English language is under siege from all directions
By Robert Yenna Mishawaka

As an old English teacher who is deeply distressed that grammar is not taught as well or as often as it was in the “old days,” I’ve decided our language is officially on the brink of destruction. Any breath our language had left was destroyed by our latest fad, text messaging. Capitalization is rarely used, many students don't capitalize the
word “I” and the letter “u” often represents the word “you.”

Our businesses that advertise on their billboards are not much better. “It’s” means either “it is” or “it has.” Do they not make the apostrophe to put on signs?

If the apostrophe is actually no longer made for billboards, please contact me, and I will drop by with a black magic marker and fix the error.

The McDonald’s restaurant motto is a perfect example of part of the problem. The motto, "i’m lovin’ it” is easily remembered, but all I remember it for is having three words with three mistakes.

Seeing mistakes on billboards makes it much more difficult for my students to recognize what actually is correct. It reminds me of the family "dinning" instead of "dining" sign I saw on a local restaurant billboard last week. Yes, I'm "old school," but in this case the "old school" is the "correct school." Long live the comma and all its relatives.

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Politicians muddy the language waters

By Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr.

Politicians destroy and debase language more effectively than globalisers and imperialists can ever hope to do. This is an issue that linguists in the country have not dared to explore because they feel that it is the political struggle of each linguistic group that has helped to prop the language. It is a lie, which needs to be nailed. If anything, the linguistic fanatics who used language as a political weapon are the very people who debased it. For example, the many Dravidian parties -- DK, DMK, AIADMK et al -- have been a curse and a disaster for Tamil.

Excepting Tamil Nadu chief minister Karunanidhi, who is an acknowledged litterateur in his own right, all the others have tried to choke the language with mindless linguistic antiquarianism. They tried to purge the language of Sanskrit words. It is the kind of a blinkered movement witnessed in the English language, when some poets and writers wanted to write in English which did not have any Latin words and who tried to revive the long-dead Anglo-Saxon words and phrases.

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Do we need to change textbooks often to teach English?
By Asantha U. Attanayake

The evolution of methods for teaching a second language has seen many approaches and methods getting discarded as and when experts in the field advocate. However, as knowledge expands such discourses are inevitable. When teaching methods change, consequently the materials are changed or vice versa.

In the case of the general education in Sri Lanka, we have witnessed textbooks being changed a number of times in terms of their outlook over the past couple of years. Changes are necessary if we want to proceed. Yet, have we ever justified empirically, why complete changes in the textbooks are necessary? What is the proof that such changes are a must?

There are instances where within two-three years after the production of one set of textbooks, changes were carried out to the entire set of books. One might argue that since English language teaching itself has not shown a remarkable improvement, or rather it has shown that it is a failure, that itself would account for the need to have changes in the main resources in teaching, that is textbooks/materials in our contexts.

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Making the Net global
Editorial, Arabnews.com
 
Yesterday's decision by the Internet regulators to allow domain names in characters other than Latin ones is a major shot in the arm for cultural equality. Most people in the world do not speak languages written in the Latin script. Of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide (a quarter of the world’s population), more than half use languages written in other scripts. There are billions more as yet without access to a computer and the Internet, who largely live in Africa and Asia who likewise do not speak a language which uses Latin characters. They are potential users. The Internet, as the prime means of communication and information exchange alongside television and telephone, must be fully accessible to them. Enabling users to key in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Cyrillic or whatever scripts they use to access their chosen websites will show that all languages and cultures are regarded as equal in the Internet age. The Internet becomes truly global.

Whether increasing domain name characters from 30 to over 100,000 makes a great deal of practical difference is another matter. Small local businesses such as restaurants or shops will probably avail themselves of the facility, but most businesses and most websites will probably stick to the present system.

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Start Again
By Stephen Hugh-Jones, Telegraph-India

There must be somebody who regrets the early death of Windows Vista, Microsoft’s short-lived replacement for its reliable Windows XP operating system. Not many people, though, to judge from user reviews, and certainly not me. My knowledge of computing could be written on half a postage stamp. I’ve no notion what a spreadsheet is, and no need to know: all I use my laptop for is the Internet, word-processing and email. I still use olde-worlde dial-up (is it even available in India?), not broadband. I don’t even know the computer geeks’ vocabulary, let alone what it means.

In sum, in these computer-literate days, I’m a dinosaur—no, let’s say an ichthyosaur, their swimming cousins, which must have known there were faster ways of getting around but just didn’t bother to evolve accordingly. And I’m falling further behind every day. Still, for my limited purposes, I’d made sense of dear old XP. It did what I asked it to, and it didn’t crash. Then my laptop was stolen. By then, Vista ruled, and, like a fool, I reckoned that such basic needs as mine could be met by its most basic version, and the next thieves would make that much less profit out of me. My new laptop was duly so equipped, complete with Microsoft Works for word-processing instead of Word.

A fool indeed. The thing offers me 191 different typefaces and 28 different colours, it can probably sing, dance and play baseball on ice. What it certainly does is vary, and what it doesn’t do is what I ask it for. Some days it offers me a connection to my service provider before even being asked. Other days it waits till I’ve asked it for the Net, and even then its response is variable. My wife has to go through a small (and quite different) litany of clicks before she is allowed onto the Net.

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Englishes
By Sofia Logarta Madilena de la Cerna, Cebu Daily News
 
We have been having a diverse, interesting group of English majors in the Master of Education program at University of the Philippines Cebu. Many are teachers of the Department of Education and private schools. Several are teachers of the various English language schools.

The situation is quite multi-cultural, for aside from Filipinos, there have been American and Korean students. And the students of these graduate students are not only Filipinos, but also Koreans, Russians and others…

Once, one of the English majors brought a Korean lady lawyer who was in that country’s justice system to interact with me because she had been into human rights and gender issues. She was on vacation with her family and they were spending their vacation learning English.

I learned from our students teaching Russians that their students were university students learning English for their foreign language requirements. They were doing this in Cebu because of its flexibility. Here, the one-on-one learning arrangement was provided, while the other places did not. The setup gave rise to some relationship challenges.

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How to teach English and travel the world
By Henry DeVries, SDNN

Why has interest in teaching English abroad recently spiked?

Half the world’s population is expected to be speaking English by 2015.  English is a first language for 400 million people and a fluent second for between 300 and 500 million more, according to the “International Herald Tribune.”

Not military might but cultural and economic reasons have thrust English upon the world stage as the new lingua franca, a de facto language used for communications by people who do not share a mother tongue.

The origin of the term lingua franca (literally Italian for Frankish language) comes from a pidgin dialect that appeared in the Holy Land around the 13th Century. Piracy and naval warfare brought it in the 16th century to the Barbary Coast, where it came to be used as the official records of trade contacts.

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Are you in a puckaterry?
By Victoria King, BBC News

A major dictionary publisher is compiling a list of regional English words that have died out. But local dialects are not entirely extinct—as these words reveal.

Have you ever found yourself in a puckaterry or felt wambly after a drink or two?

If so, you're one of a dwindling breed—a user of an English regional dialect.

Where once your vocabulary would tie you definitively to a particular part of the country, the social upheavals of past few decades have stretched those verbal ties to breaking point.

Now dictionary maker Collins is launching a project—using that most modern form of communication Twitter—to try to identify whether there is any life left in a selection of weird and wonderful words.

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English tests for migrants will fail
By Adrian Blackledge, Guardian.co.uk

The British government proposes to extend legislation that requires applicants for British citizenship and continued residence in the UK to take an English language test. The new proposals introduce additional, advanced language tests for citizenship and settlement applicants, and new language tests for some who have not yet left their home country. Phil Woolas, minister for borders and immigration, argues that the extended legislation will support integration and community cohesion.

The new proposals are based on two assumptions. First, that migrants should learn English because they are more likely to gain access to employment and services, and are therefore more likely to contribute to society. Very few people, including migrants themselves, would argue against this. Most people agree that UK residents and citizens should be able to speak English. The second assumption argues that the best means of ensuring migrants learn English is to make them take a test. This assumption is false. There is little or no evidence that testing English language learners enhances their ability to learn English.

Despite the flawed nature of this assumption, the British government has recently introduced a raft of legislation to test the English language proficiency of applicants for citizenship or permanent settlement in the UK.

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A contrived language war. Again!
By Jim Wilson, The Suburban

QUEBEC—This province’s political leaders’ recent remarks on the Supreme Court decision regarding Bill 104 are not surprising. Their denunciation of the ruling is classic self serving posturing. The call to arms to defend the language and culture smacks of the worst demagoguery. A strategy to divert people’s attention from other, truly pressing concerns.

Quebec’s political parties vie for the right to be at the head of the movement that promotes itself as the savior of Quebec against an invasion of the dreaded English language, often described as the language of the oppressor.

The defense of any language is a vague concept, and has no specified time limit as to when victory can be declared. Indeed, those whose careers are dependent on such tactics know it would be a colossal error to even suggest that a victory was at hand. We have reached a state of permanent, albeit contrived, language war. These politicians do not care about the state of the French language, but they care very much about their own survival and if sanctimoniously lamenting the erosion of the language helps their image, so much the better.

Wars, even phony wars, need enemies, and the citizenry must be told to be on their guard. The English language is perceived as a danger to Quebec, and individuals who use it are targeted too. Citizens who believe that English could be a valuable tool are often betrayed as alien to Quebec.

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Boosting English language learning in Sri Lanka
By Susantha P. Hewa

We have to accept that our sacred formula for teaching English has been writing-centred. School text books for English do include speech activities, but they cannot be prevented from being glossed over because the gains students accrue by doing them go unnoticed as no tests are conducted to evaluate speech skills at the end of the school term. Moreover, parents who are left with no index other than what they can find in their child’s exercise book to get an idea of the amount of work the child has done during the English period are naturally happy with the more tangible writing output.

It is not surprising that they feel justified in being satisfied with this criterion of evaluation because it is only a written paper that the child has to face in the end. The strongest evidence for our inbuilt and institutionalized sluggishness about developing speech skills is that speech is not tested at the G.C.E (O/L) exam.

It is true that all academic work is unthinkable without writing. You cannot think of any worthwhile gain in the pursuit of knowledge if writing is to be avoided from the very beginning of the process…

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