Alive and well on Tuesdays with Gani
By Isagani Yambot, Philippine Daily Inquirer

MANILA, December 12, 2010—During his trial for allegedly “corrupting” the youth of Athens, Socrates, in his Apology (the Greek word apologia means a defense), said that “[t]he unexamined life is not worth living.” (The Greek word bios used by Socrates means “a way of life” rather than just biological life.) Paraphrasing Socrates, the Inquirer family believes that the unexamined newspaper is not worth reading. That is why the Inquirer undergoes constant examination by its editors and business officers, to see how it can be improved and probably, even reinvented.

The Inquirer is examined every day (at the daily meeting of the daydesk and other senior editors), every week (at the Tuesday editorial assessment meeting), every other week (at the executive committee meeting) and almost every quarter (at the management meeting). It is probably the most thoroughly “examined” paper in the country today.

As publisher, I preside over the editorial assessment meeting which is held every Tuesday except during Holy Week and Christmas Week. Sometime in the 1990s Eugenia D. Apostol, founding chair and first publisher of the Inquirer, directed me, the executive editor then, to conduct the weekly meeting to critique the paper, and particularly to note and correct grammatical and linguistic errors as well as factual errors.

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Amateur
By Lakan Umali, Philippine Daily Inquirer

I sit in my room, staring at a blank computer screen. I wait for the screen to be filled up with words, words that convey a meaning, a theme, a message, an emotion to someone else. I sit, waiting for the words to travel through my veins and miraculously flow out of my finger tips, making me feel like sparks of electricity were shooting through them. But nothing comes. I feel the words, but they seem to be dormant, hiding, like an animal refusing to emerge from the thick of the forest. Sometimes the words are just out of reach, like fruits in a fairytale. I can see them waiting for me to pluck them, but when I reach out, they seem to escape my grasp and move slightly higher. I do eventually start to write, but the words are inadequate, unsatisfactory, a shabby, hollow imitation of what I originally set out to write.

Sometimes I feel like Briony Tallis in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. She seems to also struggle with the process of writing, of finding the precise words to use in telling a story. She can’t seem to create real, believable characters, because, well, she doesn’t know many real people to base her characters on. She thinks that creating characters and stories out of her own imagination, out of her own mind without any basis, would be tantamount to “lying” to the reader. She could always go to her family library to read about characters. She could learn about what makes an anxious person tick, or what makes a repressed woman reach her breaking point. But it would also just be a shoddy imitation. Real characters are a combination of imagination and reality...

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A new record
Editorial, The Bohol Standard

December 5, 2010—Long before the term “business processing outsourcing” became popular in the minds of the Filipinos, this term has rather been fueling India’s economy. At the world stage, India had been recognized as the word’s leader in BPO or business processing outsourcing.

Not until last year, although we just know it this year. According to IBM’s Global Locations Trend Annual Report, an independent research body, the Philippines is now the world’s number 1 provider of business processing outsourcing, beating India in the number one spot. India, with a population ballooning to 1.2 billion, for years held onto that spot, with its 330,000 workforce. The Philippines, meanwhile, now has 350,000 BPO workforce, according to IBM’s report.

BPO provides a whooping US$5.7 billion revenue to the country in 2010 alone. That is expected to grow at $25 billion by 2016. Or even more. If our country can maintain its position in the BPO world market, the figure can grow as much as $50 billion a year.

One of the reasons why the Philippines has overtaken India as the world’s leader in business processing outsourcing is the English language skill of the Filipinos. According to the reports, Filipinos are more flexible, they can mimic the American, British, and Australian accent with perfect consistency. The language skill of the Filipinos is very crucial in satisfying customers’ needs from all over the world.

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WOW plagiarism
By Butch Dalisay, The Philippine Star

November 29, 2010—I don’t mean to flog a dead horse, but like many other Pinoys perplexed and dismayed by the abortive “Pilipinas Kay Ganda” slogan of the Department of Tourism, and as an occasional travel writer, I think that DOT Undersecretary Vicente “Enteng” Romano did the decent and honorable thing by owning up to the responsibility for the failed campaign and resigning from his position.

I have no problem believing that he and the DOT had the best of intentions in wanting to replace “WOW Philippines” with something new. Unfortunately, in this case, something new also turned out to be something awful—an ill-conceived idea that should have been shot down the minute it was raised, simply because it was pitched to the wrong, non-Tagalog-speaking market, a case of misplaced or confused nationalism.

I must admit to some bias in this opinion, because I wrote the yet-unpublished biography of former senator and DOT Secretary Richard “Dick” Gordon, whose idea “WOW Philippines” was. To add some perspective to this issue, let me quote from the draft of that biography:

“[Gordon] also wanted something new and powerful—a catchy slogan he and everyone else could use to sell the Philippines abroad. One day, he found it, and announced it to his staff  only to be met almost universally by profound dismay and disapproval. The tagline was ‘WOW Philippines’  a worthy match, in Dick Gordon’s mind, to ‘Malaysia, Truly Asia,’ ‘Incredible India,’ ‘Amazing Thailand,’ and whatever the country’s regional competitors had come up with. WOW Philippines? What was that?

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Is Coloma’s social media strategy dead?
By Boo Chanco, The Philippine Star

November 24, 2010—Sabi ko na… hindi nila kaya! [I thought so...they aren’t up to it!] When I was listening to Secretary Sonny Coloma as he made his presentation on this administration’s social media strategy during the PRSP Congress a couple of months ago, I knew he was promising more than he is capable of delivering. He also made the mistake of thinking that they were able to utilize social media well during the election campaign. The truth is, social media merely reflected a national clamor for change that incidentally benefited their candidate.

Take a look at them now… a lot of the major stumbles of this administration can be attributed to its failure to engage social media properly. Social media creamed them during the Luneta carnage. There is the Mislang tweet. Now there is the Kay Ganda non launch. Anyone who is active in social media today must have noticed that the administration is practically absent in the furious debates on issues in sites like Facebook.

Frankly, I do not understand what has happened to Sonny Coloma. He now seems to think and even acts like a bullycrat or a bully of a bureaucrat. Power seems to have gotten into his head. He isn’t the same Sonny Coloma I used to know. The old Sonny Coloma wouldn’t, for instance, resort to closing down an otherwise supportive private sector website and hijacking its followers out of fear that free discussions of issues may prove problematic to the Palace’s party line.

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David Crystal: champion of the English language
By Michael Rosen, Guardian.co.uk

December 13, 2010—We’re all experts on language. A three-year-old says: “I singed a song.” That’s an expert, says David Crystal, using the grammar of how we tell of things in the past by adding “ed” to a verb. But as all the experts reading this know: “singed” is wrong, “sang” is right. So, some say: “No, dear. It’s ‘sang’.” Some don’t.

And in that story sits one of the great but quiet struggles of our time. Is it the job of linguists to describe or prescribe the language? Or both?

For more than 30 years, David Crystal has been producing books, articles, radio and TV programs and interviews by the gallon-load, and 2010 yielded a bumper crop.

It's been one long job of explaining, illustrating, discussing and suggesting but at the heart of it is a longing to educate. That's because my three-year-old and her would-be corrector aren't the only experts in language. There is another: the person who knows that the way we speak and write has got a whole load worse.

Every day Crystal deals with things like an actor who said that back in the 1960s no one said “gonna” and “shoulda.”

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A plea for the Queen’s English? RU joking?
By The Guardian UK

December 9, 2010—The English language is at it again. Three hundred years after Jonathan Swift issued a plea for a method of “ascertaining and fixing our language for ever,” Internet chatrooms and the likes of Facebook are causing a generation to break the rules in new and possibly permanent ways. According to a survey last month, two-thirds of the 18- to 24-year-olds questioned thought “variant” spellings that made it easier to type at speed were acceptable.

Into this unstable environment steps the Guardian's latest style guide, and, like an immaculately turned out child on its first day of school, one fears it may suffer at the hands of bullies in the modern English playground. (Stile gide? RU joking bruv?) Or, perhaps worse, be ignored and forced to eat its sandwiches on its own.

It is not the first time that attempts to “fix” the language have been made, against overwhelming odds. The British Library’s Evolving English exhibition, showing until April, reveals how a succession of impassioned tragic heroes have tried to impose order.

The exhibition includes a selection of early style manuals. They are less comprehensive than today’s offering, but what they lose in utility, they gain in belligerence.

One that stands out is A Plea for the Queen’s English, written by Henry Alford, dean of Canterbury, in 1863. Glowing behind a perspex shield, it is open at page 75, where Alford concludes lengthy and not very illuminating instructions on the correct uses of “lay” and “lie” with the observation: “Eton men, for some reason or other, are especially liable to confuse these two verbs.”

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How the ancient Welsh language helped shape English

December 1, 2010—From arctic birds to nicknames, the influence of Wales on the English language has been underestimated, says a Celtic Studies expert.

Compilers of the new online version of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) say “penguin,” “Taffy,” and “cariad” are examples of Welsh words adopted by English.

Poet Dylan Thomas is also responsible for 635 entries, they said.

Prof John Koch of the University of Wales said: “The two languages have lived side-by-side for 1,500 years.”

The OED, first published in 1884, this week relaunched itself online.

It claims to be the only English dictionary that tries to trace the first known use of every sense of every word in the English language.

There has been an underestimation from the beginning of the Welsh component in English”

And to prove the point its compilers have pointed to the number of entries that originated from Welsh.

The earliest recorded use of “penguin” can be traced back to Wales, they said.

Apparently in spite of the fact that most penguins have black heads, the OED’s compilers said Welsh coined the term from “pen” meaning “head” and “gwyn” meaning “white.”

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A global economic system necessitates learning English early
By Sunder Ramachandran, TheHinduBusinessOnline

On a recent business trip to Thailand, I read the news of the Education Ministry shooting down the idea of making English a second language. “A second language! Wouldn’t that be wonderful! It’s been talked about extensively in government circles as a means of making Thailand a little more competitive” said Khun Chinnaworn, my Thai colleague.

There are two underlying currents at play here: first is the common line fed to Thais that Thailand, unlike its neighbours, is a country that has never been colonized. This is true — if you overlook the fact that the Japanese walked in here in 1941 and took over Rattanakosin Island. Thailand even declared war on the US and England! “But hey, what’s four years of colonization for a country that’s been around for more than a thousand? And anyway, Japan isn’t a ‘Western country is it?!” said Chinnaworn.

Thais are fiercely proud of their culture and heritage, and fear pervading western influence, including on their language. Any Thai who wants to sound hip only needs to pepper his or her spoken Thai with English. The Thai language has perfectly good words for “happy,” “you,” and “shopping,” but you won’t catch socially-conscious Thai using them.

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Students need to improve English language for better careers
By Arsalan Haider, DailyTimes.com.pk

LAHORE, December 14, 2010—A common man thinks an educated man can speak good English, which, from a certain perspective is quite right. Despite this perception, a minor ability to speak fluent English can also help get attention of many people.

But, in our society, majority of graduate and postgraduate students are unable to speak English fluently, for which the outdated syllabus can be blamed first. Besides, the students, even while having the facility of Internet and cable TV channels at their houses, still need to go a long way in learning one of the most essential tools for making a good career in almost any field.

Pakistan boasts a large English language press and media. Many major dailies are published in this international language.

English is taught to students at all school levels in Pakistan, and in many cases the medium of instruction is also English. There are at present three kinds of schools in the country – private schools that cater to the upper class, government schools which serve middle or other classes of population, and madrassas (religious schools). At college and university level all instruction is in English.

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For the love of the English language
By Andy Rooney, Sun Journal

December 10, 2010—For most of my adult life I’ve made my living writing the English language. It’s one of the biggest and most diverse languages in the world, and I love it. I think it’s the best language, but what do I know? Spanish is the second-most popular language in the world. At the top is Mandarin Chinese, with more than 850 million speakers. Hindi is way up there, too.

I wish all the nations of the world would get together and decide to use the same language. I’d go with the crowd, but naturally I hope they’d pick English as the universal tongue. I can read and understand most French, and I like it, but it isn’t in the same league with English. French has a much smaller number of words in its vocabulary. (Je Parle Francais mais pas beaucoup.) German has an even smaller vocabulary. The only other contender for a universal language is Spanish.

I don’t have any statistics, but I’d guess that more books are written in English than in any other language because the most people who can read in the world, speak (and read) English as their first or second language.

How was it that people all over the globe speak so many different languages?

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Don’t squander power to communicate
By Guillermo Torres, San Angelo Standard Times

December 8, 2010—Spanish was my first language.

As a barrio toddler of the ’50s, my parents were usually working and, as a result, my Spanish-only-speaking grandmother, Beatrice Rodriguez, raised me and my siblings.

Sitting on her knee and following her around the house as she attended to chores, I learned the provincial Spanish/Tex-Mex of the Central Texas prairie, and it wasn’t until TV and elementary school arrived that I began learning and speaking English in earnest.

Among the nuggets of wisdom gleaned from my grandmother: She implied and I inferred from what she told me that Spanish was the language of the angels. Surely, no self-respecting angel would speak anything but Spanish. And, later, as an adult, when I read the (sometimes translated) writings of the Mexican, South American and Spanish writers, I began to think that Spanish was, indeed, the language of the poets.

So, having served those paeans to the Spanish language, I must say that if Spanish is the language of the angels and of the poets, then English is the language of commerce.

In short, English, has helped me pay for my mortgage and car and other accoutrements of life.

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When teachers are their own worst enemies
By Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post

December 5, 2010—First is a post by Mark Pennington, an educational author of teaching resources to differentiate instruction in the fields of reading and English-language arts: “Teaching Grammar and Mechanics,” “Teaching Essay Strategies,” “Teaching Reading Strategies,” and “Teaching Spelling and Vocabulary.” Here he writes about how teachers unwittingly helped create the accountability movement that is now choking them. This appeared on his Pennington Publishing Blog.

Then follows a response by Maja Wilson, who taught high school English, adult basic education, ESL, and alternative middle and high school in Michigan’s public schools for 10 years and is currently a teacher educator at the University of Maine. She wrote on this blog recently about teachers, and responds to Pennington in the context of that post, called “First blame the teachers, then the parents.”

By Mark Pennington
A recent discussion on my favorite site, the English Companion Ning, made me take a critical look at just what has engendered the recent demands for increased accountability in our public schools. Both Democrats and Republicans are playing the blame game and teachers are the easiest targets...

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Students learn about news, social media
By L. Beveridge, HattiesburgAmerican.com

December 8, 2010—Last week I had the pleasure of speaking with a group of students at the English Language Institute at the University of Southern Mississippi.

The class was on current events—very apropos for a newspaper person like me. But our focus also was on social media - Facebook, Twitter, etc.

It was great to see how well-informed the students are, and despite having only beginning to intermediate knowledge of English, we could touch on subjects that everyone understands.

On one of the Twitter pages we visited in class was this comment: “Rumors swirling that Larry Fedora has talked with Minnesota about its coaching vacancy.”

That drew a lot of reaction from the students, first that it related to their school’s football team, and second, can it be true?

Exactly one of the points I wanted to make. What a great way to segue into what we do as journalists.

The very first word of the comment gives an indication that the tweeter really doesn’t know if what he or she is posting is true.

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Venturing into language stuff
By Carroll Vertrees, Post-Trib.com

December 5, 2010—Sometimes when I am sitting with my coffee admiring the swell mop job I did on our kitchen floor, I ponder one of life’s great mysteries: Why do we do such bad things to the English language?

It keeps my mind off North Korea, parallel parking, the tea party movement, and people who bring broccoli to potlucks.

This burning issue hit me when I read an item about how to pronounce some words, like “licorice.” Every kid in my bailiwick knew it was “licorish,” despite what the wrapper said. Some of us who are now adults still say it that way. Why?

Maybe for the same reason many of us, and some menus, say “sherbert” when the right word is “sherbet.”

The letter “r” is a tricky little devil—it pops up where it isn’t needed, or in the wrong place. I had a boss years ago who was smart, friendly, a nice guy who often talked about upgrading the office “liberry.”

I remember a guy back home saying: “We berried old Spot out behind the barn.”

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Swearing as a second language
by Emma Teitel, McClean’s Canada

December 2, 2010—English as a Second Language (ESL) now goes by the new, politically correct name of English Language Learning (ELL), in official recognition of the fact that immigrants new to Canada may know more than one language already. That doesn’t, however, make the average ELL student a champion of political correctness. At least it’s doubtful that Amira Azad, an Iranian Muslim woman in her mid-40s, had cultural sensitivity on the brain when she interrupted our ELL tutorial on the prepositional phrase. “May I ask a question?” she said, and then leaned closer to whisper: “Tell me please, what is the difference between a slut and whore?”

“The first sleeps with a lot of men,” I answered when I recovered, “and the second gets paid to do the same.” “Oh,” she said, “same in Iran.” Amira (who, like the other students interviewed, requested that her name be changed) asked roughly 30 similar questions that day, compiling a mini lexicon of English curse words and expressions that she covered with her hands every time the program supervisor walked by. Writing down the definition of “bitch,” she noted: “Thank you. My sons will be punished.”

As someone who’s been volunteer-teaching ELL at my local library in Halifax for the past three years, I assumed that people like Amira immigrate to Canada and learn English for a “better life.” But we seldom ask exactly what kind of English is most relevant to that life...

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Finding mistakes in our written English
By Charles Levy, Ottawa Citizen
 
November 29, 2010—Being a dinosaur as well as a pedant who loves the English language in its purest form (plain English), it will come as no shock to anyone that I enjoyed Noel Taylor's column on the language “misdemeanours.” Taylor has what seems a very unique attitude towards the way English is used in this day and age, which sets him apart from most journalists practicing today, not to mention the ordinary man or woman in the street.

I often like to think, while laying in bed at night, of the many solecisms and downright grammatical errors that I observe have been committed that day in the editorial ... well, at least, the columns and letters to the editor of this and other Canadian newspapers, and by Canadian and yes, British, news anchors (I exculpate their American colleagues). To paraphrase Professor Henry Higgins, they are literally guilty of the murder of the English language.

English is not a dead language, and no one is suggesting that it should remain static, but why would a columnist or commentator substitute a perfectly good English word like “wrote” with a completely gratuitous alternate choice like “authored?” Due to norms that have been tolerated by a generation in a hurry, the noun and the verb of conventional grammar have merged, and insured the acceptance of “bad usage” as “common usage.”

I had no intention of rushing precipitously into print, but I felt impelled to support and expand on Taylor's excellent comments...

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Outdated English-proficiency standards
By Sophie Arkoudis, The Australian

December 08, 2010—Why is the Australian higher education sector allowing immigration policy to shape notions of the standards of English language proficiency of its graduates?

This is an acute case of the tail wagging the dog.

An International English Language Testing System score of seven has become the de facto standard for permanent residency as a skilled migrant. Monash researcher Bob Birrell has been quoted as saying universities have been outflanked by the willingness of the Immigration Department and professional bodies to embrace a serious standard of English proficiency.

Yes, spot-on. Let’s reclaim this agenda. It’s time for universities and the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency to restore public confidence in the English language capabilities of graduates.

To do so, a robust, outcomes-based model of English language proficiency, against which universities can monitor the attainment of graduates, must be built.

A first step towards such a framework is an agreed set of national English standards as the foundation for universities' quality assurance mechanisms.

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Language rules are meant to be broken
By Brendan Black, Sydney Morning Herald

December 2, 2010—For linguists, the statement “language change is inevitable” is uncontroversial. Yet we’re constantly told that teenagers (and, it seems, celebrity chefs) are destroying the English language. If we believe the warnings, then soon all younger generations will communicate as if they’re composing an SMS or Facebook update and dictionaries will be full of inane abbreviations and words foreign to older generations.

Most languages have “standard” varieties, which are used for formal occasions, such as academia and the law. These words often have a history going back many years, and originate in Latin, French or German, for example. When communicating with friends and family, online or in other informal situations, “vernacular” or “colloquial” language is more appropriate.

Informal language is the most subject to change and to show variations in use. This is evident in changes to spelling, abbreviations such as “LOL.” “CBF,” and “FML,” and for many users, an almost total disregard for rules of grammar. An understanding of the taboo nature of certain words can be seen in the substitution of “the c word” with the inoffensive “kent.” The word “random” has taken on a new meaning of “weird” or “unexpected,” as well as being used as a noun to describe someone who is not part of the person's social group — and unwanted.

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Role of Korean teachers of English
By David Leaper, The Korea Times

December 9, 2010—While the recent moves by Gyeonggi Province’s education authorities to cut the number of native speakers teaching at public schools was motivated by budget considerations (“Gyeonggi to hire fewer foreign teachers,” The Korea Times, Dec. 2), in principle it is not necessarily negative for English language education in Korea.

To explain this statement it is necessary to examine the wider context of English in the world. There are now more native speakers of Mandarin and Spanish than English, and soon there may be as many Arabic speakers. While in terms of native speakers English is being overtaken, it is in the number of non-native speakers and their spread that English stands out.

It has been estimated that there are more than three nonnative to every native speaker of English. It is an official language in more countries than any other. The importance of English as a second or foreign language can be seen when only four countries that are normally classified as “native English speaking countries” are listed among the top 10 English-speaking countries in the world. Moreover, despite the rise of Mandarin, English will probably remain dominant in the spheres of science and business for some time to come.

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It’s Greek to me!
By Dr. Lim Chin Lam, TheStar.com.my

December 10, 2010--English has borrowed far and wide from other languages, notably from Greek (but not forgetting Latin) but, as remarked by a wit, it has not paid back the loans. To be facetious, I must say that English owes a great debt to Greek for the loan of the latter’s words. Greek (the language) has certainly made no claim against English (the language) for repayment; yet Greek is no poorer for the loan, and English (its vocabulary) is all the richer for it.

Let me outline some of the ways in which Greek has contributed to English.

Many Greek words have gone into English – almost directly but for the matter of transliteration. Greek has its own alphabet while English uses an alphabet based on Latin (which had 23 letters, to which “J”, “U”, and “W” were later added). Because of the differences between the two alphabets, the transliteration of words from Greek to English necessitates that letters of the Greek alphabet be given their equivalents in the English alphabet. For example, the Greek letter alpha (it is not feasible here to reproduce the symbol for this letter and, for that matter, for other Greek letters) is rendered as “a”, beta as “b”, gamma as “g” and delta as “d”. Some of the less obvious “pairings” of Greek letters and their English equivalents [in square brackets] are as follows: theta[th], kappa[k] or [c], rho[rh] or [r], upsilon[u] or [y], phi[ph], chi[kh] or [ch], and psi[p].

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Master English or be left behind in global market
By John Greig, TheStar.com.my

November 30, 2010—It is completely incorrect to suggest that Japan, South Korea, and Germany have advanced economically and scientifically without English. Scientists in these countries publish their papers in English.

There is a trend among Japanese companies to make English their official in-house language. Japan’s biggest online retailer, Rakutan, plans to make English the firm’s official language. “No English, no job,” the CEO said.

In Beijing, learning English is part of an official drive to transform the Chinese capital into a “world city”. A government programme calls for all pre-schools to introduce English courses within five years. Police officers and civil servants would be required to pass English tests.

One could go on but – like it or not – English is becoming the world’s first truly universal language. It is the international language for business, the language of the information age, and of science, medicine, sports, diplomacy etc. For this reason, almost all the countries in Asia (and most of the world) are working hard at mastering the English language.

In Malaysia, English is not a compulsory pass subject in SPM. This has an important negative consequence. While the stated objective of the Education Ministry may be that all students acquire competence in English, in effect, the official policy is that English does not matter because students are not given an incentive to learn it.

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Evaluating teachers
BY TAN EE LOO, TheStar.com.my

November 28, 2010—An English language teacher enters a class, opens the textbook and instructs her students to read a few chapters. Then, she pulls out a women’s magazine from her handbag and is so engrossed reading, she barely hears the school bell ring until reminded by her students.

The scenario is almost similar in another school where a teacher tells her pupils to work on the exercises in their workbooks, while she clears her excessive paperwork.

While their indifference may not be atypical of most teachers in government schools, they are a small but growing group of ineffective and incompetent teachers who are not being held accountable for their job performance.

What is it that makes them so? Could it be because of job security in the civil service? As it is now, teachers – like others in the government – get steady increments based primarily on their educational qualifications and years of service.

However, the dynamics of all this is changing as there are some quarters who strongly feel that teachers should give up the safety of a tenure in exchange for a pay structure that rewards merit and hard work.

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