The future of English

I once had a fairly heated argument with other teachers over tag questions. Students were Singaporean, inclined to come up with things like "You would like a coffee, isn't it?"

Lots of languages have a universal tag -- Chinese ma, Japanese ka, French n'est-ce pas, ... English doesn't; there's quite a bit of grammar you can teach about tags. There are exceptions to the general rules too, as in "You think I'm stupid, do you?" with a rather different meaning than the same sentence with "don't you?" as the tag..

I just avoided all those complications, told them to use "right?" To me, teaching the tags was a waste of time. Things like getting them to use correct tenses in narrative or conditionals were better uses of grammar-teaching time.

To some, this was heresy.

Clarity of speech is important, accent is not.  Being able to understand all accents (Indian English, Jamaican English, Sth African English, Texan drawl, Boston Brahmin, Australian dulcet tones, Scottish, Irish, Sinhalese etc etc) is important.  The clearer the speech, the less the accent matters, and it doesn't matter that our students WILL speak with a Chinese English accent.

And given the growing number of Chinese English speakers in the world, then maybe that will become the most globally accepted!

I think that pronunciation is important- and extremely undervalued- but I'd agree that you can't point to any one aspect and say "This is the most important part of teaching/learning English." In class I always compared pronunciation, grammar, vocabulay, etc. to legs on a table...if any are missing, the table will fall down...

And a very apt comparison. Vocab is important, because as the Bait said. it's the size that matters, but yer gots to learn to say it and use it right.
A little aside here, just to lessen the delusion of grandeur that RD finds himself meandering in...

"The first mass-produced and widely-used foil was made from tin. Tin was later replaced by aluminum in 1910, when the first aluminum foil rolling plant “Dr. Lauber, Neher & Cie., Emmishofen.” was opened in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland."

They needed it for the chocolate!

That's what I always told my classes.
I think part of the pronunciation problem is that many Chinese get the bulk, if not all, of their English education from Chinese teachers...who themselves are too often hopelessly unequipped to coach pronunciation.

And speaking of "hopelessly unequipped", back to George's argument.
Sure, a few places managed to smelt a few grams of the stuff to use on their chocolates, cuckoo clocks, and carved wooden figurines. These people were wankers.

It took the process developed in the USA by Charles Martin Hall _{and also some French guy} to make aluminum cheap and abundant the way it is today.

I've also learned that the metal element was named by Sir Humphrey Davy, who called it: aluminum. The name was changed to "aluminium" by the British Science Nobbling Council, who sniffed that aluminum "didn't sound classical enough" before adjourning to be spanked roundly with canes.

There is a whole etymology thing on aluminium in Wiki.  But...

English will continue to change, as it has from the very beginning.  If you haven't seen it the BBC production on the history of the English language is really worth watching.

The biggest problem for teachers is that we are not sure of which changes will be lasting and which ephemeral.  So - what to teach?  Back to the basics I think.  Clear speech, standard grammar and construction etc to make a solid foundation for the uses the language will be put to.

I skip slang - it dates rapidly and is likely to make students look silly if they use it in foreign countries.  Let them pick up the local, current slang when they reach wherever they are going.

Snore...humph..wazzat..proper English...well, I agree that pronunciation is of major importance, how to pronounce some metal thing has less importance to me than teaching the poor chaps to say "This" and "That" instead of "zis" and "zat"...every time they do, I always expect one of them to lean over and say menacingly "we have ways of making you talk, you allied pig". There is also the phrase "I walked into a loom", which always makes me furious. Unless you're incredibly myopic, drunk or the room is very dark, you would rarely find any need to walk into a loom!

I think we have all been asked this question "How do I increase my vocabulary?", probably without the word "increase" in the sentence. I think vocab is of paramount importance, but I must admit I think getting the hang of basic grammar is a good thing, otherwise you might know the entire OED and still sound like Yoda after he has had a few pints.

I have, naturally, my own secret agenda...all people should just talk like characters in a P.G. Wodehouse novel. That is good English.                                              

I have, naturally, my own secret agenda...all people should just talk like characters in a P.G. Wodehouse novel. That is good English.                                         

Indeed.

Have you read any of the Flashman novels? Wodehouse's comment on the first one was "Now I understand what that ‘when a new planet swims into his ken’ excitement is all about."

Read them...my dear chap, I devoured them as an aunt devours nephews. Those novels are positively spiffy. Wodehouse and Flashman should be mandatory reading for all English majors. They would dashed well learn more from those books than they ever will from those blasted "College English" books they are saddled with.

There is also the phrase "I walked into a loom", which always makes me furious. Unless you're incredibly myopic, drunk or the room is very dark, you would rarely find any need to walk into a loom!

Those are the excuses I use. Rarely do people believe them.

Unless you're incredibly myopic, drunk or the room is very dark, you would rarely find any need to walk into a loom!

Or, of course, you work in a textile mill.....
But that room/loom/noom thing is the dreaded Changjiang Disease, discussed elsewhere, and it's damned hard to root out...

As for a non-Me standard for English (admittedly a highly theoretical construct), I'm sticking wi' yer Scots. If the whole world talked like Groundskeeper Willie, it would be a better place.
Wodehouse characters would be OK, but I must point out that Squirrel-Boy is one of those la-de-da Continental fruit-salads I mentioned earlier.



In fact, I kinda had him in mind.

This is an interesting article on the future of English. It points out that native speakers will only be 15% of the English-speaking population  by 2020, and it mentions that 300 million Chinese people now read and write English.  The author also postulates that something similar to what occurred with Latin may occur with English.

http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/16-07/st_essay

This one is also a fascinating read - but a bit longer!

http://www.britishcouncil.org/learning-elt-future.pdf

It also theorises that "The economic argument for English may be challenged as developing countries make more careful evaluations of the costs and benefits of mass educational programmes in the English language."  We could see a diminishing future as language teachers in non-native speaking countries.  

I once had a fairly heated argument with other teachers over tag questions. Students were Singaporean, inclined to come up with things like "You would like a coffee, isn't it?"

Lots of languages have a universal tag -- Chinese ma, Japanese ka, French n'est-ce pas, ... English doesn't; there's quite a bit of grammar you can teach about tags. There are exceptions to the general rules too, as in "You think I'm stupid, do you?" with a rather different meaning than the same sentence with "don't you?" as the tag..

I just avoided all those complications, told them to use "right?" To me, teaching the tags was a waste of time. Things like getting them to use correct tenses in narrative or conditionals were better uses of grammar-teaching time.

To some, this was heresy.

in england we use 'innit' and 'yea?'

you get me

300 million chinese may read and write english but out of this group how many can only say 'hello'. If the paper is classifying chinese of foreign residence in here then I can believe this figure, but if the authors are postulating that there are this many english users in China proper then I would argue not likely. This would be 1 in 4 users of english here and I find myself very lucky if I meet 1 in 25 that have conversational level english.

300 million chinese may read and write english but out of this group how many can only say 'hello'. If the paper is classifying chinese of foreign residence in here then I can believe this figure, but if the authors are postulating that there are this many english users in China proper then I would argue not likely. This would be 1 in 4 users of english here and I find myself very lucky if I meet 1 in 25 that have conversational level english.

Yes, but even 2% of 1.3 billion is 26 million, more than Australia's population and getting close to Canada's.