Dont insist on English Patricia Ryan
I know what you’re thinking you think
I’ve lost my way and somebody is going
to come on the stage in a minute and
guide me gently back to my feet
I get that all the time in Dubai here on
holiday are you dear come to visit the
children how long are you staying
well actually I hope for a while longer
yet I have been living and teaching in
the Gulf for over 30 years and in that
time I have seen a lot of changes
now that statistic is quite shocking and
I want to talk to you today about
language loss and the globalization of
English I want to tell you about my
friend who was teaching English to
adults in Abu Dhabi and one fine day she
decided to take them into the garden to
teach them some nature vocabulary but it
was she who ended up learning all the
Arabic words for the local plants as
well as their uses medicine new uses
cosmetics cooking herbal how did those
students get all that knowledge of
course from their grandparents and even
their great-grandparents it’s not it’s
not necessary to tell you how important
it is to be able to communicate across
generations but sadly today languages
are dying at an unprecedented rate a
language dies every 14 days now at the
same time English is the undisputed
global language could there be a
connection well I don’t know but I do
know that I’ve seen a lot of changes
when I first came out to the Gulf
I came to Kuwait in the days when it was
still a hardship post actually not that
long ago that is a little bit too early
but nevertheless I was recruited by the
British Council along with about 25
other teachers and we were the first
non-muslims to teach in the state
schools there in Kuwait we were brought
to teach English because the government
wanted to modernize the country and to
empower the citizens through
education and of course the UK benefited
from some of that lovely oil wealth okay
now this is the major change that I’ve
seen how teaching English has morphed
from being a mutually beneficial
practice to becoming a massive
international business that it is today
no longer just the foreign language on
the school curriculum and no longer the
sole domain of mother England it has
become a bandwagon for every
english-speaking nation on earth and why
not after all the best education
according to the latest World University
Rankings is to be found in the
universities of the UK and the US so
everybody wants to have an English
education naturally but if you’re not a
native speaker you have to pass a test
now can it be right to reject the
student on linguistic ability alone
perhaps you have a computer scientist
who’s a genius would he need the same
language as a lawyer for example well I
don’t think so we English teachers
reject them all the time we put a stop
sign and we stop them in their tracks
they can’t pursue their dream any longer
till they get English now let me put it
this way if I met a monolingual Dutch
speaker who had the cure for cancer
would I stop him from entering my
British University I don’t think so but
indeed that is exactly what we do we
English teachers are the gatekeepers and
you have to satisfy us first that your
English is good enough now it can be
dangerous to give too much power
to a narrow segment of society maybe the
barrier would be to universal okay but I
hear you say what about the research
it’s all in English
so the books are in English the the
journals are done in or in English but
that is a self-fulfilling prophecy it
feeds the English requirement and so it
goes on I ask you what happened to
translation if you think about the
Islamic Golden Age there was lots of
generation then they translated from
Latin and Greek into Arabic into Persian
and then it was translated on into the
Germanic languages of Europe and the
Romance languages and so light shone
upon the dark ages of Europe now don’t
get me wrong
I am NOT against teaching English all
Ewing’s teach each other I love it that
we have a global language we need one
today more than ever but I am against
using it as a barrier do we really want
to end up with six hundred languages and
the main one being English or Chinese we
need more than that where do we draw the
line
this system equates intelligence there’s
a knowledge of English which is quite
arbitrary
and I want to remind you that the the
Giants upon whose shoulders today’s
intelligentsia stand did not have to
have English they didn’t know how to
pass an English test case in point
Einstein he by the way
was considered remedial at school
because he was in fact dyslexic but
fortunately for the world he did not
have to pass an English test because
they didn’t start until 1964 with TOEFL
the American Test of English now it’s
exploded
there are lots not to test of English
and millions and millions of students do
take these tests every year now you
might think you and me those fees aren’t
fad they’re okay but they are
prohibitive to so many millions of poor
people so immediately we’re rejecting
them brings to mind a headline I saw
recently education the Great Divide now
I get it I understand why people would
want to focus on English they want to
give their children the best chance in
life and to do that they need a Western
education because of course the best
jobs go to people out of the Western
universities that I put on earlier it’s
a circular thing okay let me tell you a
story about two scientists two english
scientists they were doing an experiment
to do with genetics and the four limbs
and the hind limbs of animals but they
couldn’t get their results they wanted
they really didn’t know what to do until
Along Came a German scientist who
realized that they were using two words
for falling and hind limb
whereas genetics does not differentiate
and neither does German so bingo problem
solved if you can’t think the thought
you are stuck but if another language
can think that thought then by
cooperating we can achieve and learn so
much more
my daughter came to England from Kuwait
she had studied science and mathematics
in Arabic at an Arabic medium school she
had to translate it into English at her
Bremer school and she was the best in
the class of the subjects which tells us
that when students come to us from
abroad we may not be giving them enough
credit for what they know and they know
it in their own language when a language
dies we don’t know what we lose with
that language this is I don’t know if
you saw it on CNN recently they gave the
Heroes award to a young Kenyan shepherd
boy who couldn’t study at night in his
village like all the village children
because the kerosene lamp it had smoke
and it damaged his eyes and anyway there
was never enough kerosene because what
does a dollar a day buy for you so he
invented a cost-free solar lamp and now
the children in his village get the same
grades at school as the children who
have electricity at home and when
when he received to the board he said
these lovely words the children can lead
Africa from what it is today
a dark continent to a light continent a
simple idea but it could have such
far-reaching consequences people who
have no light whether it’s physical or
metaphorical cannot pass our exams and
we can never know what they know that
does not keep them and ourselves in the
dark let us celebrate diversity mind
your language use it to spread great
ideas
thank you very much
to France