How crazy is it that in this year we can communicate with different peoples from all over the globe, from Brazil to Russia and every country in between with little stress. We have the ability to buy and produce items from probably any coutntry we so choose, almost as easy driving to the store to go shopping. But throughout all this communitating, buying and selling English still proves to be the central, the core langauge. You could even go so far as to say that are living in a ‘Global Village.’
What would your immediate reaaction by if you you recieved word that it would be demanded of you go return to school in order to re-learn all your previous english skills in order to start focusing and emphezing ’Global English’ as opposed to American English’. Or as a future educator, how would you feel if you were approached by the prsident of the school you were teachign at with the demand you need to be teaching our students ‘global english’ as opposed to english only from America, Australia or even the UK? Is that important? Is ‘Global English’ nessary?
In this Article entitled ‘Global English’ Kenneth Beare explores the use of english, and poposes a radical new idea about encouraging ‘Global Englsih’ …or the lack there of.
”Many English speakers do not speak English as their first language. In fact, they often use English as a lingua franca in order to communicate with other people who also speak English as a foreign language. At this point students often wonder what kind of English they are learning. Are they learning English as it spoken in Britain? Or, are they learning English as it is spoken in the United States, or Australia? One of the most important questions is left out. Do all students really need to learn English as it is spoken in any one country?”
Let’s examine an ESL student more closely. Think about a non-native english speaker learning English in England. This student would most likly learn a set of rules not entirly different from other english speaking countries, but would learn a set of grammar rules that would propose confusion in order parts of the world. Or vise-vera, an ESL student learning to speak English in America would probably run into confusion and minor difficulty when traveling to the UK, or New Zeeland. So for the sake of these students, should we be shifting our attention to globilzied english?
Personally, I think that we should embrass and take much pride the Englsih that stems from our American roots. To steer our thinking we could think about all the Spaish Speaking countries, all 24 of the, have slight different dialect, but it doesn’t seem to be a problem among those nations for which type of Spanish should be considered prime. With all due respect to Mr. Beare I believe that this idea shouldn’t make any sort of lead way with in our country, or any other country. So, insted of considering the term global village, I think that ‘Global Villges’ (as in more than one world wide) would be more appropritae.
How do you feel about this issue? Should we embrass the ‘Global Village’ idea?
