with somebody’s language you interfere with their thoughts, which is the most intimate aspect of a person’s being.

When we look back in South Africa, I can now understand why the Afrikaner people pushed for the preservation and the spread of the Afrikaans language. This was a way to assert their identity as a nation. The language reflected their thoughts in action and they were able to succeed in various spheres by embracing their language. The use of the Afrikaans language at home, in schools, in the arts and culture arena and in business ensured the survival of the language. Most people around the world, from the French to the Zulus, language is still today regarded as a sovereign territory that should not be violated.

I guess the race relations problem increased when the Afrikaner government tried to impose their language on black people. The black people felt that they were being explicitly violated in the most intimate arena, such as their thoughts. They rebelled violently in most cases, which then brought about regime change.

A further observation is that most standard intelligence tests measure language and mathematical proficiency and come up with a score that shows the intelligence level of the person. This crude measure, created by Lewis Terman of Stanford University in 1916 and known as the Stanford-Binet test, is the basis of the modern IQ test. Terman’s view of humanity, especially minorities, is contained in his textbook The Measurement of Intelligence.

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Wrong to confidently claim ownership of English
By Jacob Dlamini, BusinessDay.co.za

September 29, 2011—A friend recently sent me the following fragment from the 1983 annual report of the English Academy of Southern Africa: “To complete the picture as far as our specifically language-related activities are concerned: we (the English Academy of SA) were represented at a ‘Military Language Congress’ organised by the SA Defence Force (SADF) at Voortrekkerhoogte, in May this year; we have finally won our battle to have the ‘equals’ sign banished when a word is broken at the end of a line — the hyphen is back, in both English and Afrikaans.”

As my friend, with whom I share a dark sense of humour about SA’s past, said: “Hurrah, then, all is well again in the land.”

To be fair, the august academy has come a long way since the glory days of the 1980s, when it was successfully waging war against the SADF over the latter’s use of hyphens while the SADF was, well, trying to get a firm grip on that whole business of total onslaughts. Today, the academy’s vision includes a commitment to a “democratic society in which effective English is available to all who wish to use it, where competent instruction in the language is readily accessible and in which the country’s diverse linguistic ecology is respected.” The vision is noble and realistic. SA does have a diverse linguistic ecology, with citizens fluent in more than the 11 official languages we have.

But how many of us appreciate the value of this rich linguistic ecology?

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In battle to save Chinese, it’s test vs. test
By Brittany Hite, WallStreetJournal.com (blog)

September 29, 2011—Chinese students’ obsession with learning English is apparent. Chinese cities are littered with billboards and fliers for teaching institutes, and the demand for native-speaking teachers and tutors seems endless. For many, the TOEFL, or Test of English as a Foreign Language, ranks second only to the infamous gaokao college entrance exam as a driver of candle-burning study habits.

Worried that this preoccupation with English is contributing to a decline in native language skills, officials at the Ministry of Education are now trying to get students to return to their linguistic roots. How? By introducing another test.

The newly developed native-speaker Chinese exam measures listening, speaking, reading and writing skills and is meant to promote Chinese people’s “interest and ability in their own language,” Xinhua reports.

The National Education Examinations Authority, a body affiliated with the Ministry of Education, said it will promote the test to job seekers and college applicants before it is introduced nationally. It will be launched on a pilot basis in October in Shanghai, Jiangsu, Yunnan and Inner Mongolia, according to the Shenzhen Daily.

Despite the existence of dozens of local dialects, written Chinese is essentially the same across the country. The speaking portion of the new test will measure proficiency in Mandarin, often described as “standard Chinese” (putonghua).

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Language skills no piece of cake
By Matt Hodges, China Daily

June 26, 2011—What annoyed me the most about Avatar—aapart from its lame attempt to go 3-D —was hearing Sam Worthington’s character describe learning the language of the Na’vi as something easy and routine. It’s just about memorizing words, he says, whereas most adults his age would argue that getting bilingual this late in the day sounds more like the precious mineral they are trying to rid the planet Pandora of: “unobtainium.”

Granted, there are people, like former marine Jake Scully, who’s not exactly what you call an ordinary learner. The guy can ride phoenix-like aliens on his first attempt. It took me longer to figure out how to turn on my washing machine.

But for the vast majority of us, it will never be as easy to process vast landscapes of new information post-puberty as it was before we had hair sprouting in the most bewildering of places.

Apparently they call this benchmark age the Critical Period Hypothesis, and it may be related to the delayed development of the pre-frontal cortex in young children. Or maybe it’s just that, as you get older, fast cars and fast women are a lot more appealing than playing hangman.

I certainly noticed the difference. Even though I can recall tons of random and useless French vocabulary from junior-school tests, it took me three weeks to remember the words for “how much” in Mandarin at age 30…

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The booming market for English teachers in China
By Michelle V. Rafter, SecondAct.com

June 16, 2011—If you're considering teaching overseas as a way to see the world and enjoy an encore career, look east to China.

Private schools there are on a hiring tear because many Chinese parents want their children to learn English to thrive in a global economy. China is becoming the fastest-growing private English education system in the world, according to a survey by Disney English, a Magic Kingdom subsidiary that runs 22 Chinese academies that teach English to preschoolers. Another recent study says that China's private education market is projected to grow 45 percent between 2009 and 2012.

Some English language programs in China are soliciting people 40 and older to teach. Their ranks include the Teacher Ambassador Program, a joint venture between United World College, a chain of 13 international colleges and schools, and the U.K.-based Ameson Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes East-West cultural and educational exchanges.

The program, called TAP for short, currently is hiring recruits with bachelor's degrees and prior teaching experience to work in high schools in 13 Chinese cities this fall…

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Break on through (to the puppet side)
By David F. Hoenigman, The Japan Times

It is often said that truly gifted teachers make their subject matter come to life. Jesse Glass has taken that concept to a new level by asking his students to take literary characters off the page and dance them about the room.

So in this professor’s classes you might find a thigh-high likeness of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus bragging of his scholarly accomplishments and enormous intelligence to the delight of a group of highly attentive students, as follows:

“How I wish old Archimedes could come back from the dead for a debate. Or Aristotle! I’d show Aristotle who knows what about what! I’m the smartest man in all of Wittenberg, all Germany, all Europe, the whole world! I want to know more! How can I learn more?”

The student controlling Faustus receives feedback and encouragement from his classmates and professor, fiddles with the puppet’s strings, laughs happily, and continues with his recitation.

Another group rehearses lines from a scene that will see each one assume the role of one of the seven deadly sins. Still another group surrounds a table, thoroughly engrossed in the process of drawing and coloring a large sheet of paper that will serve as backdrop scenery within the puppet theater.

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What are the real advantages of learning English?
By Mike Guest, The Daily Yomiuri

September 5, 2011—Forget the "internationalization" justification. It's much too vague. Try telling some middle-aged guy who runs a small bar in Tottori that he needs English to become "internationalized." Try explaining to the 16-year-old in Niigata who will take over his father's fishing boat that as a Japanese he must "internationalize," and that this means he must master English.

Forget as well the sentiments espoused by some governmental types that English should be learned so Japanese people can "explain" Japan or Japan's positions and beliefs to outsiders (as if there are set national beliefs that all Japanese adhere to). Treating the populace as ambassadors or apologists is simply manipulation. And the reality is that people don't like to listen to walking national advertisements any more than they do strangers trying to propagate their religion.

Forget the justification of helping the lost foreigner on the streets of Tokyo. Trying to master English based on the one-off possibility that you may be asked the location of Shinjuku Station is not a worthy pay-off for your efforts. The "foreigners don't speak Japanese" image is stale and often inaccurate anyway.

Likewise, you can forget the "one week trip to Bali" justification. The time and effort it takes to gain a holistic grasp of a language just to be used in a seven-day vacation is an equally dubious return on your language study investment…

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Cross-cultural boundaries of information
By Kate Elwood, The Daily Yomiuri

August 16, 2011—As an applied linguist with an interest in cross-cultural issues, I always keep an ear out for anecdotes in which someone is startled by the actions or utterances of a person from another culture. As a non-Japanese living in Japan, I find that I hear more of such accounts of bafflement and mystification from other non-Japanese, usually those who have only been here a few years or less. This is most likely because these newcomers to Japan may be frequently faced with a variety of unexpected occurrences, sometimes even on a daily basis. At the same time, they may also feel more comfortable expressing their surprise to a fellow foreigner, anticipating a common take on the situation, compared to how a Japanese person might feel when speaking to me about things that they find strange but which I may find customary.

Naturally, though, Japanese people are sometimes also taken aback by cultural differences when coming into contact with non-Japanese, and I am always eager to hear these narratives of confusion as well.

There is one cultural difference that appears to equally surprise Japanese and non-Japanese, which linguist Akio Kamio has termed "territory of information."

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Canada “very good for seniors”
By Jennifer Saltman, The Province

October 28, 2011—Christl Agache, 73, arrived from Romania three years ago. Learning English is still her biggest challenge

Christl Agache worries that her English is not good enough.

“I forget what I learn in [English Language Services for Adults] school. I must have practice,” she says carefully.

And practise she does—as often as possible.

Agache continues to take English classes and visits MOSAIC, an agency that provides services to immigrants and refugees, where she can work on her conversation skills and has made friends who speak the same languages as her: Romanian and German.

“At home, my children come evenings and don't have time speak English with me,” she says.

That leaves her often practising with her dog: “Stay, pick up, drop it,” Agache recites.

Agache visited Canada twice before moving here from Romania three years ago after her husband died. She lives in Burnaby with her son, who immigrated nine years ago, and daughter-in-law. Her daughter's family also lives in the Lower Mainland.

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The Time Machine – Quebec and the Canadian Federalism
By Etienne Forest, CanadaFreePress.com

1
October 8, 2011—My Japanese name is Patrick Nishikawa and I am a Japanese scientist.  I was reborn under a Japanese name on March 29 of the 22nd year of the Emperor Heisei known as 2010 outside Japan. Prior to my Japanese rebirth, I was known by my quintessential French Canadian name which I continue to use for scientific purposes. Having left Canada in 1980, I remain a pre-Charter Quebecker of the 1970s in heart and soul.

It is my intention to write for Canada Free Press on the topic of state sponsored multiculturalism because of the threat it poses to the world in general and to the West in particular. Nevertheless, I would like to write my first article on a very Canadian topic because the time is ripe.  My topic will be on “symmetric federalism,” a desirable system which I believe to be unrealistic in Canada.

What’s this about a Time Machine?

Recently, neutrinos going faster than the speed of light have been reported at CERN. So let me indulge in the fantasy of a time machine whose fanciful existence could be contemplated should that discovery be true. If we could go back at least 50 years ago, at the time when Canada was mainly an English and French country built on land shared with aborigines (Inuit and Amerindians of various types), I would have argued then that the topic of “symmetric federalism” was the most important topic to discuss. Today, in the face of the multicultural threat and the destruction of the Nation State in the West, I am perhaps just talking about the proverbial rearranging of deck chairs on the sinking HMS Titanic.

Ideally, a land mass can be made of independent sovereign states which maintain peace and commerce through treaties which are mutually beneficial…

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Have anglos become ‘too visible, too audible’?
By Jeff Heinrich, The Gazette

MONTREAL, September 21, 2011—Merci pour les compliments. For anglos in the Quebec arts scene, there’s been no shortage of kudos lately.

Unanimous recognition of anglo artists’ value by the National Assembly. Industry awards for Arcade Fire (music), Jacob Tierney (movies) and Louise Penny (mystery novels). A bigger and more bilingual Blue Metropolis (literary fest). The success of Barney’s Version and rehabilitation of Mordecai Richler in the francophone media.

But maybe popularity isn’t such a good thing. Maybe a whole lotta love can be just a bit, you know, de trop.

That’s an issue that will be discussed over the next few days at “State of the Arts,” a conference organized by ELAN, Quebec’s English-Language Arts Network. More than 100 participants are expected to attend the events – some closed to the public, some open – at a variety of Montreal venues.

One of the highlights: An open panel discussion called “Invisible or Too Visible?,” to be held Saturday afternoon in the atrium of the Conseil des arts de Montréal on Sherbrooke St. E. At the event, journalists (including The Gazette’s Brendan Kelly) and festival organizers will discuss whether the growing presence of English-language artists in Quebec is a good or bad thing.

“A few years ago we were talking about our No. 1 need being visibility, taking all these people and connecting them to audiences and media,” said ELAN executive director Guy Rodgers, a playwright raised in western Canada who lived in Australia before settling in Montreal in 1980, the year of the first referendum on Quebec sovereignty.

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After learning two languages, French was a struggle
By Jean Kunz, Globe and Mail

OTTAWA, September 21, 2011—“Are you bilingual?”

I was asked that question often when I first arrived in Ottawa in the late 1990s.

“Of course I am. Couldn’t you tell by my Chinese accent?”

That was my standard reply until I joined the federal public service nearly a decade ago. It was apparent to me that while I could speak English and another language, I had yet to prove that I could speak French. I was not officially bilingual, a prerequisite to succeed in the public service.

My kids are bilingual. I struggle with French

My quest toward official bilingualism started off on a promising note. I scored high on the aptitude test that assessed one’s capability of learning a second language; it was administered in English, my second language.

Over the following years, I took language classes part-time. Written exams on reading and grammar went smoothly, but I couldn’t say the same for tests on oral interaction. Each time, I received the same feedback: I needed to speak in more complex sentences, improve my ability to talk about abstract topics, develop more fluency.

Ottawa is blessed with an abundance of language schools and I had been a client of a few. All the schools I attended focused on preparing students for the federal language test…

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What good’s a language crisis if you can’t blame the anglos?
By Graeme Hamilton, The National Post      

QUEBEC, September 12, 2011—The latest studies published by Quebec’s language watchdog, the Office québécois de la langue française, have drawn predictable warnings that the sky is falling. The headline-grabbing statistic is Université de Montréal demographer Marc Termote’s projection that by 2031, fewer than half the residents of the island of Montreal will speak French at home.

The knee-jerk reaction to this news, heard from various language hawks since the data was published Friday, is that French is being swamped in a relentless English tide.

Gérald Larose, the former labour leader who now heads a sovereigntist council, warned Monday that before long “Montreal will be lost” and Quebec will be in an accelerated process of “Winnipegization.” He was referring to the assimilation of Franco-Manitobans. “The French there all know each other by their first names,” he wrote.

But people like Mr. Larose seem stuck in a bygone era when the villain was the snooty Anglo who refused to learn French. Toward the end of Mr. Termote’s report he makes an observation about the linguistic situation. Reducing the problem in Quebec “to a French-English dichotomy might have been understandable a few decades ago,” he writes, “but it no longer applies today.” In other words, the stock reaction of blaming the English for the demise of French is invalid.

Not that that will stop the most diehard anglophobes. On the LCN news network Monday, former Parti Québécois MNA Pierre Curzi, now sitting as an independent, said the study is evidence that Montreal is “anglicizing.”

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English in its most hideous form
By Gen Why?, The Daily Post

September 25, 2011—You know the situation. You’re on the bus or in the supermarket line, trying your best to fit into the general milieu when a couple of fabulously exotic descent sidle up beside you and begin to talk in hushed, foreign tones.

The words are a blur, but the tone is unmistakable. Those flowing, rich expressions with too much phlegm and not enough vowels are definitely, unnervingly, about you. It doesn’t sound good. Chins lower, eyebrows raise, and stifled giggles ensue. It is impossible to tell the theme of the conversation exactly but as you stare at them vacantly, you’re positive you can decipher the words “philistine numbskull” ... positive. Unfortunately, ridicule is transnational.

Like many of my Kiwi counterparts, I am hopelessly monolingual. My intercultural success begins and ends with occasionally being able to convince people I’m from Belfast on St. Patrick’s Day. This usually succeeds only with people who are too drunk to hear. But it’s not for lack of trying. Over the last 20 years I have dabbled with several languages in the hope of becoming urbane and sophisticated.

The journey started in Year 7, where I flung myself passionately into Mandarin because everything else was full. From a 12-year-old’s perspective, my two-year affair with the language was a success. Whether it was due to academic devotion or the fortnightly trip to the West End Chinese Smorgasbord is still a matter of debate.

Yet as much as I delighted in the joy of oriental cuisine it also took me years to comprehend that chicken nuggets weren’t, in fact, part of customary Eastern cooking…

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A toast to public speaking
By Praseeda Nair, Khaleej Times Online

DUBAI, July 3, 2011—The two most frightening words in the English language for most high school students are public speaking, or so it seems from the sheer number of young people clamouring to join speech-heavy extracurricular activities, ranging from debate to Toastmasters clubs.

As a global communication and leadership training programme, Toastmasters International has over 260,000 members in over 80 countries across the world. Each region is divided into a numbered district and area, allowing for inter-club competitions and sessions to take place within a certain locale.

The latest addition to Area 40 in Dubai is the youth-based club, The Republic Toastmasters Club, headed by a former Gavel club member (an under-18 Toastmaster-affiliated programme), Anamta Farook.

“The common misconception people have of Toastmasters is that we only deal with public speaking. It’s not about memorising speeches, but more about how to think on your feet and communicate effectively, both in a group and one-to-one,” Anamta said.
Toastmasters clubs aren’t exclusively for the shy or for those battling stage fright. Some are reserved by nature, others self-assured and loud, but all of them share an interest in perfecting their formal speaking skills.

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Exploring English: Issues to address
By Keith W. Wright, TheStar.com.my

October 16, 2011—When teaching oracy and literacy skills to students for whom English is an additional language (EAL), teachers must know exactly what is required to be taught. The primary focus should be on their learners’ comprehension and the instruction must be logical and directional.

The teacher’s physical movement, gesture and expression are important as is the need for engagement, motivation and variation. Learning remains a partnership between the teacher and student.

However, the task for most EAL learners, unlike primary English speakers, is different. As they have not been repeatedly exposed to English outside the classroom or learnt the language unconsciously, deliberate and directed study is a necessity.

The features of natural language acquisition can be extremely difficult to replicate in a classroom. Unlike children in an English-speaking home, many EAL learners lack support and encouragement from a peer group or English-speaking parents.

Even the language of an EAL teacher requires attention to accommodate the language proficiency of learners.

Unlike learning situations where a commonality in primary language exists, adapting language to suit the learner is imperative.

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Let the parents decide
By Wong Chun Wai, TheStar.com.my

September 25, 2011—Allow English to be the medium of instruction in schools if there is a demand for it.

JUST about everyone seems to agree that we need to do something to stop the deteriorating standard of English in this country. These include our leaders who can make the decisions to stop the rot, but they seem to lack the political courage to do so.

What we have here is a situation where everyone sees the problem and agrees that something has to be done fast or the country would be in trouble, but no one dares to make the first move.

Instead, we continue to hear lame excuses, such as Malaysia needs to train enough English teachers first, we need to study the problems first, or we need to assess the situation. In the end, we will just continue talking.

There is already a whole generation of Malaysians who are not proficient in English today. The product of the switch from English to Bahasa Malaysia as the medium of teaching in schools, many of them are already in their 40s. From conversing with them, you know their teachers did not teach them grammar. Many cannot write a proper sentence in English and seem to have no idea even of present or past tenses.

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Playing with words
By Gabriel Martin, TheStar.com.my

September 30, 2011—Scrabble may be of less value as an English Language learning aid than most people believe, although you can learn a lot in the process of improving your game, albeit not in a very structured manner.

The point is, Scrabble is a word game, not a language game. It has been observed before that Scrabble is more mathematics than language, and expert players tend to have backgrounds in mathematics, computer science, actuarial science, engineering, architecture and music.

If you want to play well, you need to be able to identify possible options from any given position, and to select the option which gives the best chance of winning.

The valuation of words within the game therefore differs from those within the language. The words which are most useful in written and spoken English are not necessarily the words which are often used in Scrabble.

Those likely to appear in the context of the game are determined by probabilities, which in turn depend on the words in the dictionary of choice, or more strictly speaking, the official list, and the likelihood of their coming up during play.

The letter distribution was worked out by the game’s inventor, Alfred Butts, based on a painstaking manual count of letters used in The New York Times, and his handwritten notes of this still exist. Butts’ insight means that the letter distribution in the game is fairly reflected in the real language.

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English language: Pick only the best to teach
By Dr. Maizatulliza Muhamad (Reader feedback), New Straights Times

September 19, 2011—The teaching and learning of English in Malaysia has always been subject to scrutiny.

Recently, the deputy prime minister, who is also education minister, suggested the English language curriculum used in schools be reviewed as students’ mastery of the language was deemed unsatisfactory, even after learning it for 13 years.

The DPM’s claim has triggered comments from various individuals. National Union of the Teaching Profession president Hashim Adnan argued that the reason for poor mastery level lies not in the curriculum but with the teachers (“Lack of trained English teachers the cause”—NST, Aug 8).

He stated that many English teachers were not proficient enough and this had a domino effect on the students.

According to him, the new generation of English language teachers was the product of Malay-medium education and their proficiency level is apparently not up to par with their older counterparts, who had an English-medium education.

While decisions have been made with regard to the medium of instruction in Malaysian schools, his comment about teachers’ level of proficiency has its merit.

As educators who teach future English teachers, my colleagues and I sometimes have to deal with undergraduates whose proficiency level does not befit their status as future English teachers.

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Teachers need to take English courses, too
By S. Sharmini (Reader feeback), TheStar.com.my

September 18, 2011—Much has been said and debated about the current status of the English language in our country in the last few weeks.

Experts and even ministers have stressed the need to master this global language.

English being the Second Language does not in any way lower the importance or status of Bahasa Melayu, our national language and this should be made clear to all Malaysians.

Parents, who are also stakeholders in education, should realise that if they want their children to be competitive globally, they should ensure that their children are taught to appreciate and speak English.

However, it is not the children alone who need the “language boost” but teachers too. They need to keep up with new teaching methods. Many teachers tend to be in their own “comfort zone” and do not have the drive to move forward.

Regular assessments should perhaps be carried out for them to be trained further so that their teaching knowledge and skills remain relevant.

Many teachers tend to teach only for exams and they sometimes lose sight of what they’ve been trained for. Instead of bringing in 500 teachers from native English-speaking countries to teach local schoolchildren, we should instead think about training the 5,000 local English Language teachers by using the expertise of professional or specialist service providers in the language.

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Give importance to English
By Bulbir Singh, TheStar.com.my

September 11, 2011—Lately there has been talk of the deplorable level of English in our schools.

I am glad that the Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin, who is also Education Minister, has acknowledged that the standard of English is indeed going downhill and needs to be addressed.

He is quoted as saying that the ministry itself is unsure as to the reasons for the declining standards.

While we must pay equal attention to Bahasa Melayu, which has its own role of uniting the nation, the importance of English cannot be ignored.

In the first place, the government should be serious about its policies on education and should see them through over a longer period of time.

Also, it is about time that the ministry looks into the proficiency of the teachers assigned to teach English.

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How to improve our children’s English skills?
By Lim Mun Fah, Sin Chew Daily

September 16, 2011—We have been told since young that English is very important. Even my father, who does not know how to read English, had kept telling me so.

Today, I’m telling my children the same thing: English is really important!

However, their English skills are even worse than my poor English.

It is an undeniable fact that not only my children, but many Malaysian young people, regardless of primary school leavers or university graduates, are having poor English skills.

Our English standard used to be ranked among the highest in Asia as Malaysia used to be a British colony. Oops! Our former Prime Minister said that we have never been colonised as the British were just invited to give advice here.

Today, English symbolises status and authority.

English-stream schools were abolished in the 1970s and even though English language lessons have been retained, its standard has plummeted.

Even if we shut our eyes and cover our ears, we still have to admit that English is an international language, as well as the language of science and technology…

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English... too easy?
By Mary Murphy, Budapest Times    

October 1, 2011—If you can speak three languages you’re trilingual. If you can speak two languages you’re bilingual. If you can speak only one language you’re an American. – Author Unknown

As I continue to struggle on and off with learning Hungarian (I am now on my fifth teacher, all the others having given up fighting with my recalcitrant tongue), I was highly bemused to learn that minds within the Ministry of Education think that English shouldn’t be positioned as the first foreign language Hungarian students learn, as it is... wait for it... too easy!

Apparently, these great minds think that learning English as a first foreign language creates the misguided notion that all foreign languages are easy to learn, and when they find out otherwise, they’re discouraged. By their logic, if students were to study “languages with a fixed, structured grammatical system, the learning of which presents a balanced workload, such as neo-Latin languages”, which represent a lot more work, then they could learn the much easier to learn English almost as a by-the-way. Ergo, by learning more difficult languages first, Hungarians would become more multilingual. I beg to differ.

In Hungarian, the stress is always on the first syllable. That’s an easy rule to follow. In English, however, the stress often determines the meaning of the word. For instance, “permit” and “permit” are different; the former is a verb, “to allow,” the latter a noun, “a licence to do.” Same letters, same combination, different meanings. Or what about determining what the first syllable is?

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Native Hungarian talks about the differences between her native tongue and English
By Esther Kiss, WestSideToday.com

June 28, 2011—“Hello, my name is Esther” or “Szia, a nevem Eszter” in my native Hungarian.

They say that the English language is the hardest language to master; between verbs, adverbs, pronouns, nouns, conjunctions, punctuations, blah, blah, blah, there is definitely a lot to learn and very little of it is consistent, as is with the case with other languages. For starters: Hungarian uses a forty-four letter alphabet and English limits its vocabulary to twenty-six tools from which to make words.

The confusion between the two languages in which I function starts even farther back than that; in Hungarian, my native tongue is called “Magyar.” Whatever you call it, my first language is defined as a Uralic language and is spoken in many of the Baltic regions in Eastern Europe of which Hungary is a part.

While English is the most popular language in the world it has some idiomatic rules that drive non-native speakers… to study harder. For example prepositions do not exist in Hungarian/Magyar…

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English a “deterritorialised” language today, says linguist
By Anil Datta, TheNews.com.pk

KARACHI, October 18, 2011—English today is a language of global access, a language of self-representation. Its role as a key to the study of literature and English (or British) culture is receding. This is because today literature as a subject doesn’t carry the lure that it did till about 27 years ago. It is on the wane, given the corporate and technological spheres of activity the world is marked by today.

These views were expressed by Dr Peter Grundy, honorary fellow at the Language Centre, University of Durham, UK, and a visiting professor of linguistics at the University of Vienna, Austria, while talking to The News at a local hotel on Monday. Dr Grundy is in town as one of the trainers at the just concluded Society for the Promotion of English Language Teaching (SPELT) conference.

He said that when he was a student at the university, there were a large number of students studying literature but today at the same university, the number had greatly dwindled.

Today, he said, the role of English was more to facilitate international interaction and tackling international economic issues, like the international job market and emigration. The global perspective of the language was undergoing a radical change, he said. As such, he said, the role of English today was less confined as compared to what it was when it was the key to just the study of literature.

“Today English is a ‘deterritorialised’ language. In the present-day digital world, it is a tool for communicating internationally,” Dr Grundy said and cited the Internet and other modern tools of information technology like the iPod and the mobile phone.

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Workshop: Understanding the challenges of English language training

September 28, 2011—Teachers from government and private schools participated in a focus group on English Language Training (ELT) at Serena Hotel on Monday. The aim of the focus group was to understand, consider and prepare for the challenges that lie ahead for English teaching, said a press release issued by the British Council.

One of the key challenges discussed was how to accelerate the transition from old school ELT methodologies to new, innovative teacher roles, approaches and styles.

“You cannot solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it; you must learn to see the world anew,” said Roudaba Shuja, a participant in the focus group.

The focus group highlighted the need for English is growing significantly in Pakistan. Fuelled in part by Pakistani institutions and systems being in English and economic empowerment.

The focus group work will enable participants to present outcomes and develop recommendations based on these outcomes…

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Mind your language
By Andleeb Abbas, DailyTimes.com.pk

September 11, 2011—We are dependent on the foreign curriculum with foreign examples in a foreign language creating an ideal culture for students to do rote learning without really understanding the crux or the context.

Language is the mirror of a culture. What you speak and do not speak is a huge reflection of the character of a nation and society. The debate on what to do about English and what not to do about our local languages is still on and, lo and behold, the Sindh government announces that from class six onwards to class 10, schools in Sindh will make the learning of Chinese mandatory. This announcement, according to them, is a gesture of acknowledgement of the great friendship between the two countries. If this is the reason for imposing another language on a nation that is still confused about what status to give to English and Urdu, it seems like another typical and immature declaration from a government that really seems to find it almost impossible to do anything meaningful and purposeful.

The debate on which medium of language should govern the education system has been a contentious issue. Language in Pakistan has become a basis of class distinction. Urdu is the commoner’s language while English is the language of the elite. The less you know your own language and the more you speak English with a foreign accent the more you are looked up to…

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Ten-year national action plan for a trilingual Sri Lanka
By Sajitha Prematunge, DailyNews.lk

June 23, 2011—Nearly 90 percent of Sinhala speaking people cannot communicate in Tamil and cannot communicate effectively in English. Whereas 70 percent of Tamil speaking people in Sri Lanka cannot communicate in Sinhala. But the new Presidential initiative on a trilingual Sri Lanka plans to change this.

A salient feature of the Presidential initiative for a trilingual Sri Lanka is the redefinition of language. “The initiative will not promote Sinhala and Tamil as mere instruments of communication, but as a holistic cultural package,” said Presidential Advisor and Coordinator of the programme ‘English as a life skill’ and the initiative for a trilingual Sri Lanka, Sunimal Fernando. “Language is an expression of culture. Knowledge of Tamil culture will facilitate empathy and affection for its culture in the Sinhala people and thereby encourage people to learn the Tamil language. The same goes for Sinhala.”

Under the trilingual initiative Sinhala and Tamil will be promoted as vehicles through which modern ideas, views, technologies and modern sciences among a host of other subjects could be discussed, discoursed and debated. English will be promoted as a life skill for occupation, employment, accessing knowledge and technology and for communicating with the rest of the world. English is basically a tool for communication.

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Lexicon as major system of English
By William Roger Jones, The Korea Times

September 29, 2011—Recently, I presented one strategy and addressed one classroom application of using The Korea Times in getting to know a word in that major system of English language named lexicon.

Also, I mentioned that the major systems overlap. Especially, you can see this extended commonness in grammar, another major system having auxiliaries (morphology, orthography, and syntax). Grammar in its broadest sense refers to the rules of speech and writing of Standard English.

It is complex and includes using words in specific ways according to their parts of speech, and verb tenses and their agreement in sentence construction, as well as correct use of punctuation and mechanics, etc. This is the prescriptive grammar that we are taught in school to use if we wish to sound educated and painstakingly learn if we wish to receive a good grade from the English instructor. The Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language contains 1,800 pages and some 3,500 points requiring grammatical exposition, largely points to do with syntax.

The descriptive grammar such as what we really speak (nobody speaks textbook English), Ebonics and Chicano English, and the creative hybrid “new Englishes” such as Chinglish, Japlish, Konglish, Singlish, and Taglish, etc., although interesting and amusingly having communicative purposes we must suppress, for if displayed could very well hinder one's chances to obtain particular employment or to achieve a position of social status.

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Our sensitive relationship with the English language 
By Freddy Macha, TheCitizen.co.tz

LONDON, October 13, 2011—Last week we saw how various Africans with no single national language like us claim to manage European languages better than us. Let’s carry on with the contention.

I met this Zambian female, a Bemba who frequents the same gym. She had the best teeth I have ever seen.

“How come your teeth are so white? Are they real?”

She smiled even brighter than before.

“Ever since I set foot in London I have heard that question over and over again,” she said.

“So do you use some special Zambian toothpaste?”

She laughed: “Nooooh!  I have a beautiful heart and it shows in my mouth. I never lie.”

We kept on till we touched nationalities.

Was I Jamaican? She wondered. Ethiopian?

“I am your neighbour,” I hinted.

She stepped back.

“You are Congolese? I love Ndombolo.”

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Massive decline in English knack for pupils, teachers
By Stella Barozi, Guardian on Sunday

September 25, 2011—In one of a local TV advert, a teacher asks a student to define global warming. Biting her finger and thinking really hard, the student struggles to find the right English words to explain the terminology.

After struggling for some time, the student decides to explain the terminology in Kiswahili and the teacher cuts her short insisting she does so in English. The student keeps quiet and appears to think hard as she again tries to figure out the right English words.

In the meantime, the rest of the class remains silent as no one can give the definition in English. Finally, the teacher, smilingly, allows the student to define the terminology in Kiswahili. Relieved, the student smiles and defines the term ‘global warming,’ more confidently.

This is a common situation in most Tanzanian schools. English is a big problem, not only to students but to teachers as well. Children have a long way to go in mastering the English language.

Except for the few who go to English medium schools, mastering the international language is still a challenge for most children; the same expect to compete in East African, regional and global job markets.

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What’s that you say?: Understanding in any language
By Julia Proctor, TheAge.com.au

October 31, 2011—I language is your love...

Then this might just be the degree for you. Linguistics is the study of communicative behaviour, both verbal and non-verbal, explains Randy LaPolla, La Trobe’s chair of linguistics. Students study the structure and design of language — including phonetics (that's the study of sounds) and syntax (the study of sentence formation). They look at how language relates to thinking and how it functions in society, as well as how language develops and changes, and how it is acquired and learnt.

Hang on, are we talking about the English language?

Linguistics is concerned with human language in general, as well as individual languages. During the course, examples are taken from English, but also from other languages. “Linguistics looks at the similarities and the differences in communicative behaviour in different societies,” says Professor LaPolla, who adds that understanding communicative behaviour helps in the understanding of other areas of human behaviour and shines light on different cultures and views.

Do I need to be multilingual to study linguistics?

There’s no requirement to study a second language alongside linguistics. Sometimes, students pair linguistics with subjects such as anthropology, English, education or law. However, many linguistics students also learn, or already speak, a second language. “Usually people who do linguistics are interested in languages generally,” says Professor LaPolla...

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TEQSA role to safeguard language standards
By Bernard Lane, TheAustralian.com.au

September 28, 2011—There should be independent oversight of English language standards at universities taking advantage of streamlined procedures to recruit overseas students, according to an expert on global student flows, Lesleyanne Hawthorne.

“This a highly appropriate role for the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, should problems associated with institutional conflict of interest emerge,” Professor Hawthorne said.

Under Knight visa reforms adopted by the government, universities alone, and no longer immigration officials issuing visas, will vet the English proficiency of would-be students from the key market of China.

Packages, in which a student signs up for a foundation or English courses as well as higher education, also will benefit from the visa streamlining.

"The government will seek assurances from participating universities that high-quality education outcomes continue to be achieved, including through ensuring students have appropriate English language skills," a spokeswoman for Immigration Minister Chris Bowen said.

Alex Barthel, public officer of the Association for Academic Language and Learning, was worried the changes would “license universities to open the doors to students with any language proficiency level.”

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TEQSA role to safeguard language standards
By Bernard Lane, TheAustralian.com.au

September 28, 2011—There should be independent oversight of English language standards at universities taking advantage of streamlined procedures to recruit overseas students, according to an expert on global student flows, Lesleyanne Hawthorne.

“This a highly appropriate role for the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, should problems associated with institutional conflict of interest emerge,” Professor Hawthorne said.

Under Knight visa reforms adopted by the government, universities alone, and no longer immigration officials issuing visas, will vet the English proficiency of would-be students from the key market of China.

Packages, in which a student signs up for a foundation or English courses as well as higher education, also will benefit from the visa streamlining.

"The government will seek assurances from participating universities that high-quality education outcomes continue to be achieved, including through ensuring students have appropriate English language skills," a spokeswoman for Immigration Minister Chris Bowen said.

Alex Barthel, public officer of the Association for Academic Language and Learning, was worried the changes would “license universities to open the doors to students with any language proficiency level.”

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I am an English speaker, too (2)
By Ahn Hye-jeong, The Korea Times

July 12, 2011—In this article, I will further elaborate on the article published in The Korea Times on June 9. Particular attention will be paid to the development of English as an international language coupled with the skills required to become a proficient English speaker in today’s world.

English is a foreign language in South Korea. It does not perform any official function as a language. However, the cultural and social importance of English is notably more significant than that of any other foreign language. A high level of English proficiency is often associated with a more prestigious social status and professional and academic success.

The Lee Myung-bak administration also re-emphasized the importance of learning the English language by setting up a dichotomy of ``English- fluent” and ``English-poor” nations. The government simultaneously claimed that the English proficiency of any nation or individual is a central factor in promoting both the individual’s and nation’s status and success.

South Korea is well known for its dedication to learning English. The term, ``English fever” indicates how much emphasis Koreans put on English learning. South Korea is one of the largest consumers in the English education market spending over $10 billion a year on this alone. In 2007, more than half of the total number of applicants enrolling for TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication) were Koreans and approximately 124,000 Korean applicants enrolled in TOEFL (Test of English for Foreign Language) making this group the clear majority of applicants.

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English worship
By Deauwand Myers, The Korea Times

July 13, 2011—The English language owes its ubiquity to British power. Advancements in war technology and naval exploration created, for several hundred years, the largest empire ever known. Britain’s ex-colony, the United States, became a new kind of empire, and even in its current economic hardship, is the richest and most powerful nation in all of human history.

With this power came all the attendant privileges and problems. One of its privileges, that of English being the lingua franca of our time, makes it easier for American and British citizens (and her commonwealth nations) to globally interact.

But English is not the only language a student must know to be successful in the world. Asia’s fetishizing and romanticizing English, even ascribing magical powers to those who can master it, is wrong. There are racial, ethno-centric implications in this English worship. The more you can speak English, the more Western (white), sophisticated, and erudite you are.

Chinese and Spanish are widely used languages as well, and I wish Korean education would broaden its scope and enrich students’ academic lives with a menu of options in language learning.

Pedagogical studies have shown that students who learn several languages do better in understanding these languages (especially at an early age).

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Revisit myth of English as official language
By Charles Dhewa, Newsday.co.zw

HARARE, August 3, 2011—Zimbabwe’s Medium-Term Plan (MTP), launched on July 7 2011 by the Ministry of Economic Planning and Investment Promotion, highlighted Human–Centred Development as a key pillar.

One of the most important ingredients of human –centred development is language. To achieve human development, we have to revisit the myth of English as an official language.

The MTP should be repackaged into languages spoken by ordinary people such as Shona, Ndebele, Tonga and many others.

This will empower people to conduct business in their own languages through which they dream, aspire and make sense of the world. English should only be used to engage with the outside world.

To the extent that economic planning in Zimbabwe is currently the preserve of economists, some of the educated people who attended the MTP launch could not understand the arcane language in which the document was couched.

Most Zimbabwean indigenous languages have rich metaphors which can inspire business and economic development.

If English was the only language of success as is assumed in Zimbabwe, the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans whom we are trying to emulate, would not have become economic giants.

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Talayero Tales: The simple truth of the English-speaking Chamorro
By Ed S.N. San Gil, Pacific Sunday News

August 7, 2011—I am often asked "Why don't the younger generation of Chamorros speak their language?" I thought about this question for weeks trying to come up with an honest answer.

It is easy to blame someone or an event in our history for the cause of this problem. For years, Chamorros have pointed the finger at the Americans. After all, they were the ones who punished the young Chamorro generation for speaking our language in school back in the 1950s.

For every issue there are two opposing sides. The popular side is where blame can be directed. In this case, the Americans or statesiders are the ones we are pointing to. As I said earlier, the Americans required the young Chamorro generation to speak English in school. Most would argue this was "the" main reason for the decline of the Chamorro language.

If you are content with this reasoning, you need not read further.

For the sake of keeping the course of history straight, let us go back to the 1940s and the Japanese occupation of Guahan. During the war, my mother was but 8 years old. She told me how the Japanese soldiers would reprimand those who spoke any language other than Japanese. You have to take into account the occupation lasted about three years. Even with the threat of death, the Chamorro language thrived.

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Rules of English grammar
By Alhaji A. M. Marzuq, MyJoyOnline.com

August 18, 2011—To those of no language inclination, the phrase “Rules of Grammar” is a monster. Indeed, the term sends them to a state of fear and confusion, as it sounds to them endless memorization of dry rules with no apparent use.

In reality, however, grammar is an interesting subject when presented comprehensibly. In any case, English grammatical rules must be embraced by all users of the language because they are vital for oral and written communications. For instance, the rules of grammar teach users how to form words, phrases, and sentences in universally acceptable ways.

The scope of English Grammar varies from linguist to linguist. Some linguists include orthography (spelling, capitalization, and punctuation), semantics (word meaning) and pragmatics (language use in context) under a wider definition of grammar, while others treat the areas mentioned as separate linguistic disciplines.

Communication, in most situations, usually follows action, and grammatical rules help us to accomplish many communicative tasks. For example, to talk about our past job experience at a job interview, we apply the rules for the present perfect tense. Besides, the rules for forming conditional sentences help us to express contrary to fact wishes, assumptions or regrets about missed opportunities, while the present simple tense is used to talk about hard facts and regular habits.

In English writing, adjectival and adverbial phrases and clauses help us add more information and enrich our sentences, while the rules governing conjunctions and transitional adverbs are vital when we want our text to appear coherent with logically related parts.

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How about German as the new lingua franca?
By Todd Buell, Wall Street Journal (blog)

September 1, 2011—Is learning German the key to success for European youth? The language of Goethe and Schiller arguably lacks the global reach of English, Spanish and French, but, these days educated people are expected to speak English proficiently.

Where students distinguish themselves is by what other languages they learn, and here is where German mightn’t be a bad idea due to the relative strength of the German labor market.

Combine that with Germany’s shortage of skilled labor and a young person with both English and German is in the driver’s seat when it comes to future employment (an Asian language wouldn’t hurt either, but first things first).

Data from Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency, show that 94.6% of students roughly between 15 and 20 years old were studying English in 2009, the last year for which complete data are available.

On average, a student at that educational level has learned 1.4 foreign languages. Since for most European students, the native language isn’t English, it suggests that a student knows his or her native language as well as English and then maybe one other language.

Among the other languages, 25.7% of EU students at this level are learning French and 26.5% German. For comparison’s sake, the figure for Spanish is 19.3%.

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Who’s the smart aleck that invented the English language?
By Valerie Close, Vinton Today

IOWA, August 31, 2011—I’ve had fun catching up with a neighbor “kid” I used to play baseball with, and well, I practically lived at their house during my childhood.

We talked briefly about spelling.

I notice all the time, I can write an article, proofread Dean’s articles, scan the e-mail that is sent in and THINK I caught all the typos.

I click the button to send it out for all of you to read and THEN I see a ton of spelling mistakes.

When I was in school, I prided myself on my spelling skills, and even entered a state contest, so sure of myself. I can't remember now where I placed, but I was good.

When we got married, Dean was a great speller too.

Even my friend agreed, that for some reason the ability to spell sometimes flees her grasp.

I think I’ve used Google more in the last year and a half to figure out how to spell a word.

For the longest time, in my teen years, for some reason the word, “Of” stumped me. It should be spelled “Ov.”

It used to be fun to teach the kids how to read, until I found now I just get frustrated trying to explain that even though a word SOUNDS like it should be spelled a different way, well, it’s not. NO, I don’t know why. NO, I don’t know WHO said it should be spelled that way, and NO you can’t spell it the way it sounds. Why? Because it’s wrong!

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The language paradox: Speak English, can
By Ansel Ashby, Policymic.com

English is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world; the most when native and non-native speakers are combined. It is the official language of the European Union, The United States, India, and many other countries throughout the world, in various slightly different forms. Recently the former Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, said that American English would prevail over other forms.

Speaking English is a good skill to have, American or otherwise.

But what about all the non-native English speakers? Some linguists now estimate that non-native speakers now outnumber native speakers by a ratio as high as 3:1. For every native born English speaker, three more people are taught English as a second language. Lucky for us, the native English speakers, I mean; we can travel nearly anywhere in the world and get along just fine. Undoubtedly, that’s one of the main causes of the U.S.’s deeply entrenched monolinguism.

So if everyone speaks English, why learn another language? Please, translate: “Dis Guy Singrish Sib Eh Powerful Sia.”

Any guesses? It means: This person’s Singlish is very good.

Okay, how about this: “Order That The Objects Continuen Infecting Your mystery, Please Not To Touch.” Or: “Coffee Give Birth to a Child Condition”

The first example is Singlish. The commonly used pidgin English found widely in Singapore. Singlish loosely combines an English vocabulary with Mandarin sentence structures and syntax, not to mention a handful of words and phrases from Chinese, Malay, and Tamil.

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Singapore’s language battle: American versus “the Queen’s English”
By reddotrevolver, AsianCorrespondent.com

September 7, 2011—Known as a country in Southeast Asia with a highly educated workforce, Singapore is also one of the only countries in the region that uses English as a working language, and as a medium of instruction in schools. The ease of communication has established the country as the headquarters in Asia for many multinational companies.

A report by the Educational Testing Services (ETS) based on data from Jan-Dec 2010 shows that Singapore came in third in TOEFL (The Test of English as a Foreign Language) scores out of 163 countries. It is the only Asian country in the top three.

However, students in Singapore are taught in British English, or “the Queen’s English,” since elementary school. To Singapore’s former Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, this poses a serious and imminent challenge.

According to Channel NewsAsia, Lee said:

“There is an intense worldwide competition for talent, especially for English-speaking skilled professionals, managers and executives. Our English-speaking environment is one reason why Singapore has managed to attract a number of these talented individuals to complement our own talent pool…”

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“Good English starts at home”
By Murali Sharma (letter), TodayOnline.com

September 5, 2011—Soon, Speak Good English campaign will be upon us. The fact that we have this campaign yearly speaks volumes for the determination, vision and hope that its organisers hold for future generations.

It is astounding that in Singapore, where we are surrounded with materials in English, many are still struggling with the language. From accent to pronunciation and grammar to vocabulary, the basics seem to have eluded a large number.

In a country where the English language envelopes our very existence in administration, street signs, television, radio, magazines, newspapers, etc, it is amazing how many have fallen by the wayside. So how can we improve?

Like all good things, good English should start at a young age, in the home. However, we are a polyglot society, with each race having its own ancestral language constructions. All these influences shape the English that we speak, and no two languages can coexist perfectly.

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Technology overkill absolutely killing the English language
By Loran Smith, Athens Banner-Herald

September 11, 2011—Any English teacher will tell you good grammar comes from practicing good grammar. When I have ever written anything I would later like to recall, it is because I was in too much of a hurry and failed to take a few minutes to proof what was written.

With a poor hand when it comes to writing, I realized years ago that a typewriter would be a treasured friend. Then along came the computer, and efficiency was heightened considerably.
I often have concluded that for technology to be best utilized, discipline is required. There was a time when a competent copy editor was a newspaper operation’s most valued asset.

In bygone days, the Athens Banner-Herald had one of the best, the late Dan Kitchens, who also taught at the Henry Grady School of Journalism at the University of Georgia. At one time, he was the faculty adviser to The Red & Black, the student newspaper. He read every word in the paper and marked errors with a red grease pencil. When he met with the staff to offer his cynical critique, no one was spared. I have to believe it made the paper better and produced highly regarded reporters—who, later, as seasoned newsmen, paid tribute to Dan and his admonition that writers should make a determined effort to get it right before their work made it into print.

He once heard a network announcer on the “Today” show make a grammatical faux pas. He called NBC, got her on the phone and gave her unshirted hell for being so irresponsible.

If Dan were here today, he would be appalled at what seems to get by editors today. Further, he would have the greatest disdain for email sloppiness. Even between friends…

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English as she is spoke...
By JM Joyve, NationMultimedia.com

September 26, 2011—How do we expect Thais to be able to deal with English when we native English speakers cannot agree on either pronunciation or spelling.

Most other languages, including Thai, only have one version of the language; however, English seems to have no fixed abode, or rules.

Some of us see “zeebras,” while others see “zedbras.” Some of us salute “lefttenants,” while others salute “lootenants.” We can’t even agree on how to pronounce the alphabet. Some say “aich,” others “haitch.”

I have to admit that I can’t watch BBC, because I can’t understand most of the talking heads, even though they are ostensibly speaking my native language

When Thais are listening to us, is it any wonder that they have difficulty learning our language. I have studied five languages in my lifetime, and find English the most convoluted of the five. For a non-English speaker, it must be extremely difficult to learn all of the rules, which really don’t exist in English, such as the rule of “I” before “e” except after “c.” How do you explain “science”? Or do we go to “skool” or “shul”?

Even the meaning of words can be difficult for native English speakers. For example, the “thing” on the end of a pencil, with which we make erasures, may be an “eraser” or a “rubber,” while a “rubber” to other English speakers is a “condom.”

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Local students and pidgin English assault

By Chidera Michaels, AllAfrica.com

October 3, 2011—At this point I was looking at two irreducible possibilities as sources of my relative’s problems: either he was a fraud who most certainly paid someone else to take his WAEC examinations for him or he was truly smart but was taught a parallel “English Language,” a language that has its own word meanings and rules of grammar distinct from those of regular English Language, a language that has somehow evolved in Nigeria.

But whichever of those possibilities was my relative’s problem, I was sure of one thing: my relative has a colossal problem on his hands that could frustrate his chances of obtaining quality education in this country.

And so I decided to dig a little deep to find out what the genesis of his problems may be by calling up a few people in Nigeria.

What I found out left a repulsively sickening feeling in my stomach.

I found out that corruption, a familiar Nigerian drumbeat which has eaten deep into every facet of her life, has dealt a devastating blow to her educational system as well.

Public education in Nigeria is now a ghost of its former self.

And its private counterpart (at every level), born out of the need to take the place of the collapsed public schools, is now perhaps Nigeria's newest and fastest-growing unregulated fraudulent machine.

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Language of instruction
By Zoë Robert, IcelandReview.com

October 16, 2011—In June I attended a round table discussion at the Nordic House on the significance of English in Iceland. The seminar was part of a series of events to launch the Iceland branch of the English-Speaking Union (ESU) and was co-hosted by the Vigdís Finnbogadóttir Institute of Foreign Languages.

According to a 2005 study of words used by speakers of the Scandinavian languages, the number of English words in use has doubled during the last 30 years and is now 1.2 percent.

With a reputation as a conservative language, Icelandic has fewer English loanwords than other Nordic languages, despite, according to the study, Iceland being the country in the region which uses English the most.

Apparently this is because of the long tradition of native language word formation since the 12th century and a strong puristic language policy.

According to Ari Páll Kristinsson, an expert on language policy and planning studies in Iceland who presented the study, basic Icelandic vocabulary has remained relatively unchanged for over a thousand years and for that reason it is easier to create Icelandic words than to adapt loanwords into the language system.

The study looked at the frequency of borrowed words and found that Icelandic borrowed just 17 words per 10,000 words, while Norwegian used 111 per 10,000.

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Project English
By M. Shamsul Hoque, TheDailyStar.net

October 23, 2011—Bangladeshis, especially the youth, need to acquire and use new knowledge and skills for adapting to an information-based fast-moving world. And it is English that can best help them meet this need. But the English they are now learning (textbook contents through rote learning) mostly for examination requirements is not responsive to this need. They need to learn communicative English for this purpose.

So, our national curriculum at primary and secondary levels has been designed, textbooks have been developed and the majority of the teachers have been trained to facilitate Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). But despite all these initiatives, there has been a continuing decline in the standards of teaching and learning of English.

To reverse the situation, four ELT projects have been set up so far with government initiative, assisted by the Department for International Development (DfID) of the UK government. These projects are: Orientation of Secondary School Teachers for Teaching English in Bangladesh (OSSTTEB), Primary English Resource Centres (PERC), English Language Teaching Improvement Project (ELTIP) Phase 1, and English in Action (EiA). The main goal of all these projects was to strengthen English language education.

The first three projects (1990-2002) helped develop national curriculums, textbooks and training courses based on CLT. They worked closely with the government officials and relevant professionals, but each of them worked separately as a project team. However, the impact of these projects was hugely impressive during the project periods but faded away after they were finished...

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The Indonesian language at 83: Looking back to look forward
By Setiono Sugiharto, The Jakarta Post

JAKARTA, October 29, 2011—The tremendous speed of the modernization of the Indonesian language, especially its lexicon, cannot be separated from the exhaustive work of past Indonesian scholars from two radically different camps: the conservatives and the modernists.

The conservatives’ central figure was the late Anton M. Moeliono, who contributed significantly to the modernization of the Indonesian lexicon. In an attempt to seek Indonesian counterparts to foreign terminology that dominated almost all domains, Moeliono, known as the guardian of the Indonesian language, was consistent in resorting either to the Malay language or indigenous Indonesian languages for reference.

He strongly believed that using Indonesian and its indigenous languages was one of the most effective ways to safeguard it from outside threats, such that Indonesian language users could take pride in their national language.

Moeliono’s legacy is now widely adopted by the Indonesian language users, including such words as rekayasa (engineering), penyelia (supervisor), tenggat (deadline), kudapan (snack), pantau (monitor), suku cadang (spare parts), and penyibak aib (whistle blowers).

However, not all the terminology he unveiled gained acceptance and became part of our daily communication. Words such as jasa boga (catering), warta merta (obituary), sengkuap (canopy), umpan tekak (appetizer), and pranata (institution) are hardly used in either spoken or written communication.

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