English as bindweed spreading across Europe

On October 28th 2005, the Hague Amsterdam Times carried a report under this startling headline:

Rutte:retain some Dutch at uni's

I personally love English, my mother tongue, I love Italian which is my next-to-mother tongue, I love French which is the language of my in-law family and of my children's mother, I love German which was the language of one of my grandmothers ( Die Oma aus Aachen " Morgen morgen nur nicht heute, sagen alle faule Leute )

But the insidious and massive tidal wave of English as a second language sweeping over the 24 EU countries I regard as an unmitigated catastrophe. This is happening in the shape of a natural tsunami and is ably abetted by the directives from the EU Commission. The whole CLIL movement, ( teaching other subjects through English) is being firmly backed by Brussels.
Why should German kids learn about the 30 Years War, their own prolonged, mutual slaughter ( with the odd Swede thrown in ( Gustavus Adolphus), ) through the latinised dialect of Far West Frisian German that is known as English?
Do I want Scottish kids to learn about the enclosures through the medium of Albrech, the variant of Albanian spoken in Calabria, Southern Italy?

Sure, I am exaggerating ( and enjoying it!) but language structures partially inform thinking structures and certainly mould the way thought is expressed.
I want richness of thought in Europe, of culture, of modes of expression. I do not want the supermarket of English to tower over the corner shops of Lithuanian, Basque, Moldovan and Icelandic.

I use the supermarket monopoly image intentionally, since it is the capitalist companies in places like Germany, when they impose English as their in-company language, which are spreading the bindweed of English from the Atlantic to the mouth of Danube and from North Cape to Gibraltar. This is a bindweed that will, in time suffocate many of the marvellous flowers across the mental gardens of Europe.

Rant over!

What's in this Issue?

I want to introduce you to this issue by pointing out the wide variety of styles that HLT November 2005's writers offer for your pleasure. In what follows I am sharing my own opinions which both you and the writers will more than likely disagree with.

Short Article 7: From school failure to life-success in learning a second language is a feast of oral language, showing typical, native oral thought patterns and displaying normal features of oral grammar. The interviewee is a design technology teacher who used to work with the upper forms in a UK secondary school. His language is a million miles from the artificial garbage you find parading in some textbooks, masquerading as oral language, but which is actually EFLese, a variant of English spoken by no living native.
If you are a linguist by inclination you will savour the normal "liberties" that Andrew takes with the language. If you are an octogenarian German Land Kultus Ministerium mandarin, charged with vetting coursebooks, you may well shudder and contort with disgust.
Under the rubric Poems you can read a native speaker who uses language with a simplicity and power that are breathtaking. Her text, understandable to a lower intermediate student, uses repetition and silence with wondrous effect. You might want to use her Lessons in Humanity, that deals with Henry Kissinger's Chilean intervention, with your own students. The theme of USA ueber alles is, after all a persistently current one.

In Dr Qing Gu's Major article 1: " Enjoy Loneliness"- Understanding voices of "the" Chinese Learner, you have an impeccable piece of academic writing, keyboarded by an L2 speaker of English, but who, in my view, writes as a native.

By way of contrast, in Short Article 9: Being in full control of my learning, Jane Arnold, a professor at Seville University, who often writes immaculate, native academic prose, kind of lets her hair down and talks to you in a very personal, almost chatty way.

If you read Richard Cooper's Short Article 6, which deals with pros and cons of Powerpoint presentations, you have the joy, challenge and possibly frustration of dealing with a literary style of some complexity. ( I have been know to accuse this good friend of writing Rococco prose…… He still sees me!)

I wonder if you feel the generous Russian spirit that leaps of the screen when you read Natalia Shuvalova's piece: We tend to see our students as "linguistic beings" - Readers' Letters ?

The text I personally prefer stylistically and linguistically is John Morgan's part of Major Article 2 : Some People dislike humanistic teaching, or the real world of the classroom.
The thought behind the words seems to me absolutely clear, measured and yet satisfyingly complex, and the words carry the weight of this reflection without stumbling, faltering or distorting. John, who died of smoke in November 2004, was a great wordsmith.

You may wonder, by this stage, whether there is anything practically useable in this issue.

Plenty:

An old Exercise carries a business maze activity that you can use right away with your intermediate level students.

In Teachers Resource Book Preview Penelope Williams and her colleague offer you relevant movement activities that you can use with any age group. Did you realise that there are 10.5 ways of doing Simon Says?

In Lesson outlines both John Morgan and Simon Marshall offer you magic exercises of a sort you may not have come across before.

End of 2005 Message

In May and June of 2005 I was thrilled to see the VISITOR SESSIONS recorded by the HLT statistics package rise from the previous average of around 850 per day to the mark of 1000 per diem.
In the first three weeks of November, 2005, roughly 1250 people visited HLT each and everyday! The heaviest traffic days are typically Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday…….and no one can tell me why. Is it because people work hard on Monday and then start surfing in the middle of the week? Fridays they surf their imaginations, dreaming of the week-end?

Please tell many more people about HLT so we hit the 2000 per day figure by next June 2006!
Please write for HLT which has only been able to exist over 7 years thanks to its 1000 plus writers.

Have a good end of December break, if your culture sanctions this.

Mario
Email: mario@pilgrims.co.uk

Please click here for English For Teaching Other Subjects In English.