Vote for an education president
By Isagani Cruz, The Philippine Star

Again and again, we have been told that the coming elections are crucial to the survival of our country. That may very well be true for the economy, for governance, for human rights, and for all the other issues that we voters have to worry about when we go to the polls to elect the new national and local officials.

Fortunately for education, the coming elections are not that crucial. Presidents have come and gone, but Philippine education has shown remarkable resilience. Sad to say, of course, that is negative rather than positive. Despite all the efforts of all the past presidents, we still lag behind practically every other country in the world in various international rankings of educational systems (TIMSS, THES, ISI, and so on).

It is not just embarrassing, but outright disgraceful, that we have scored, at best, fifth from the bottom in TIMSS exams and once even landed rock bottom. Our best universities barely make it to any list of internationally-rated institutions; that only a handful out of more than 2,000 tertiary-level schools are respected outside the country is clearly cause for desperation.

Can the next President really make a difference when it comes to our educational system?

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Watch the English language!
By Bubbles Sabharwal, MyDigitalfc.com

The English language is full of traps for those who do not speak it regularly and have not grown up with it. I remember hearing a music teacher tell his pupil, “I want you to play better, not badder.” It may not be our mother tongue, but if it is used, then it must be used in the correct sense. Just as grooming, posture, courtesy, manners are all the hallmarks of a well rounded person, so is a pleasant voice and correct speech. Honestly, a pleasant voice, a deep voice can be as attractive as a six-pack, for some at least!

Have we not heard “lonjeray” for lingerie, “bokay” for bouquet, “ketch” for catch, “yesserda” for yesterday, “jenyouwine” for genuine. (this one is a howler…) and “sassiety” for society. Another one that always gets my facial muscles twitching is “chawklut” for chocolate?

Face it, we all judge people by their appearances. If what we see is interesting, we try to get to know the person better. If you get an attractively wrapped gift, you feel its contents are valuable, just as a well-groomed and a well-spoken person suggests that he or she has inner qualities of worth. While on the topic of voice, how many of us really listen to ourselves speak? Cup your mouth and hear yourself. Another exercise is to cup your hands behind your ears and say several sentences aloud as if talking to yourself.

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Accented teachers may be better for English language learners, study shows
By Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post

A new study on how well students learn second languages from teachers with accents suggests that Arizona may be making a mistake by trying to remove heavily accented Hispanic teachers from classrooms filled with Hispanics trying to learn English.

School districts in Arizona are under orders from the state Department of Education to remove teachers who speak English with a very heavy accent (and/or whose speech is ungrammatical) from classrooms with students who are learning to speak English. Officials say they want students who don’t know much English to have teachers who can best model how to speak the language.

I wrote the other day about the difficulties in determining just how deep an accent has to be to be considered a problem, but here’s another side of the issue.

According to a new research study conducted in Israel, students learn a second language better from a teacher who speaks in the same accent as they do.

The study, published in the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, said that students learning from a teacher with the same accent have an easier time understanding the material.

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Hopscotching the world in headlines
Book Review by Janet Maslin, The New York Times
 
On an epochal day in 2007 the newspaper staff in “The Imperfectionists” must deal with a huge story. “Thankfully,” Tom Rachman writes, “most of the editorial staffers are occupied piecing together copy on a shooting at Virginia Tech” when the other story, the really big one, breaks.

What’s the word “thankfully” doing in a chapter titled “Gunman Kills 32 in Campus Rampage”? It’s there because Mr. Rachman, a former journalist, knows and loves the myopia of his old profession, the gallows humor of its practitioners and the precariousness of the business to which they devote their lives. Armed with this knowledge and somehow free of the fashionable diffidence that too often plagues fiction about the workplace, he has written a rich, thrilling book that is both love letter to and epitaph for the newspaper world.

Mr. Rachman’s transition from journalism to fiction writing is nothing short of spectacular. “The Imperfectionists” is a splendid original, filled with wit and structured so ingeniously that figuring out where the author is headed is half the reader’s fun. The other half comes from his sparkling descriptions not only of newspaper office denizens but of the tricks of their trade, presented in language that is smartly satirical yet brimming with affection.

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A three-way English competition
By Kim Whan-yung, JoongAng Sunday

The best command of the world’s dominant language will give China, Korea or Japan an edge in the “Asian century.”

Lately, opinions that the 21st century will be “the era of Korea, Japan and China” or “the century of Asia” are assuming great prominence. The Korea-China-Japan summit meeting scheduled for the end of the month will provide an opportunity for the three countries to pursue an East Asian alliance.

The 19th century belonged to Britain, and the 20th century was dominated by the United States. The 19th and 20th centuries were an era of the English language. At present, more than 400 million people around the world consider English their native language. It is the de facto international language and it made a great contribution to Britain and the United States’ dominance of the world.

English is also recognized as one of the crucial qualities of human capital. According to research on the correlation between English proficiency and national competitiveness, the ability to communicate in English is a critical variable that supports expansion of international trade.

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When pregnant pauses miscarry
By U-En Ng, New Straights Times

The English language can be a tricky thing. Despite our best intentions we mangle it somehow and produce funny, strange, revolting, senseless things:

Last week, for example, my bit of made-up dialogue in these pages somehow went from “fie” (an expression of disgust) to “fine”, but no one seemed to complain anyway.

This kind of thing is par for the course in this line of work and is made worse in our present age of increasing illiteracy by things like careless blogging, inadequately subbed news, and the general tendency to view casual expression as a personal virtue even in formal settings. We are losing the ability to tell if something in language has gone wrong.

The stage is no exception to this and we often make lapse into ineptitude when we revert to Manglish to force “localization,” that is, the sometimes questionable practice of “Malaysianising” a play for a local audience that would otherwise find the work incomprehensible and be turned off forever from English theatre.

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Mother tongue: A hot button issue
By Eugene KB Tan, TodayOnline

Given the island’s multilingual make-up, language is both a socioeconomic and political resource.

So, it is no surprise that language policies require a delicate balance of competing—and  sometimes, conflicting—objectives, interests and expectations.

Among the mother tongues, the teaching of and perceived emphasis (or lack thereof) on the Chinese language continues to arouse strong emotions among Chinese-Singaporeans, who are in fact more heterogeneous than widely perceived.

This can be seen from the recent heated public reaction, especially in the Chinese language media, to the Education Minister’s remarks that his ministry is considering a reduction in the weightage given to mother tongue languages at the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE).

Currently, mother tongue languages are given a 25-per-cent weightage, the same as English, mathematics and science.

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Iceland’s volcano a mouthful to say
By Tom Watkins, CNN

CNN—An event as big as a volcano that disrupts transportation around the globe might be expected to have its name added to the English lexicon, perhaps meaning “to cause widespread disruption,” an English-language monitor said Tuesday.

“People talk about a ‘Krakatau,’ right?” said Paul JJ Payack, president and chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor, in a telephone interview. He was referring to the 1883 eruption of a volcano in Indonesia that unleashed a tsunami that killed more than 34,000 people.

Payack’s Austin-Texas-based monitor analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choices and their impact on culture, with an emphasis on English.

“Tsunami” itself has gained in usage since the 2004 South Asia event that left 245,000 people dead or missing across the region, said Payack.

“When prices collapsed economically, the first thing that they called it was an ‘economic tsunami,’” he said.

But what happens when that volcano's name is Eyjafjallajokull, as in the Icelandic volcano whose ash clouds have grounded thousands of flights worldwide?

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Pardon my French
By Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times

Éric Zemmour, slight, dark, a live wire, fell over his own words, they were tumbling out so fast. He was fidgeting at the back of a half-empty cafe one recent evening near the offices of Le Figaro, the newspaper where he works, notwithstanding that detractors have lately tried to get him fired for his most recent inflammatory remarks about French blacks and Arabs on a television show. Mr. Zemmour, roughly speaking, is the Bill O’Reilly of French letters. He was describing his latest book, “French Melancholy,” which has shot up the best-seller list here.

“The end of French political power has brought the end of French,” Mr. Zemmour said. “Now even the French elite have given up. They don’t care anymore. They all speak English. And the working class, I’m not talking just about immigrants, they don’t care about preserving the integrity of the language either.”

Mr. Zemmour is a notorious rabble-rouser. In his view France, because of immigration and other outside influences, has lost touch with its heroic ancient Roman roots, its national “gloire,” its historic culture, at the heart of which is the French language. Plenty of people think he’s an extremist, but he’s not alone. The other day Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, sounded a bit like Mr. Zemmour, complaining about the “snobisme” of French diplomats who “are happy to speak English,” rather than French, which is “under siege.”

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China has many “dirty words”
By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING—In 1972, comedian George Carlin wrote a monologue titled, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” When a version of this riff was broadcast the following year on a jazz radio station, it set off a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately upheld the right of the Federal Communications Commission to regulate indecent material on the airwaves.

Nothing is quite so clear-cut in China, especially when it comes to the murky realm of Internet censorship. China does, of course, have its own version of the dirty words (many, many more than the seven identified by Carlin), but the list itself is confidential.

Trying to figure out what is banned and what is not has taken on new urgency in the aftermath of Google's withdrawal from China over censorship concerns and the strong stance of the Obama administration on Internet freedom.

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Taiwan must invest now in more language study
Editorial, Taiwan News
             
The rise of economic clout and global influence of the People’s Republic of China undoubtedly is pushing Taiwan to become more deeply integrated into the so-called “great Chinese economy” due to the PRC’s emergence both as a labor-intensive “workshop” and export platform and a fast growing potential industrial and consumer market.

The pressure of this reality lies behind the rush by President Ma Ying-jeou’s rightist Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) government for rapid signing of a controversial “Cross-strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement” with Beijing this summer.

But the inescapable reality of such pressures does not mean that the passive strategy of “complete liberalization” of the KMT government is the only option.

Indeed, many advocates of a Taiwan-centric strategy believe that Taiwan can accelerate all aspects of “globalization” to balance the threat of PRC domination.

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