English, the Language of Common Communication and Unity...

English, the Language of Common Communication and Unity… by David W. Morris Tags: TOEFL, Sons of David Foundation, Communication

As the world is ever more rapidly becoming a global community as a result of advanced technology, it is increasingly necessary to have one common language. Many of the world’s problems come from the inability to communicate. In today’s society it has become necessary to learn your mother tongue and a second common auxiliary language to exchange a few words, consult and solve problems with those of other cultures and other languages.

English is quickly becoming that language of choice. The Enoch Olinga College has found that many of our students do not have the Basic English skills necessary to adequately use the language to enter a US university degree stream. To this end, ENOCIS has designed a series of English preparatory classes to aid students to prepare for the TOEFL Exam, a requirement to earn an US university degree.

The Enoch Olinga College, (ENOCIS) has applied for a grant from the Sons of David Foundation, (SOD) a private Latin American foundation for the advancement of education amongst the underserved peoples of the world. SOD has agreed to provide full scholarships to qualified Spanish speaking students to go through the three part course.  For each qualifying student this represents a more than $2000 USD scholarship. The only expense incurred by the student is a small registration fee and the cost of printing and shipping of the certificate of completion for each level of the course. For more information you may go to the Spanish ENOCIS site “Clases en Ingles”.

As the preparatory program evolves ENOCIS will add a language chat room to practice your skills, a TOEFL Pre Examination Program and English language preparatory programs in Vietnamese and Chinese.

English, now the global language, drifts from its roots

Tags: Globalism, Anglophone, TOEFL, Globish, Common Languages

By Noam Cohen the New York Times

Published: August 6, 2006

When the Iranian president proposed last month to ban English words like "helicopter," "chat" and "pizza," Iran became the latest country to try to fight the spread of English as a de facto global language.

But with interest in English around the world growing stronger, not weaker - stoked by American cultural influences and advertising, the increasing numbers of young people in developing countries and the spread of the Internet, among other factors - there are some linguists and others who say: Why fight it? Instead, the argument goes, English, particularly the simpler form of the language used by most nonnative speakers, should be embraced.

"It's a lost cause to try to fight against the tide," said Jacques Lévy, who studies globalism at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and is a native French-speaker. English, he added, is just the latest in a line of global tongues. "It could have been another language; it was Greek, then Latin, French, now it is English."

In a report for the British Council, a government body that promotes English culture around the world, a linguist, David Graddol, cites figures saying that 500 million to a billion people speak English now, as either a first or second language.

Under a plan he calls the World English Project; countries would recognize the advantage of English as a global tool and introduce English instruction earlier in schools. As a result, he writes, there could be "two billion new speakers of English within a decade."

But the danger is that proper English will be overwhelmed by the English of nonnative speakers, he acknowledged.

"This is not English as we have known it, and have taught it in the past as a foreign language," he wrote. "It is a new phenomenon, and if it represents any kind of triumph it is probably not a cause of celebration by native speakers."

Leave it to a native of France - a country that itself in the 1990s briefly required that 3,000 English words be replaced by French ones - to suggest that this simpler English be codified.

Jean-Paul Nerrière, a retired vice president of IBM, calls his proposal Globish. It uses a limited vocabulary of 1,500 words, taken from the Voice of America, among other sources, which can be put together clumsily to express more complicated thoughts. Little concern is given to the complexities of grammar, and he proposes that speakers of Globish say the same thing in different ways to make up for difficulties in pronunciation.

The typical conversation in Globish could be grating to a native speaker, but get the job done between, say, a Kenyan and a Korean trying to navigate a business deal or asking for help at the airport check-in. For nephew, there is "son of my brother/sister"; kitchen is "room in which you cook your food"; chat is "speak casually to each other." Pizza is pizza, however, because Globish considers it to be an international term, like taxi or police.

"Globish is not a language, it will never have a literature, it does not aim at conveying a culture, values," Nerrière wrote in an e-mail message. "Globish is just a tool, practical, efficient, limited on purpose."

Nerrière said he got the idea from his travels in Asia while working for IBM. "I observed that my communication with my Japanese or Korean colleagues was much easier, much more efficient, and much less inhibited than what I could observe between them and the American associates traveling with me," he said.

Globish is something that an American would need to learn as much as a non-English speaker, he said, although a book he has written about the idea is not available in America. (There are French, Korean, Italian and Spanish versions.) He said he was working on software to identify words that fall outside the vocabulary limits and propose substitutes from Globish writing.

As the world learns to deal with the domination of English, whether through Globish or the more-intensive language training proposed by the British Council report, it is native English speakers who could be in need of extra preparation. Though English fluency can seem like the key to the kingdom today, in the future, if there are two billion people who can speak English, the English speaker without knowledge of another language will be at a disadvantage.

Lévy said he liked Globish's idea of reminding native English speakers that they cannot assume that the entire world is as fluent as they are. "The global English world is not a world where Anglophone people speak the same as they would at home," he said. "We have to force native English speakers to limit the use of these tools."

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