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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A field guide to English usage online
By Erin McKean, Boston.com

In those old dark days before the Internet (and before Twitter!), if you were stumped on a question of style, or puzzled as to how to use a word, you pretty much had a single option: Look it up in a book.

Mostly that book was “the dictionary,” unless you were erudite enough to have Fowler’s Modern English Usage lying around, or the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage. The really hard-core might have a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style or Garner’s Modern American Usage. But still: one book, maybe two, to satisfy every question you might have about word use in English? The Internet came none too soon.

There are now plenty of well-established sites for those interested in discussing questions of meaning, usage, pronunciation, and style. And just in the last couple of months, we’ve seen several great new resources come online — Web pages, blogs, and Twitter feeds. If you wanted, you could spend all day hopping from one to another. Here are a few worth your attention.

The Economist, that venerable magazine (which calls itself a newspaper, which is itself a usage question), recently relaunched its language blog, Johnson (named after Samuel, of course).

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A skill, not a weakness
By Laurie Olsen and Shelly Spiegel-Coleman, Los Angeles Times.com

Learning more than one language is a 21st century skill. It provides students with economic opportunities across the globe and at home. Many students enter our schools fluent in a language other than English. They speak Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Farsi, Arabic, Khmer and dozens of other languages important in international trade. They come with a resource.

Ideally, these students — more than 1.5 million in California who enter school speaking a language other than English — would gain English proficiency while enhancing their home language skills. They would graduate from high school fully bilingual or multilingual and ready to compete in the global marketplace.

Instead of nurturing the promise of our English-learner children, California’s adherence to an “English-only” teaching policy has left most of them in a linguistic no man’s land, with inadequate English skills and undeveloped skills in their home languages.

In California, more than 95% of students who come to school not knowing English receive instruction in English only. Unfortunately and unfairly, this approach has resulted in English learners falling further and further behind academically compared with students who speak only English.

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Byrd and the Bard
By Stephen Marche, The New York Times
 
Shakespeare scholars, and the literary community generally, have selfish motives for missing Robert Byrd, the West Virginia senator who died last week at 92. Historians will long debate his complicated legacy, but scholars will no doubt agree that he was the greatest Shakespeare-quoter in American political history. His death marks the passing of an entire style of literate politics.

Most politicians quote Shakespeare badly, if at all—with a special emphasis on at all. Quoting Shakespeare is risky as a rhetorical strategy. No American politician today wants to seem too educated. Robert Byrd was different. He didn’t waddle around in clichés like “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” from “Macbeth,” or “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” from “Hamlet.”

In 1994 alone, Senator Byrd quoted every last Shakespeare play on the Senate floor at least once. That’s 37 plays. He could use old favorites as well as the next politician. “Those friends thou hast and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel,” Polonius’s old chestnut from “Hamlet,” is how he described his friendship with Bennett Johnston, the Democratic senator from Louisiana. He loved to quote Cleopatra’s “Give me my robe; put on my crown. / I have immortal longings in me.”

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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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Thinking in English
By Surbhi Pillai, AmedabadMrror.com

Good morning! There are people, who are of the opinion that if you think in a language then you are good at it. And that is why they insist that if you want to have a command of English, you have to first let it start talking to your brains. But that’s obvious; it’s surely not space science to gauge that the language you are good at, you are also bound to think in. Nevertheless, you can’t force your brains to begin to make use of a language that up until now was almost nonexistent in your psyche.

It has to be a slow process. You will continuously have to bombard yourself with English — by constantly staying in touch with it to get your mind to acclimatize (get used to) itself to the new language. In fact, the real test of whether your mind has now started thinking in English will be to have a real ‘oral’ brawl (fight) in English. It is true that no matter how good a person is in a particular language, he or she will switch on to a language that he or she thinks in when fighting. For when you are having a verbal duel (fight), words just flow out like an avalanche (rush) and that’s where the real test of the language lies.

Hence, don’t tax your poor brains by forcing them to think in English, it is not magic. Trick them, coax them into gradually thinking into the language of your choice.

Let me now talk to you about an expression that is very commonly used but is completely hilarious (laughable) and wrong:

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Concerns about a spreading English
By VR Narayanaswami, LiveMint.com

When people think of the spread of English worldwide, “infiltration” is the word that suggests itself. It can refer, on the one hand, to the surreptitious movement of troops into enemy territory, and on the other, to a liquid permeating a substance. But the milder metaphor of percolation is perhaps more valid when we speak about English.

The spread of the English language has not been smooth. It faces resistance from speakers of other languages. There are rumblings even in the immediate neighbourhood of England.

Not much is known about conflicts between English and the Scots language. But a government report earlier this year revealed that 64% of the people of Scotland do not consider Scots a language. According to Wikipedia, Scots has been undergoing a process of attrition. More and more features of Standard English are imported into it. The irony is that the language of the country which Voltaire considered the wellspring of European civilization is facing linguistic death.

It is a slightly different story with the Irish tongue. It received official recognition in Northern Ireland in 1998, and does not face a threat from English: The British government has pledged £20 million for the promotion of the Irish language in Northern Ireland.

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“Wah! Your England so powderful!”
By Leslie Andres, New Straits Times.com.my

Not too long ago, a Malaysian student at a university in Minnesota was speaking to an American student he had just met. The young Caucasian chap knew the other person was a foreigner, but not the country from which he had come.

Midway through the conversation, the American learned the foreign student was from Malaysia and was shocked.

“But you speak such perfect English!”

Sad but true. You might think that the American was ignorant, perhaps, for thinking only his countrymen and Britons speak proper English. But can we blame him when the Malaysians he had met up to that point spoke English haltingly, at best, or hardly at all?

With more than 300 students, Malaysians made up the largest foreign contingent in that particular university which had an enrolment of about 15,000. Only a handful of Malaysians spoke fluent or even passable English.

So, if this American lad had only met Malaysians who spoke broken English, how was he to know that English was this nation’s second official language? When it was explained to him that this was in fact so, he was thunderstruck.

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English, in danger? That’s mad as a box of frogs
By Elizabeth Renzetti, TheGlobeandMail.com

Not long after I moved to London, I found myself in a supermarket aisle engaged in a frustrating one-sided conversation with a shop employee over where to find the clear plastic stuff used to wrap sandwiches. It ended with me barking, “Saran Wrap! Where’s the Saran Wrap?’’ while she looked at me blankly. It was like a two-person play called Helen Keller Meets the Insane Shouty Woman, and the intermission (sorry, that should be “interval’’) came when a kindly English lady whispered to the shop girl, “I think she’s looking for the cling film, dear.’’

The same thing happened when, after cutting a finger, I yelped for a Band-Aid and was confronted by a sea of puzzled stares. Finally someone said, “Oh, you want a plaster.’’ I refrained from saying, “Yes – was the spouting arterial blood your first clue?’’

“How can you hope to tame English? Isn’t it the Ellis Island of languages, absorbing new arrivals without fear or favour? Move over, zeitgeist and schadenfreude; make room for the Bengali newcomer, nang. ”

Of course, plaster is much more refined than Band-Aid. It was a potent reminder that we share a language, but the subtleties of its use divide us as much as unite us, and that those differences are as powerful identifiers as the shibboleths of old. The British are defiantly from the land of Pope and Keats, and we should remember that we’re from the land of indiscriminately capitalized brand names.

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