Bane or Boon: Social Work in Teaching Foreign Languages

How do benign teaching methods contribute to learning a foreign language?
Reliance on the elusive spoken word, time-consuming games and teaching techniques peculiar to animators, group discussions unchecked for appropriateness, precision, and clarity, unbridled disregard of error-swapping in peer-editing and group discussions: To come up with a scheme to remedy the current sorry state, a rigorous analysis of what is going on at the receiving end in the teaching process, for instance, recording and analysing classroom activities, may be useful in reassessing the unhappy status quo.

How a failure in communication changed my life

With tongue in cheek, I relish telling this little anecdote about the origin of CTM or Communicative Teaching Method, which has been dogmatically and uncritically applied in teaching foreign languages ever since. I was a contemporary witness when a paradigm change took place and social work was implemented in pedagogy way back in the seventies. To illustrate my point, this is when I became aware of it.
Scottish Peter, as he was nicknamed, was standing before me, bent over with his hands supporting his massive body on his knees. He was swaying from side to side, alternatingly directing first his left ear and then his right ear into the direction of my mouth. All the time, he had a look of utter despair on his face, his eyes fixed onto my lips as if this were to facilitate his comprehension of what I was trying to say. Alas, it was to no avail.

I was trying to pronounce the word “vegetable”, but I must have gotten the IP alphabet symbols wrong when I taught myself some of the rudimentary things about the English language. Not unexpectedly, there were bound to be errors and in this case my pronunciation of the second syllable sounded like “table”, vege-table. No wonder Scottish Peter, who worked as a breakfast and vegetable cook in our small hotel in Guernsey for the summer season, had a hard time understanding me. And being a social worker by profession, he felt it his duty to blame himself for what he thought was his inability to understand my gibberish sort of language, rather than blaming my ignorance and inability to speak understandable, accurate and clear English. But can you actually blame him? He was probably the victim of the theory of CTM, which has, up to now, not been scientifically tested. He was probably thinking all the time when our little communicative comical act was going on that I was an underprivileged victim of society. It never crossed his mind that I might have been just too lazy to learn proper Standard English! Needless to say that this break-down in communication was no isolated incident and I resolved to do something about it to ensure I would always be understood with ease, if that should ever be possible.

At the time, I had little theoretical grounding on phonetics and grammar worth mentioning. My active vocabulary was about 700 words barely enough to engage in simple-speak-small-talk. English people are always polite and tried to make me believe that my English was good, which I knew was not. After my first stay in the UK, I began to work in earnest with authentic material to improve my English in all areas. In short, I began to “study” proper English largely on my own. It was common practice at the time that the native teachers did most of the talking, which suited me well since I was very much interested in “authentic English” and in most cases, I absorbed this as first rate model English like a sponge.

It was the time, when the responsibility for results to be achieved in language- teaching rested solely with the teacher. He was supposed to impart his or her knowledge of his or her language, his or her expertise on synonyms, near synonyms and varied structures, giving many contextual examples. And all of this was done skilfully, professionally and competently with a high degree of enthusiasm, fervour and zeal. I have it on good authority straight from the horse’s mouth that these days, teaching contextual English is considered “time-consuming”. They always handed out copies of the texts so that one was able to work with them at home in one’s own time and do the all-important revisions whenever one wanted to. Some of them had used their teaching material for more than twenty years without detriment to the motivation of their students. With this way of presenting material, I found that the retention rate was high, probably because of the affective element inherent in this teaching technique. Out of about fifteen teachers of English I have had, about four actually possessed those rare qualities. This high-calibre and talented kind of person was appreciated unanimously by all students, even the slow and lazy ones. What was mostly valued by most of us was his or her ability to give explanations eloquently and fit for printing, in short, he and she was a master of his or her language.

Then, there was a major change in teaching of foreign languages. I vividly remember the evening when I had my first encounter with the “Communicative Teaching Method” or CTM, as it was called. It was in one of those language classes for immigrants in South Africa. I had attended the language course for immigrants before and was surprised that we were about 80 people in the class on that evening as opposed to some 20 in previous classes. The new teacher divided the class into groups of four with the air of an expert as if he had had long years of practice in what was to follow. He then went around the class talking briefly to each group. Our group was the last he stopped by and after exchanging a few sentences with each of us he established that our group happened to be the most advanced group in the room. Since I was not interested in statistics and swapping errors with other non-native speakers of English, I stopped going to that class.

Only years later did I find out that the CTM had been introduced worldwide without any shred of scientific evidence as to its efficacy. And I have not seen any comparative long-term scientific studies of any given method combination!

But this was not my last contact with my pedagogic pet peeve. A university lecturer at Hannover University, who had read German at some American university, had been in the country for a number of years, cohabiting with a German woman for some time. Yet, he was unable to speak German; it was rather the gibberish sort – despite all the advantages of living with an educated native speaker, which is particularly conducive to acquiring a foreign tongue.

And he did insist on going by the CTM “Book” in his classes. One day he called to tell me that he had been most astonished to have found more than ninety students in his class at his university course on Shakespeare, and was eager and proud to explain that he had gone by “The Book“ by having the students form groups of four and speak to one another in English. All he did was go round, ensuring that only English was spoken, while making sure he did not miss a single table of four.

I suppose that in the not too distant future this sort of hopping from group to group and “listening in” can be taken over by some language-surveillance computer or robot. This device would hover above the participants, the symbolic meaning of hovering being the authority or superior knowledge so badly craved for, ignore the quality of English spoken, emit some encouraging sounds at irregular intervals, tilt its metal head as a sign of attention, extend a pair of metal ears, duly pricked-up – and it could even be programmed to make some nodding movement, indicating approval – and it would not have to be in the right places because nobody would notice or care.

Needless to say that it is S.O.P. (Standard Operating Procedure) with CTM not to interfere, not to correct even bad mistakes and above all, to leave the talking to the group: “active speaking” right from the start. In other words: output without input.

Incidentally, the expression “active speaking” is part of a slogan used by a coaching company in Germany. Ever since I read their ad, I have been wondering what “passive speaking” may be like. “Silence” would be my best guess, also because it is what would be best these days in many cases.

There is no trick to being a satirist if you have so many people working for you.

About this posting

This posting is part of a series dedicated to topics dealing with various aspects of the English language which usually get short shrift on the internet and in other publications. It is, in a wider sense, concerned with the English language crumbling into incomprehensibility at alarming speed and how society is influenced by it. How do schools and universities react and in what way is literature affected by all this? Furthermore, how do people working in education and linguistics cope with this avalanche of “Local English neologisms”?

What often sounds like modern Pidgin English can generally be put down to neo-pidginicity. It is an artificially accelerated and manipulated process – or rather linguistic genetic engineering – of attempting to oversimplify Standard English, the result of which is in all cases some sort of Neo Pidgin English or Simplified-Simple-Speak.  Four major fields of contact contribute to the gradual encroachment on Standard English: Basic Global English, as advocated by Dr. Joachim Grzega, machine translations of any kind, unedited documents and publications – frequently of international validity – being passed off as standard English but in fact written by non-native speakers of English, the acceptance of „Local English“ and non-native speakers of English teaching their version of „Local English“. The result of the English „produced“ in all these areas of contact is often, at best, a barely elevated Pidgin English.

And to compound matters, Globish appears to become a composite haphazard mixture of all about 180 Local Englishes and may for that very reason not be as easy as some people think once it has evolved into a sub-language of Standard English.

Finally, it would be interesting to see the first book written in Basic Global English, Dr. Joachim Grzega`s novel and daring invention and see in which section bookshops will display such a work of art

Standard English: OUT – El Silbo IN

Can El Silbo, the whistling language of the Canaries, become a serious contender to Basic Global English or even Standard English?

Beware: Satire

Are you fed up with hearing grunting noises, expletives, ever more babble and prattle, bellowing and yelling? Are you sick and tired of listening to Local Englishes, the maimed and substandard forms of Standard English? Have you had enough of conversing in Basic Global English, which is Dr. Joachim Grzega`s mutilated and novel form of Local English? Then, El Silbo, the harmonious whistling language of Gomera with its warbling and trilling, tweeting and cheeping sounds may appeal to you.

The whistling language El Silbo enables people to communicate across the many deep valleys of the volcanic island of Gomera. This set me thinking and I have been wondering why could it not be used to bridge the gap between Standard English and its new expanded Pidgin English varieties. In my humble opinion, it is well suited to become the lowest common denominator like Globish or Basic Global English. El Silbo seems somewhat superior to some of the newer forms of Neo Pidgin English or Local Englishes in the making.

El Silbo has no syntax or grammar of its own. It is a sign language, like Morse code or some rudimentary form of Neo-Pidgin English. The language has four vowels and four consonants which can be whistled in rising or falling pitches to form some 4,000 words. Although some say this restricts conversation, expert whistlers maintain that if you can say it, you can whistle it. Messages must be whistled with rhythm, clarity and power, which makes El Silbo far superior to Dr. Grzega`s novel and daring Basic Global English, which distinguishes itself by its paucity of diction with its basic vocabulary of 750 words and a bonus vocabulary of 250 to describe the speakers` individual worlds with.

While you can see locals in the sunny island of Gomera, gazing out to sea and puckering up to perform their „Silbo“ whistling language, I have already reconciled myself to facing the next wave of language deterioration, which is sure to happen with the unrelenting advance of substandard language in the media, the internet and books.

About this posting

This posting is part of a series dedicated to topics dealing with various aspects of the English language which usually get short shrift on the internet and in other publications. It is, in a wider sense, concerned with the English language crumbling into incomprehensibility at alarming speed and how society is influenced by it. How do schools and universities react and in what way is literature affected by all this? Furthermore, how do people working in education and linguistics cope with this avalanche of “Local English neologisms”?

What often sounds like modern Pidgin English can generally be put down to neo-pidginicity. It is an artificially accelerated and manipulated process – or rather linguistic genetic engineering – of attempting to oversimplify Standard English, the result of which is in all cases some sort of neo-pidgin English or Simplified-Simple-Speak.  Four major fields of contact contribute to the gradual encroachment on Standard English: Basic Global English, as advocated by Dr. Joachim Grzega, machine translations of any kind, unedited documents and publications – frequently of international validity – being passed off as standard English but in fact written by non-native speakers of English, the acceptance of „Local English“ and non-native speakers of English teaching their version of „Local English“. The result of the English „produced“ in all these areas of contact is often, at best, a barely elevated Pidgin English.

And to compound matters, Globish appears to become a composite haphazard mixture of all about 180 Local Englishes and may for that very reason not be as easy as some people think once it has evolved into a sub-language of Standard English.

Finally, it would be interesting to see the first book written in Basic Global English, Dr. Joachim Grzega`s novel and daring invention and see in which section bookshops will display such a work of art.

Synopsis of Neo-Pidginicity

BGE (Global Basic English), Globbish, Simple-Speak, Simplified-Simple-Speak – What you may always have wanted to know about Neo-pidginicity!

Neo-pidginicity is the artificially accelerated and manipulated process – or rather linguistic genetic engineering – of attempting to oversimplify Standard English, the result of which is in all cases some sort of neo-pidgin English. Four mainstream deviations of Standard English contribute to the gradual encroachment of neo-pidgin English on Standard English:

1. Teaching BGE or Basic Global English as advocated by Dr. Joachim Grzega is the most infamous approach to pandering to those unwilling to learn Standard English is. It is a teaching programme of his own invention and it has been painstakingly constructed to accelerate the acquisition of a mutilated sort of English. But also school-English is a widespread contributor to spreading the unnatural and often mutilated „local Englishes“. Non-native speakers of English often teach their respective version of „Local English“. The result of the English „produced“ in all these areas of contact is often, at best, a barely elevated Pidgin English.

2. Unedited documents and publications – frequently of international validity – are passed off as standard English but in fact they were written by non-native speakers of English often in a substandard, mutilated, and therefore difficult English.

3. The unreflecting acceptance of „local Englishes“ as they grow rampant in their respective countries is a major factor, too. Local Englishes are pushing their way into societies violently and unnaturally fast with all their excrescencies.

4. Machine translated websites, documents, and correspondence more often than not leave you guessing, and so does translation software for your home computer.

Both pidgin English and neo-pidgin English have a few features in common which are often either ignored or considered taboo: both varieties are frequently broken and unnatural English and, therefore, difficult to understand, often ambiguous and leave the conversationalist guessing in many instances. As a rule, the average standard of a speech in Pidgin English is usually in the region of 4th graders, of which many proponents of Pidgin varieties are probably unaware.
The most prominent propounders and popularizers of BGE or Basic Global English, the poor deviant of standard English, are non-native speakers of English. It is their mission to create an artificial sort of official global language – a kind of „Simplified Simple-Speak“ even simpler than the elusive and still to be created Globbish. And BGE is considered suitable to serve as a lingua franca at the highest level among bankers, politicians, business persons and other decision makers.

Another striking feature is the fact that the true standard of English in Germany is still a taboo topic and not discussed publicly, although a heated discussion about Denglish is going on. Even in linguistics, the topic of falling standards, especially in schools, is out of bounds. Machine translations are often the cause of great hilarity and although many students of English are aware of this, the impact that machine translations may have seemed to be underestimated.

There is little material available to the public about the influence of all of the above on education, teaching, literature, and society in general. And there is hardly any material on auto didactic learning, informal learning, or self-teaching or self-study as it is sometimes called. The fact that highly successful students are autodidacts is little known too.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Comparative studies analyzing material ranging from papers, essays, homework, records of spoken English etc. to business correspondence, text books, and dissertations would convincingly demonstrate that standards are falling. But such studies are nowhere to be found and if there are any, they are probably not for public consumption. In other words, all my claims could easily be proven by recording, transcribing and analysing spoken language. As to texts, such analysis would even be easier.

Chick and Chips – When Modern English Abusage becomes Usage

Some time ago, I was invited to a restaurant with this appealing Hispanic -Latino ambiance promising perennial sunshine. It is part of a fast-growing, very ambitious up-market catering chain. All their sunny culinary havens are situated in the outskirts of towns along feeder roads.

The waitress handed us the menus and I was immediately struck by its translation into English. And after studying the menu for a while, I remembered what a native speaker friend once told me when I announced that I had prepared a lavish sample folder with German into English translations of menus, intending to offer my services to the local catering business. “Please don’t do that, because we won’t have anything to laugh about anymore when we visit restaurants.” Of course, not wanting to be a killjoy, I didn’t.

When after some considerable time, the waitress deigned to take our orders, the first thing my host wanted to know was how old the girl to be served with the chips would be. And would she be served on a huge tray among a pile of chips and could he, alternatively, have her rolled in puff pastry?

After the meal, I told the restaurant manager, who had the appearance of a very young bus boy, that the dish’s name was well suited to be included in my website, which also features Denglish. He was then eager to learn what website it was and would I mention the company. I said it was only a private website. Wouldn’t mention the company at all. Turning his back on us, he mumbled something like, “In that case, I don’t care at all.” His tone of voice sounded contemptuous, which I took to mean something like, “Nitpicker, don’t waste my time.”

Apart from this outrageous debasement of a very English traditional dish, they also offer the exotic variety “Chick Hawaii”, which would, however, entail eating loads of pineapples in addition to a colossal heap of protein. But I wasn’t up to that on that particular day.

As to the Denglish expression “Chick and Chips”, it is, being a basic Globbish English term which can be easily confused, well-suited to be included into Dr. Joachim Grzega`s simplified simple-speak course “BGE” or Basic Global English”. Mr. Grzega is a native German linguist, determined to oversimplify the English language. Despite his ambition, he relentlessly and scrupulously focuses on ambiguous or misleading pronunciation and word choice. In the Spiegel magazine article, “Die Kunst des Stammelns” [The Art of Stammering] http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,544420,00.html
he uses the following example: “Where are the beaches?” to point out that it should not be confused with “Where are the bitches?” Incidentally, the example is taken from a class of 8-year old children.

One is left to wonder whether the non-native propounders of this sort of language would likewise mutilate their German native language with the same blind zeal and dedication and allow their children to speak fluently wrong, carry forward their pet errors and allow ambiguous or difficult language to become ingrained.

BGE is an artificial acceleration process (neo-pidginicity) to facilitate learning some sort of neo-pidgin English based on Globbish. The most prominent propounders and popularizers of this deviant of standard English are non-native speakers of English. It is their mission to create an artificial sort of official global language– a kind of simplified simple-speak even simpler than Globbish. And it is considered suitable to serve as a lingua franca at the highest level among bankers, politicians, business persons and other decision makers.

Will Smiley-Speak soon be all the rage?

A Global Language of Smileys as a Lingua Franca
What will the global language of the future be like? Perhaps a simplified standard English to accommodate the needs of the younger generation and local Englishes in each country as predicted by www.askoxford.com/globalenglish/?view=uk?. Or even a kind of Simplified-Simple-Speak as propounded by Dr. Joachim Grzega?

Or will sign language, as used by deaf and mute people, replace speech? My guess is that smileys will make it in both speech and writing. Right now, there are more than 5000 different smileys around and this won’t be the end of it. The Chinese language is proof of the viability of my novel idea. 3000 characters suffice to read a mainland newspaper and well-educated Chinese know about 7000 characters.

Initially, you will probably have problems pulling faces and sticking out your tongue when communicating with your boss or when you are given an audience by the Pope but once you have got the hang of it, it should become second nature. Teaching Smiley Speak must be fun too.

Smileys are exactly what the doctor called for to replace the trendy simple speak of the young and also BGE (Basic Global English). Even Dr. Joachim Grzega`s method of mutilating the English language does not go far enough and his Basic Global English, or BGE, will probably have problems holding its own. Some newspapers have already begun to run series of “interviews without words”, among which is the prestigious Süddeutsche Zeitung.

It does not seem to be beneath their dignity to publish a series of grotesque faces, contorted into ridiculousness. Nevertheless, they may be the forerunners of a new global speak, so treat them with the respect and seriousness due to them.

For more hilarious inanity click here:
http://sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de/texte/anzeigen/26532

Standard English – The Language of Quaint Crumblies?

If only my language were more like a flash-animated website, full of colourful, fast-moving, plain imagery, weird sounds, three-letter words and four-word sentences. A sort of comic strip with speech-balloons for those who have chosen to prolong their childhood indefinitely. Even Stone-Age men found delight in colourful pictures adorning their cave walls, though, of course, those were not animated. Yet, colourful and moving objects along with annoying sounds would not at all be alien to me. On the contrary, they would remind me of my baby chain rattle suspended across my pram with dancing bears and snakes and tiny ducks I used to enjoy so much when I was about 6 months old.

In this day and age, the pace of living is fast and so are changes in almost all aspects of life. Written language is being partially or wholly replaced by fragmented chunks, animated websites, video clips, SMS snippets, freakish sounds, and more often than not inane cartoons. Spoken language is often reduced to the bare minimum, making it ambiguous in every other sentence or, rather fragment. Descriptive and precise language is rendered superfluous and only quaint crumblies like myself use this sort of language.

In his book „La terza fase“, the Italian linguist Raffaele Simone even speaks of „a retrograde evolutionary step,“ claiming that our century will be „dominated by a culture of audiovisual input“ and that „This new manner of creating communication or information has lost all long-established characteristic features of being analytical and well structured, contextual and referential and has transformed itself into an indifferent mass in which everything is contained in anything and analysis and experience are valued only little.“
Likewise, the Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater „warned of the progressive simplification of the language used by young people, saying that these days, young people do not read because they understand only very easy texts.“

With regard to Globbish, there is some hope that this issue may be solved. The linguist Dr. Joachim Grzega, a German crusader with a noble cause, has come up with a method of his own invention, which he calls BGE or Basic Global English. For that purpose, he has reduced and changed English grammar to what he deems to be the bare necessities and selected a 1000-word vocabulary as a means to „communicate effectively“.

What a relief to be unburdened of the need to use the tried and tested code of communication which Standard English used to be. Just fancy being able to say just anything which comes to your head. Up to now, this was privilege of those residing in „secluded“ areas. There is no need to bother at all, whether you have expressed yourself clearly.

Allow me to slip in a piece of advice if you are thinking of taking part in the state of the art cultural linguistic activities of modern life and uncertain about your intelligibility when experimenting with the new way of speaking, try out your Basic Global English on some 10-year old kids. If they understand you, anybody might.

On Being Sloppy

I had become sloppier than the sloppiest man who has ever been to the University of Sloppiness and got a degree in “Being sloppy”. How was that, you may wonder. Well, I know that ignoring facts is the gateway to conscious stupidity. So I finally gave in and decided that it was high time I acknowledged the existence of simple-speak. I was too weak to sustain my resistance and decided that it was best and more convenient to take an active part in the present-day cultural life of state of the art linguistics.

What sounds like a contrite confession is unfortunately true. For years, I had suffered in silence the current trend of using simple-speak, ignoring spelling, punctuation, and common sense grammar in both English and German. This was easy for me to do in chat rooms, which I never visit, and with messenger services of any kind, which I never use.

But two spelling reforms in six years in Germany had left their mark; I just could not be bothered any more to follow rules “some“ significant and anonymous inhabitants of lofty ivory towers had “genetically engineered” and which seems to me like a veritable case of exercising power without responsibility. Nevertheless, they went through with it despite all opposition and the ensuing massive concerted resistance was to no avail. The ulterior motive is blatantly clear: it was to be an economic boost of the entire branch of the printing industry.

A former member of the reform committee disclosed some time ago that another motive for changing 100-year-old established spelling rules was not the actual new spelling reform itself but the fact that the private publisher “Duden Verlag ” *1 had exercised control over spelling for too long a time. And it was high time it was brought back into the fold of government control, an obscure cadre given carte blanche (or a fool’s licence?) to do what they like – almost like an intelligence agency.

Common software problems, especially with MS, also contributed to my acquiescence into falling standards, which were the quality of products and services in this case. They had induced in me a sense of insouciance, of indifference bordering on apathy in my case. It was MS Word, though, that has finally given me the coup de grace. Before the year 0 (zero) B.G. (before Gates), I had no problems marking my old-fashioned files any way I thought proper. It was only when I began to save documents in files on word processors when the problems started. Has anyone ever taken the trouble to find out how many ordinary, useful and often necessary letters and symbols or special characters you cannot use when labelling folders and files?

But what has jolted me out of my lethargy are the relatively new concepts of “Local Englishes” and BGE, which, incidentally, is not a strain of mad cow disease in a medical sense. It is a sort of very simplified global English (Basic Global English) of the sort you would teach to children and adults with special needs. No need to perform in accordance with tried and tested standards at all. Anything goes, anyone can say just anything, and some teeny weenie sense can always be attributed to the fragments of this mutilated neo-pidgin sort of English. That is, if you can muster the goodwill of a social worker. The process of the devolution of languages will be called neo-pidginicity by future generations.

*1 Verlag Bibliographisches Institut & F.A. Brockhaus AG, Mannheim

Homage to a Teacher

We were in grade seven when a new teacher took over our lethargic and intimidated class. We had been beaten, bullied, and often mocked by his predecessor. With the tip of his cane – for the absence of a whip, I suppose – he would point out of the window, as if he were saying, “Look, this is what is awaiting you in the word of grown-ups. So you had better get used to it.”

Mr. Leonhard, whom we called “Leo” for short, was a natural leader. Yes, I have deliberately chosen this word as it describes his character best. He possessed all of the traits one would find much later in countless studies when trying to isolate the “universal leadership trait” in management personnel. He was confident and would inspire confidence; he was energetic and would miraculously pass on his energy. He had the ability to set high standards combined with an abundance of knowledge in many fields and he expected his standards to be met as if it were the most natural thing in the world. When assigning group work, he would pinpoint responsibility and relentlessly follow up on the common “group spongers”. More importantly, Leo was also the instigator of my discovery that self-study or autodidactic learning was crucial to achieving good results in any field of knowledge.

I still vividly remember the first day when he stormed into the classroom, stopping briefly to take a deep breath, doing his teaching bit, then stopping again – this time to breathe out before he left the classroom. He had literally come, seen, and won. On the very first day, he, being a very good maths teacher, had established that our entire class was about one grade below standard. No problem, he asserted confidently, and soon he proved it wasn’t.

Leo’s unshakable and contagious positive attitude had us hanging on to every word of his when he was lecturing and participating eagerly when his presentation demanded a more interactive involvement. We were keen to study and many of my classmates, including myself, satisfied by far the requirements for homework. We would accept and imbibe knowledge as a precious gift. The words “discipline, study, exercise, knowledge, grammar, and homework” were not dirty words for us and we didn’t need to wash our mouths out with chocolate when we said them.

I have been wondering from time to time, how he would fare in this day and age. I met very, very few teachers like him later; when I was in Germany between overseas jobs I attended Cambridge Proficiency classes, or courses purporting to be on that level, so as not to lose my language skills. It was about that time when the responsibility for teaching-results was shifted from the teacher upon the students or group. Course descriptions might have read something like: ““Active participation is a prerequisite to the success of the language course”. He probably would have replied, “Without input, no output.” Now, please don’t ask me about the difference between active and passive participation.

How would Leo do in the Germany of today, where the unrestrained application of the doctrines of a liberal and permissive society has introduced social work into education? I simply cannot imagine him, standing there, asking what the class would like to do. Or would they rather have another cup of coffee before proceeding? Or explaining for 10 long minutes what he was going to do in the following 45 minutes and spending the last 5 minutes, summarizing what we had done in the remaining 30 minutes?

And would he have writhed in agony when reading the account of a German high school teacher published in the HAZ (Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung) in which she disclosed about two years ago that the teaching material she is using now for grade 12 students was used only a few years earlier for grade 10 students. And how would he have rated the standard of performance of these adult kids once they have become business leaders, politicians, administrators, army officers, judges and teachers, and not to forget – bankers? Perhaps, “the blind leading the blind”?

And what about the excessive use of child-like drawings and graphics in full-colour editions of text books with lots of empty space to scribble onto? And what would he have said about using the very same sort of text books in adult education?
Probably, he would have said that it remained to be seen if these improvements would contribute to achieving measurable results, and, in the long run, to raising standards.

And would he have averted his eyes in defeat at attempts by Dr. Joachim Grzega to mutilate the English language with his new method of a language teaching programme? The linguist with a mission advocates a sort of simplified simple-speak, namely his “BGE” or “Basic Global English”. According to him, this teaching programme of his own invention is to accelerate the acquisition of a mutilated sort of English and which is no more than a barely elevated pidgin English or neo-pidgin English. He has reduced English grammar to about 20 rules and a 750-word basic vocabulary, which will be extended by 250 words adapted to the individual needs of pupils according to their hobbies and interests. Pupils are encouraged to speak “fluently wrong” right from the start, which is quite bizarre because parents would never tolerate poor language in their native tongue. Judging by an article published in the weekly magazine “Der Spiegel”, I gather that emphasis is placed on avoiding only embarrassing mistakes rather than imparting knowledge of a tried and tested and established code of standard English communication. Leo would probably have said that he was not finicky about corrections for the sake of correctness, but for the ambiguities, misunderstandings or even abstruseness resulting from too simple or incorrect a language.

As to avoiding embarrassing mistakes, those could run into millions in ever new combinations. A formidable task this is and to me it looks pretty counterproductive.
Why reduce a tried and tested, effective code of communication to the lowest common denominator when you have to patch it up? There likely to be millions of embarrassing or hilarious pitfalls – or both.

To revert to my subject, decades later, I found out that Leo had not held a teaching degree and had not even had a crash course in pedagogy. He was a university graduate in engineering and a tank commander in World-War II. Doubtless, he could have confronted the most obstreperous youngsters in the most unruly school you would find in this day and age. He managed to become a teacher simply for the fact that there was a shortage of teachers after the war and that he happened to belong to the right church. And he was forgiven by the class for having an affair with a very young and beautiful music teacher who had taken the fancy of most of the boys going through puberty as it were.

Talking Taboo: Pidgin English in Literature?

For years, pidgin Englishes have been treated on the same level as standard English at Universities all over the world and considered to be normal „varieties of English“, probably without the consent of the rightful owners, namely the English people. Thus, broken English – that is what Pidgin English mostly is – is ennobled to a higher rank than its scope for expressing ideas permits.

During my research into pidgin Englishes and „Local Englishes“, I came across statements like: „If you despise pidgin English, you despise the people speaking it“, and: „Many people think that varieties [of English] are incorrect ways of speaking, but they are mistaken; they are just different“. The people claiming this may never have been subjected to a prolonged, torture-level-like gibberish during which they gave up trying to understand what was being said and just said „yes“ in the right places, wishing at the same time that their ordeal was over. If they had, they would think otherwise. Likewise, the propagators of this theory emphasize the social aspect in communication rather than the actual conveyance of accurate and precise information.

A while ago, I read Doris Lessing`s book „Ben in the World“ and I was surprised to find about five passages in which some kind of substandard, non-native speaker English was in fact mentioned and commented on through the characters. The following passages have all been taken from the Flamingo pocket book, copyright Doris Lessing, 2000.
„He felt out of things, the chattering, the embraces, the talk he did not understand, when it was in Portuguese, and even the English was mutilated and hard to follow.“
(p. 90)
„But she was friendly, and helpful, making food for him, offering him juice, and when he sat silent and doleful included him in what she said, in her quick, but difficult English.“ (p.94)
„The evenings were full of people, who arrived loudly, laughing and talking in Portuguese but to Alex and Ben in their hard-to-understand English.“ (p.94)
„[…] by now she knew some English, not much, but enough to make it seem that she knew much more.“ (p. 110)
and:
„She was seventeen, though she pretended to be twenty-two, just as she put on a show of knowing more English than she did.“

„Who can make himself / herself understood, is right“. (Quote by Dr. Joachim Grzega in his interview in the weekly magazine Der Spiegel.)

„Who can make himself / herself understood, is right“. (Quote by Dr. Joachim Grzega in his interview in the weekly magazine DerSpiegel.) http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,544420,00.html
I have taken the liberty of quoting Dr. Joachim Grzega, who has come up with a simplified Globbish English – „BGE“ or Basic Global English. This sort of synthetic English, which is destined to be handed down to future generations, is a neo-pidgin English, or a barely elevated pidgin English.

The extremely carefully selected vocabulary comprises about 1000 words, 750 of which are general vocabulary and 250 tailored to the individual needs of his 8-year old pupils in a trial classroom. The whittled down vocabulary seems important because it would appear that many non-native speakers of English all over the world find standard English too taxing, too hard to understand, and in all probability, too tiresome to learn up to the level which could actually be achieved.

Mind you, this is not the end of it. Dr. Grzega has reduced English grammar with painstaking care to about 20 rules. He is now working on a BGE course in basic business Globbish. It says in the Spiegel magazine article that non-native speakers with an excellent command of standard English are harder to understand than those who can barely make themselves understood. Shame on all of you very proficient non-native speakers of English. Have you never heard of your „social“ responsibilities? Scale down your scope of your speech and writing and narrow the latitude of your mind and help decrease the range of thinking, which is not difficult to do with only a very limited vocabulary. Be bold and try to be a cut below the others.

Incidentally, bankers will be delighted at the new business Globbish course. At last, they can converse globally in a uniform system of balderdash without having to think hard when moving billions of Euros across the globe. I cannot help thinking of an aphorism I came across in a Linux forum a few days ago: „The limits of language are the limits of thought“. But it is results that count, as Dr. Grzega daringly maintains. So learning Basic Global English is a solid investment in your future.

Preview on upcoming topics:
Autodidactic Learning, BGE (Basic Global English), books, Denglish, Globish, Globbish, Grzega method, informal learning, linguistics, literature, local English, machine translations, neo-pidginicity, Pidgin English, poetry analysis, reading, school, self-study, self-teaching, students, study, teaching, translation.

Good riddance, VISTA – Bien venido big, big, big Brother!

Computer Problems sorted out? Don`t be too sure about it!

Are you unhappy with FAQ websites, help functions and various support responses? And do they seem to you like Victorian moral tales to make us lesser mortals all work harder and become better users? Or even worse, do you feel like an abused end user, like an involuntary and inexpensive consultant to the computer and software industry because your time and effort spent on describing your problem is probably going to help the company in question more than yourself?
Mysteriously changed settings, especially in MSWord; error messages which prove to be mere hallucinations of the CPU; capricious real error messages which interrupt some important work you are doing; quirky problems with software installations that even puzzle computer boffins and presumptuous auto-starts of programs I didn’t even know existed, just to name a few, are FEPs or Frequently Encountered Problems.
Out of three software programs I have installed during the past two months, two do not work at all. Mind you, they are all shareware programs. Admittedly, they are not on my priority list right now but I dread to think how much time I will have to spend when I need to make them work. My ignorance is definitely partly because I haven’t taken the time to busy myself with the handling properly, because they are incidental tools for me and I have lots of other things on my plate which I consider more important.
Fortunately, the Windows XP operating systems hardly crash anymore or freeze my computers (I am using both the Home and Professional editions). Gone are the days when MFN (Microsoftus Functionius Nixibus) as I used to call it, would flash peremptory error messages at me, warning me, for instance, that „Windows had caused an error in section…The operating program will be shut down“. And, as we all know only too well, when the XP operating systems were much improved with most bugs sorted out, Billus Gattus Monopulus introduced his new operating system Vista, with even new flaws. Naturally, I gave VISTA a miss after checking it out on a friend’s computer and I am testing various Linux systems on an old computer now.
In all likelihood, I am going to switch to Linux for a reason: IT companies of all sorts
have been trying to exert ever more control on content and some even spy on our computers. No problem, we can protect ourselves effectively with a whole range of programmes or hardware. What we cannot protect against is some sort of compulsory storage of our most intimate data on external servers as it is being discussed now. Microsoft is keen to introduce a new operating system that would not even require you to install software on your computer. All your software and data would be on a Microsoft server. George Orwell would have been envious of this idea!

One is left to wonder, how this issue will affect society as a whole and schools and universities in particular. Will Microsoft also play a leading role in education as software generously provided online would probably be subject to some sort of censorship?
Incidentally, is there one single person on earth who is making use of online hard-disk-drives right now?
(Excerpts from my diary)