The techie magazine WIRED http://www.wired.com/ is a stretch above me but I peek at it from time to time when I visit my local library. Here’s what caught my eye the other day:
“How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand” June 2008 by Michael Erard
It caught my eye because one of the subjects of the Clermont Blog is global education and international teaching. Any of you who work in the field know about the shifting sands of change ~ and to mix analogies ~ the tidal wave of new schools opening in China and the Middle East. We could truly be on the verge of international education’s golden era (drum roll, please).
However, the numbers are staggering. Now apparently the great masses of Chinese wish/need to learn English. From the article:
“Thanks to globalization, the Allied victories in World War II, and American leadership in science and technology, English has become so successful across the world that it's escaping the boundaries of what we think it should be. In part, this is because there are fewer of us: by 2020, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language.
Already, most conversations in English are between nonnative speakers who use it as a lingua franca. In China, this sort of free-form adoption of English is helped along by a shortage of native English-speaking teachers, who are hard to keep happy in rural areas for long stretches of time. An estimated 300 million Chinese — roughly equivalent to the total US population — read and write English. Given the number of people involved, Chinglish, as we shall call it is destined to take on a life of its own." Chinglish.
Yikes!
So, let’s help our new friends learn or improve their English. Here are some calculations.
“How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand” June 2008 by Michael Erard
It caught my eye because one of the subjects of the Clermont Blog is global education and international teaching. Any of you who work in the field know about the shifting sands of change ~ and to mix analogies ~ the tidal wave of new schools opening in China and the Middle East. We could truly be on the verge of international education’s golden era (drum roll, please).
However, the numbers are staggering. Now apparently the great masses of Chinese wish/need to learn English. From the article:
“Thanks to globalization, the Allied victories in World War II, and American leadership in science and technology, English has become so successful across the world that it's escaping the boundaries of what we think it should be. In part, this is because there are fewer of us: by 2020, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language.
Already, most conversations in English are between nonnative speakers who use it as a lingua franca. In China, this sort of free-form adoption of English is helped along by a shortage of native English-speaking teachers, who are hard to keep happy in rural areas for long stretches of time. An estimated 300 million Chinese — roughly equivalent to the total US population — read and write English. Given the number of people involved, Chinglish, as we shall call it is destined to take on a life of its own." Chinglish.
Yikes!
So, let’s help our new friends learn or improve their English. Here are some calculations.
300,000,000 learners of English =
2,000 students per mega-school =
150,000 schools =
25 students per class =
80 teachers per school =
2,000 students per mega-school =
150,000 schools =
25 students per class =
80 teachers per school =
80 teachers X 150,000 schools =
12,000,000 English/ESL teachers!Now there is a recruitment challenge! Easy to find? Why that’d be a piece of cake.
