Local dialects key to global success
By Philip Tubeza, Philippine Daily Inquirer

MANILA—To be globally competitive, Filipinos must learn first in their local dialect.

City dwellers may cringe upon hearing the accent of people from the provinces, but experts say that one of the keys to a good education is teaching students early on in their mother tongue, or dialect, instead of in English or in Filipino.

Dina S. Ocampo, an education professor at the University of the Philippines, said that numerous international studies had shown that using Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE)—or teaching young students in their dialect—actually improved their ability to learn English, Filipino, and other subjects later on.

“They learn best when the language used for learning is something they used. The analogy here is like a pyramid. You need a strong foundation to learn new things. It’s like you use your old strengths to learn subsequent things,” Ocampo said in an interview.

“To be globally competitive, you must go local. They say that in business. Why can’t we do it in learning? We must start from local.”

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Salute to the premier English Department
By Elmer A. Ordoñez, The Manila Times

The Department of English and Comparative Literature (DECL) of the University of the Philppines is a century old. Yesterday [June 18, 2010] the program of festivities was presented by DECL chair Adelaida F. Lucero for a year-long celebration of 100 years of excellence in teaching, creative writing, research, publication, extension service.

The department was founded in 1910 within the University of the Philippines (then in Padre Faura) which celebrated its centenary two years ago. The first professors were Americans and a few Australians.

Promising students were sent as pensionados to the US like Carlos P. Romulo, first editor of Varsity News (forerunner of the Philippine Collegian), who finished his M.A. in English at Columbia University, with his thesis on the fiction of O. Henry. Romulo’s career spanned from professor of English, to publisher, soldier, diplomat, UP president, and world statesman.

The first Filipino to head the department was Dr. Antonio Viterbo, with a Ph.D. also from Columbia, before the war. In 1928 assistant professors Vicente Hilario and Eliseo Quirino put out the landmark Thinking for Ourselves as an alternative textbook for students steeped in the Victorian English curriculum at the time.

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“Teacher lang”
By Raul Pangalangan, Philippine Daily Inquirer

Once, after the oath-taking of successful bar examinees, I joined a group of law professors from various schools all over the country for the traditional merienda with the Supreme Court justices. One professor recounted that he had just come back from a trip to Japan, and that to his amazement, he got more respect when he was introduced as a law professor rather than as an attorney. It drew oohs and aaahs around the table, with everyone delighted and surprised that the Japanese would bow lower to a sensei rather than to a bengoshi.

Compared to other Asian countries, Filipinos will actually be alone and isolated in their surprise. In Confucian societies especially, the scholar and teacher has a revered place at the top of the societal food chain, right below royalty and certainly high above merchants.

Yet if you’re joining the ranks of Filipino teachers in school year 2010, I tell you now: Brace yourself to hear the words “Teacher lang.” Someone said it to me on my way home after I finished my doctorate at Harvard, someone well-educated and who said it with genuine empathy and concern.

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Words and their stories: Mouth expressions
By Jill Moss, Voice of America

People use their mouths for many things. They eat, talk, shout and sing. They smile and they kiss. In the English language, there are many expressions using the word mouth.  But some of them are not so nice.

For example, if you say bad things about a person, the person might protest and say “Do not bad mouth me.”

Sometimes, people say something to a friend or family member that they later regret because it hurts that person’s feelings. Or they tell the person something they were not supposed to tell.

The speaker might say: “I really put my foot in my mouth this time.” If this should happen, the speaker might feel down in the mouth. In other words, he might feel sad for saying the wrong thing.

Information is often spread through word of mouth.  This is general communication between people, like friends talking to each other.  “How did you hear about that new movie?” someone might ask. “Oh, by word of mouth.” 

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Studying engineering before they can spell it
By Winnie Hu, The New York Times

GLEN ROCK, New Jersey—In a class full of aspiring engineers, the big bad wolf had to do more than just huff and puff to blow down the three little pigs’ house.

To start, he needed to get past a voice-activated security gate, find a hidden door and negotiate a few other traps in a house that a pair of kindergartners here imagined for the pigs—and then pieced together from index cards, paper cups, wood sticks and pipe cleaners.

“Excellent engineering,” their teacher, Mary Morrow, told them one day early this month.

All 300 students at Clara E. Coleman Elementary School are learning the A B C’s of engineering this year, even those who cannot yet spell e-n-g-i-n-e-e-r-i-n-g. The high-performing Glen Rock school district, about 22 miles northwest of Manhattan, now teaches 10 to 15 hours of engineering each year to every student in kindergarten through fifth grade, as part of a $100,000 redesign of the science curriculum.

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Gene Weingarten teaches you to be funny
By Gene Weingarten, The Washington Post

I teach a class in English as a second language. My students struggle with humor, trying to be funny in a language that is not their own. Can you help them by outlining the basic forms and structures of English-language comedy?—Sarah Hopson

Dear Sarah—It is indeed a tragedy when the great gift of humor is denied to people merely because of a language barrier. Fortunately, you came to the right place! By deconstructing some timeless jokes, I shall create a brief tutorial in American Humor Appreciation so your students can experience the same unbridled joy as the rest of us.

“Take my wife ... please.”

This classic Henny Youngman formulation deftly combines the rhetorical devices of irony and surprise: At first, Henny appears to be referencing his wife as an example of something; then, we learn that he is instead offering the lady to anyone who will take her off his hands.

We laugh, but why?

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English language learners and the power of personal stories
By Katherine Schulten, The New York Times

We’ve asked Larry Ferlazzo, a prolific blogger and Twitter user who has written a recent book called “English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work,” to do a guest post for us today.

More than five million children in the United States enter school each year speaking a language other than English. That amount is expected to grow to 25% by the year 2025. It’s not surprising, then, that we hear from readers regularly that the more we can offer for this group, the better.

Larry has an interesting background: he spent the first twenty years of his career as a community organizer in California, often working with foreign-born populations. When he became a high school teacher six years ago, he realized that many of the strategies he used as an organizer translated easily to the classroom.

We’ve asked him to detail the ways he’s adapted what he calls the Organizing Cycle to his current students, and he’s provided some very easy and quick lesson ideas (off Times resources, of course) to show how anyone can do it.

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Minding “our” language: a post-colonial obsession
By Ajit Randeniya, Lankaweb.com

Sri Lankan newspapers appear to regularly report worrying reports of urgent needs such as medical supplies to hospitals, and as the recent flash floods sickeningly demonstrated, the re-engineering of the city storm water drainage network needs to be undertaken urgently.

Curiously, however, the Colombo elite, instead of pursuing these vital social needs, appear to be busily engaged in addressing some perceived problems with the ‘Sri Lankan variety’ of English!

Now, if memory serves us right, President Rajapakse may have raised the issue sometime last year that all Sri Lankans need to gain proficiency in the English language and Information Technology as essential “Life Skills”; not a bad idea in view of the continuing dominance of English and IT in global trade and development. He may even have floated the idea, in the same context, that Sri Lankans need not have any concerns about speaking English ‘our way’ in the interest of “getting on with it.”

The current flurry of activity by certain sections of the Colombo polity could well be a campaign against President Rajapakse’s idea of making English accessible to the younger rural generations, disguised as an expression of ‘concern’ about the declining “standards” of English. It could also be a reaction by those who have traditionally considered English their private property!

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Political party’s lack of English Language comprehension is pathetic
By Sheka Tarawallie, Cocorioko.net  

It is becoming worrying; it is becoming pathological; it has already cost us so many lives; and it has to be stopped in the interest of this country. What we are talking—or writing—about is the opposition Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP)’s pathetic lack of basic English language comprehension—the inability of the SLPP or its cohorts to understand simple English has cost us a lot in this country and has led many of its supporters astray. Their intellectual incapacity, especially in understanding diplomatic language, has always given their supporters a false sense of hope and a phony security until they eventually discover that what the party mouthpieces tell them is the opposite.

In 1997, when the United Nations Security Council placed a ban on the importation of arms and ammunition into Sierra Leone by all warring factions, the SLPP’s interpretation was that they were excluded and went ahead to hire a British mercenary firm, Sandline International, to supply arms and ammunition to the kamajors, mortgaging our mineral resources. The end result was virtual self-destruction, because Sam Hinga Norman, the head of the kamajors was indicted by and died in the hands of the Special Court, a situation that adversely divided the party, leading to their defeat in the 2007 presidential and parliamentary elections.

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Do we need an Academy of English? The experts argue for and against

YES: Rhea Williams, chairman of the Queen’s English Society

People always say to me that English is a living language, and ask: “Why do we need something like an academy?”

English is a beautiful language—it has an enormous vocabulary, much bigger than that of many other languages. People misunderstand things if language is not used correctly. Misuse of apostrophes is the best-known problem, but people also don’t seem to know about tenses any more, for example, you hear “we was” a lot.

Successive governments have changed the rules about teaching grammar in schools. Now there are a lot of teachers who do not know the rules themselves. There are mispronunciations and misunderstandings galore.

An academy is needed because the correct information is not something that people can find easily. I suspect that many people in this country have easier access to a computer than to a reference book.

NO: Jack Bovill, chairman of the Spelling Society, which aims to promote remedies to improve literacy, including spelling reform

In many ways I have sympathy with the Queen’s English Society because accurate spelling is essential. However, variations in spelling will happen regardless of what people wish to say about it. In English we have the example of the word “show”, which in the 19th century was written “shew”. George Bernard Shaw pointed out that pronunciation shifts according to the way that a word is written.

There is overwhelming evidence of fluidity, and in a sense this is unpredictable. The difficulty for the QES arises when pronunciations are repeated in writing. The argument rests on the question: is there merit in spelling and the way that it is spoken being more closely aligned?

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Scots: an auld dug with plenty of bite
By Brian Logan, Guardian.co.uk        

I saw Rory Bremner performing recently, impersonating Gordon Brown. So leaden are his public pronouncements, joked Bremner, he sounds as if he's speaking a second language. How the audience laughed—in innocence, presumably, of the fact that, when Brown speaks standard English, he is speaking his second language. Brown is of a generation with my parents, and grew up calling a chimney a “lum,” an ear a “lug,” a frog a “puddock,” and the likes of David Cameron, a “sleekit skellum.” Gordon Brown grew up speaking Scots.

It’s no surprise that Bremner (a Scotsman) should neglect this fact. As a Scottish government report revealed this year, 64% of people in Scotland do not consider Scots a language, “just a way of speaking.” We Scots have spent 400 years being told (or worse, telling ourselves) that the language of Barbour’s Bruce, of Robert Burns and Gavin Douglas—who wrote the first translation into any Anglic language of Virgil’s Aeneid—is nothing more than a slovenly version of its sister tongue, English. But an “auld dug snaks siccar”—an old dog’s bite holds fast. Despite centuries of neglect, the Scots language refuses to let go.

Should its tenacity be encouraged? That was the subject of a “carnaptious” (or bad-tempered) debate in Scotland after the release in January of Public Attitudes Towards the Scots Language.

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