Don’t Insist on English

Don’t insist on English

Patricia Ryan is Ted’s speaker in 2010, she has been living and teaching in the Gulf for over 30 years and in that time she has seen a lot of changes now, the statistic is quite shocking and she talks about language loss and the globalization of English, 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.

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. 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 we're not a native speaker we have to pass a test. English teachers are the gatekeepers and we have to satisfy them first that our 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, the books are in English the journals are done in or in English but that is a self-fulfilling prophecy it feeds the English requirement.

We have a global language we need one, today more than ever but she 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 the speaker wants to remind us that 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.

At the last of speech, the speaker suggests, when a language dies we don't know what we lose with that language, let's celebrate diversity, mind our language, use it to spread great ideas.