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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The X Factor When Hiring? Call It “Presence”
 
This interview with Robert W. Selander, chief executive of MasterCard, who was scheduled to retire as CEO on July 1, 2010 after 14 years in the job.

Q. What are the most important leadership lessons you have learned?

A. I spent a reasonable amount of time living overseas. So relatively early in my career I moved first to San Juan, then to Rio, then to London, then to Belgium, running businesses in those markets.

Pretty early on, I recognized that more is the same than is different — fundamental values, wanting to give your children more opportunity or at least as much as you had in life, etc. It’s present all around the world, and that happens to be true in a lot of aspects of business as well. More is the same than is different, but we tend to focus on differences, and perhaps exaggerate or accentuate those beyond the reality of what we have to worry about.

I can remember when I moved to Brazil and I had spent two years learning Spanish. I was out visiting branches. I was working for Citibank at the time and had responsibility for consumer businesses there.

Brazil is a big country. I was living in Rio and it’s like living in Miami. I was out visiting a branch in the equivalent of Denver. Not everybody spoke great English and I hadn’t gotten very far in Portuguese. As I was sitting there trying to discern and understand what this branch manager was saying to me, and he was struggling with his English, the coin sort of dropped that this guy really knows what he’s talking about. He’s having a hard time getting it out. 

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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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The Dollar Is Like The English Language
By Anita Raghavan, Forbes.com

In recent years, there’s been a lot of hand-wringing about the dollar. Amid all the sturm und drang, one rarely hears a compelling argument for the dollar retaining its status as a dominant currency particularly given the fiscally-precarious position of the United States.

On Thursday, however, after Bloomberg's sovereign debt briefing in London, I spoke with Stephen Jen, a former Morgan Stanley strategist who now is managing director of macroeconomics and currencies at BlueGold Capital Management in London.  He  offered the most convincing argument I've heard recently for the dollar retaining its role as a dominant currency on the global stage.

The dollar, Jen argues, is like the English language. People say “French is so much better, the grammar is better,” says Jen, but in emerging market economies, people are clamoring to learn English, not French. Why is that? It is not, he says, because they share some affinity with the U.K. or U.S. but because English is the most convenient language to use. Its predominance has made it irreplaceable.

The same holds true for the U.S. dollar. "The dollar is hard to supplant," says Jen who maintains that it will continue as a reserve currency…

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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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With so many nations in the World Cup, what language do referees use?
By Soo Ewe Jin, TheStar.com.my

Thirty referees from 28 countries, including our very own Subkhiddin Mohd Salleh, are officiating at the World Cup in South Africa.

Have you ever wondered what is the language they use to keep all the players, plus the coaches on the sidelines, in check when things get a bit fiery?

The lingua franca is English. Of course, this is not to say that everyone on the pitch speaks the language. In the heat of the moment, more colourful language, in all sorts of tongues, will invariably come out.

But the authoritative language is English.

The reason I bring this up is to illustrate the point on how widely English is used, and the consequences of not giving due attention to it.

At the English Language Teaching Association conference held in Kuala Lumpur recently, Raja Zarith Idris, consort of the Sultan of Johor, lamented on a problem we can no longer ignore—that most Malaysians cannot speak or write well in English, compared with the ability and ease with which older Malaysians speak and write it.

And while countries such as China and Indonesia are fast catching up on becoming more proficient in the English language, Malaysia is moving in the opposite direction.

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Confused by a curiosity of collective nouns
By Fred Khumalo, Timeslive.co.za

The beauty of the English language is that no matter how fluent you think you are, it will always humble you. It is so vast and intricate that it would be foolish to claim mastery of this crazy language. You are bound to trip over the many snares or linguistic landmines that lie in wait for you.

My last column is a case in point. I wrote what many readers, my friends, my children, my drinking buddies, my pets and my wife thought was a brilliant column—until one smarty pants reader noted that I had made a grave grammatical error.

In one of my intellectually lazy moments, I erroneously referred to a “swarm of owls.” Wrong collective noun. When the reader alerted me to this faux pas, I felt like Chris Maroleng, that poor e.tv journalist who is now famous for all the wrong reasons—he was the one who told an AWB interviewee not to touch him “on” his studio.

My fingers were too tjatjarag in typing the wrong collective noun. Jammer. I was embarrassed but also amazed that the linguistic gatekeepers at this newspaper—the hallowed subeditors—had not spotted this blemish on my otherwise beautifully burnished column.

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