5 maneiras de identificar se uma escola é realmente bilíngue

  

Atualmente, na área da Educação, a expressão educação bilíngue está em alta e, infelizmente, muitas escolas utilizam o termo inadequadamente por desconhecimento ou tática de marketing, afinal, qual é o pai que não gostaria de ter um filho fluente em dois idiomas?

Entretanto, não basta uma escola intitular-se bilíngue para, de fato, ser. Como atualmente não existe uma legislação específica que determine se uma escola é bilíngue, é importante que pais estejam cientes sobre como identificar se a escola se enquadra na definição.

1- Não basta escolas aumentarem a carga horária.
O ensino bilíngue consiste no ensino EM um segundo idioma e não DE um idioma, em diferentes graus de imersão. Ou seja, não basta a escola ter aulas de inglês todos os dias da semana para considerar-se bilíngue.

2- Não há tradução em educação bilíngue.
Quem faz tradução são cursos de idioma ou aulas de idiomas dentro de uma escola tradicional. Se seu filho demonstrar sempre que aprendeu que apple é maçã, que car é carro e que tree é árvore, pode tratar-se de um sinal de alerta. Em uma aula bilíngue, mesmo que as crianças que estejam em processo inicial de aprendizado perguntem à professora ou professor “mas o que é apple?”, o professor nunca responderá “maçã”. Ele poderá mostrar uma maçã e dizer: “This is an apple!” ou então “Apple is a delicious red fruit every child loves!”

3- A formação dos professores é diferenciada.
Outros fatores que os pais devem analisar são o currículo e a experiência dos professores. Em qualquer profissão isso é importante, mas escolas bilíngues sérias, além de recrutarem profissionais capacitados e experientes, investem na carreira de seus funcionários, com cursos de especialização, palestras e participação em convenções para atualização e aprimoramento no nível do ensino.
Professores bilíngues geralmente têm vivência no exterior, podem ou não ser nativos, mas são profissionais atualizados, que possuem não somente fluência no idioma, mas amplo conhecimento nas características sócio-culturais do país origem do idioma, conforme já mencionei aqui.

4- Não somente aulas são em Inglês, mas o ambiente como um todo.
Os melhores resultados na educação bilíngue são vistos quando instituições transformam a escola em um ambiente bilíngue, ou seja, não importa qual o nível de imersão utilizado, perguntas e respostas entre alunos e professores são feitas em inglês.
Inclusive quando professores conversam com pais, geralmente eles perguntam se os pais falam inglês e, caso a resposta seja positiva, as conversas também são em inglês.

Apesar de não ser uma regra, quando a própria equipe conversa em inglês entre si – e não somente na frente dos alunos – o processo de aprendizado é melhorado e o nível da qualidade do inglês dos professores aumenta. A regra é simples: quanto maior a utilização do idioma, melhor será sua qualidade.

5- Escolas são transparentes e não escondem seus métodos.
Geralmente as escolas genuinamente bilíngues oferecem um tour aos pais para averiguarem os itens citados acima, desta forma, em uma visita pela instituição é possível ver como as crianças conversam entre si, como funcionários conversam entre si e se os professores utilizam um nível mínimo de imersão.
Caso esta iniciativa não parta da escola, cabe aos pais solicitarem esta visita de observação e também buscar referências externas, como avaliações na Internet, opiniões de outros pais que tenham alunos na escola e conversas com crianças que estudem há alguns anos na escola. Crianças com um ou dois anos de estudo em escola bilíngue, mesmo que tenham apenas três anos de idade, já despertam espanto em adultos pela fluência com que falam neste segundo idioma.
Afinal, nenhuma propaganda fala mais alto que uma criança bilíngue.

Texto adaptado da Autora: Letícia Pimentel

  

18 Behaviors of Emotionally Intelligent People

 Emotional intelligence is a huge driver of success. It is the “something” in each of us that is a bit intangible. It affects how we manage behavior, navigate social complexities, and make personal decisions to achieve positive results.
1. You have a robust emotional vocabulary

All people experience emotions, but it is a select few who can accurately identify them as they occur. Our research shows that only 36 percent of people can do this, which is problematic because unlabeled emotions often go misunderstood, which leads to irrational choices and counterproductive actions.
2. You’re curious about people

It doesn’t matter if they’re introverted or extroverted, emotionally intelligent people are curious about everyone around them. This curiosity is the product of empathy, one of the most significant gateways to a high EQ. The more you care about other people and what they’re going through, the more curiosity you’re going to have about them.
3. You embrace change

Emotionally intelligent people are flexible and are constantly adapting. They know that fear of change is paralyzing and a major threat to their success and happiness. They look for change that is lurking just around the corner, and they form a plan of action should these changes occur.
4. You know your strengths and weaknesses

Emotionally intelligent people don’t just understand emotions; they know what they’re good at and what they’re terrible at. They also know who pushes their buttons and the environments (both situations and people) that enable them to succeed. Having a high EQ means you know your strengths and how to lean into and use them to your full advantage while keeping your weaknesses from holding you back.
5. You’re a good judge of character

Much of emotional intelligence comes down to social awareness; the ability to read other people, know what they’re about, and understand what they’re going through. Over time, this skill makes you an exceptional judge of character. People are no mystery to you. You know what they’re all about and understand their motivations, even those that lie hidden beneath the surface.
6. You are difficult to offend

If you have a firm grasp of who you are, it’s difficult for someone to say or do something that gets your goat. Emotionally intelligent people are self-confident and open-minded, which creates a pretty thick skin. You may even poke fun at yourself or let other people make jokes about you because you are able to mentally draw the line between humor and degradation.
7. You know how to say no (to yourself and others)

Emotional intelligence means knowing how to exert self-control. You delay gratification and avoid impulsive action. Research conducted at the University of California, San Francisco, shows that the more difficulty that you have saying no, the more likely you are to experience stress, burnout, and even depression. Saying no is a major self-control challenge for many people, but “No” is a powerful word that you should unafraid to wield. When it’s time to say no, emotionally intelligent people avoid phrases such as “I don’t think I can” or “I’m not certain.” Saying no to a new commitment honors your existing commitments and gives you the opportunity to successfully fulfill them.
8. You let go of mistakes

Emotionally intelligent people distance themselves from their mistakes, but do so without forgetting them. By keeping their mistakes at a safe distance, yet still handy enough to refer to, they are able to adapt and adjust for future success. It takes refined self-awareness to walk this tightrope between dwelling and remembering. Dwelling too long on your mistakes makes you anxious and gun shy, while forgetting about them completely makes you bound to repeat them. The key to balance lies in your ability to transform failures into nuggets of improvement. This creates the tendency to get right back up every time you fall down.
9. You give and expect nothing in return

When someone gives you something spontaneously, without expecting anything in return, this leaves a powerful impression. For example, you might have an interesting conversation with someone about a book, and when you see them again a month later, you show up with the book in hand. Emotionally intelligent people build strong relationships because they are constantly thinking about others.
10. You don’t hold grudges

The negative emotions that come with holding onto a grudge are actually a stress response. Just thinking about the event sends your body into fight-or-flight mode, a survival mechanism that forces you to stand up and fight or run for the hills when faced with a threat. When the threat is imminent, this reaction is essential to your survival, but when the threat is ancient history, holding onto that stress wreaks havoc on your body and can have devastating health consequences over time. In fact, researchers at Emory University have shown that holding onto stress contributes to high blood pressure and heart disease. Holding onto a grudge means you’re holding onto stress, and emotionally intelligent people know to avoid this at all costs. Letting go of a grudge not only makes you feel better now but can also improve your health.
11. You neutralize toxic people

Dealing with difficult people is frustrating and exhausting for most. But high-EQ individuals control their interactions with toxic people by keeping their feelings in check. When they need to confront a toxic person, they approach the situation rationally. They identify their own emotions and don’t allow anger or frustration to fuel the chaos. They also consider the difficult person’s standpoint and are able to find solutions and common ground. Even when things completely derail, emotionally intelligent people are able to take the toxic person with a grain of salt to avoid letting him or her bring them down.
12. You don’t seek perfection

Emotionally intelligent people won’t set perfection as their target because they know that it doesn’t exist. Human beings, by our very nature, are fallible. When perfection is your goal, you’re always left with a nagging sense of failure that makes you want to give up or reduce your effort. You end up spending time lamenting what you failed to accomplish and should have done differently instead of moving forward, excited about what you’ve achieved and what you will accomplish in the future.
13. You appreciate what you have

Taking time to contemplate what you’re grateful for isn’t merely the right thing to do; it also improves your mood by reducing the stress hormone cortisol (in some cases by 23 percent). Research conducted at the University of California, Davis, found that people who work daily to cultivate an attitude of gratitude experience improved mood, energy, and physical well-being. It’s likely that lower levels of cortisol play a major role in this.
14. You disconnect

Taking regular time off the grid is a sign of a high EQ because it helps you to keep your stress under control and to live in the moment. When you make yourself available to your work 24/7, you expose yourself to a constant barrage of stressors. Forcing yourself offline and even–gulp!–turning off your phone gives your body and mind a break. Studies have shown that something as simple as an email break can lower stress levels. Technology enables constant communication and the expectation that you should be available 24/7. It is extremely difficult to enjoy a stress-free moment outside of work when an email with the power to bring your thinking (read: stressing) back to work can drop onto your phone at any moment.
15. You limit your caffeine intake

Drinking excessive amounts of caffeine triggers the release of adrenaline, which is the primary source of a fight-or-flight response. The fight-or-flight mechanism sidesteps rational thinking in favor of a faster response to ensure survival. This is great when a bear is chasing you, but not so great when you’re responding to a curt email. When caffeine puts your brain and body into this hyper-aroused state of stress, your emotions overrun your behavior. Caffeine’s long half-life ensures you stay this way as it takes its sweet time working its way out of your body. High-EQ individuals know that caffeine is trouble, and they don’t let it get the better of them.
16. You get enough sleep

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of sleep to increasing your emotional intelligence and managing your stress levels. When you sleep, your brain literally recharges, shuffling through the day’s memories and storing or discarding them (which causes dreams) so that you wake up alert and clearheaded. High-EQ individuals know that their self-control, attention, and memory are all reduced when they don’t get enough–or the right kind–of sleep. So, they make sleep a top priority.
17. You stop negative self-talk in its tracks

The more you ruminate on negative thoughts, the more power you give them. Most of our negative thoughts are just that–thoughts, not facts. When it feels like something always or never happens, this is just your brain’s natural tendency to perceive threats (inflating the frequency or severity of an event). Emotionally intelligent people separate their thoughts from the facts in order to escape the cycle of negativity and move toward a positive, new outlook.
18. You won’t let anyone limit your joy

When your sense of pleasure and satisfaction are derived from the opinions of other people, you are no longer the master of your own happiness. When emotionally intelligent people feel good about something they’ve done, they won’t let anyone’s opinions or snide remarks take that away from them. While it’s impossible to turn off your reactions to what others think, you don’t have to compare yourself to others, and you can always take people’s opinions with a grain of salt. That way, no matter what other people are thinking or doing, your self-worth comes from within.

Time magazine – Feb. 16

Hamlet character and plot summary

Today there is another one of Shakespeare´s most famous play, Hamlet.

There have been more than fifty film versions of Hamlet since 1900. A few of the most famous are:

Hamlet (1948)
This version was directed by and starred the famous English actor, Sir Laurence Olivier and was the first British film to win an Oscar. Olivier adapted the play and reduced its length to about two hours.

Hamlet (1990)
Director Franco Zeffirelli made the decision to cast Mel Gibson, better known for his roles in action films like Mad Max and Lethal Weapon, as Hamlet. Again, the film adapted the play to make it an acceptable length for cinema.

Hamlet (1996)
Actor/director Kenneth Branagh assembled an all-star cast for thisunabridged version of the play. The film is often mentioned as one of the best Shakespeare film versions ever made.

As well as filmed versions of the play, there have been several films based on the story of Hamlet.

The Bad Sleep Well (Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru) (1960)
Famous Japanese director Akira Kurosawa directed this story of a young man joining a powerful company to try to expose the men responsible for the death of his father.

The Lion King (1994)
The king is murdered by his brother. The king’s ghost tells his son to challenge the wicked uncle. Does this sound familiar? Of course this Disney version does not have Hamlet’s tragic ending.

Watch the video

Here is a link to watch the video with subtitles about the story

https://view.vzaar.com/5655672/download

THE MAIN CHARACTERS

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Hamlet discovers that his father, the old King of Denmark, was murdered by his uncle, Claudius. Hamlet plans to kill Claudius in revenge, which he does at the end of the play. But Hamlet is wounded in the fight, and dies as well.

Claudius
Claudius murders his brother, the old king of Denmark, by putting poison in his ear. Claudius marries his dead brother’s wife, the queen. Claudius becomes king of Denmark himself. But Hamlet, Claudius’s nephew, finds out what he has done, and kills him.

Hamlet’s mother
Hamlet’s mother, the queen of Denmark, marries her brother-in-law, Claudius. She does not realise that Claudius murdered her husband. She dies by drinking poisoned wine.

Ophelia
Ophelia is Hamlet’s girlfriend. But Hamlet rejects her, and she kills herself.

Polonius
Polonius is King Claudius’s adviser, and is asked to spy on Hamlet. Hamlet kills him by accident.

Laertes
Laertes is Ophelia’s brother. He blames Hamlet for Ophelia’s suicide. At the end of the play, he fights and kills Hamlet. But he is wounded in the fight, and also dies.

© British Council

I hope you have enjoyed learning about it.

Thank you.

Shakespeare invented new words

Shakespeare 3

Nobody knows exactly how many words in the English we use everyday were invented by Shakespeare.

Some people have claimed that Shakespeare invented many thousands of words but a more generally accepted figure is 1,700.

As this National Geographic article explains, Shakespeare may have been the first person to use some words in writing or to popularise their use. Whether he ‘invented’ the words or not, he has certainly had a profound effect on English vocabulary.

Here are some of the words and phrases usually attributed to Shakespeare..

  • bedroom
  • blanket
  • fashionable
  • freezing
  • gossip
  • hostile
  • ladybird
  • lonely
  • manager
  • obscene
  • priceless
  • puke
  • undress
  • unreal
  • watchdog
  • pomp and circumstance
  • the be-all and end-all
  • flesh and blood

An internet search for ‘words invented by Shakespeare’ will bring up many thousands of results. Do a search and see which other words you can find to add to the list.

Watch this video: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/explore-english-shakespeare/1/steps/59163?utm_campaign=Share+Links&utm_medium=futurelearn-open_step&utm_source=google-plus

© British Council

Facts about Shakepeare’s life

  

 Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in London. However, much about his life remains uncertain or mysterious. There are even some people who think he didn’t write the plays!
Here are some of the things we do know about Shakespeare:

  1. Shakespeare was born and died on the same day, 23 April.
  2. When Shakespeare got married, he was 18. His wife was 26 – and pregnant.
  3. One of Shakespeare’s relatives was arrested for plotting against Queen Elizabeth I, and was executed.
  4. Shakespeare acted in his own plays. For example, in Hamlet, he played the ghost of Hamlet’s father.
  5. Shakespeare performed as an actor in front of Queen Elizabeth I, and after her death in 1603, in front of King James I.
  6. The Globe Theatre in London burned down in 1613, when a large gun set fire to the roof during a performance of Shakespeare’s play Henry VIII. It was rebuilt.
  7. Shakespeare spelled his own name in several different ways, including ‘Shakspere’ and ‘Shakspeare’.
  8. It is known that Shakespeare wrote at least 38 plays. It is possible that he also wrote others which have been lost.
  9. Anagrams of the name William Shakespeare include ‘I am a weakish speller’ and ‘I’ll make a wise phrase’.
  10. According to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Shakespeare introduced nearly 1,000 new words to the English language.

© British Council

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Read these five clauses from the Declaration of Human Rights.

Which one do you think is the most important?

Do we have them in our country?

  • The Right to Equality. We are all born free. We all have our own thoughts and ideas. We should all be treated in the same way.
  • The Right to Trial. If we are put on trial this should be in public. The people who try us should not let anyone tell them what to do.
  • The Right to Marriage and Family. Every grown-up has the right to marry and have a family if they want to. Men and women have the same rights when they are married, and when they are separated.
  • The Right to Freedom of Thought. We all have the right to believe in what we want to believe, to have a religion, or to change it if we want.
  • The Right to Education. Education is a right. Primary school should be free. We should learn about the United Nations and how to get on with others. Our parents can choose what we learn.

© British Council

Let´s review the Comparatives and Superlative Adjectives

Comparative adjectives are used to compare two things or people to each other.
•A bus is bigger than a car.
•Bill is older than Harry.

Superlative adjectives are used to compare one member of a group to the whole group.
We use the with a superlative adjective.
•The Nile is the longest river in the world.
•In our class Maria is the oldest and Charlie is the youngest.

FORMATION
Form Adjective Comparative Superlative
One syllable : long longer than the longest
(add : -er / -est) nice nicer than the nicest
hot hotter than the hottest
Two or more syllables : famous more famous than the most famous
(add: more-less/most-least
before the adjective)		 interesting less interesting than the least interesting
practical more practical than the most practical
Two syllables ending in -y : funny funnier than the funniest
(the ‘y’ becomes ‘i’
before -er/-est)		 easy easier than the easiest
happy happier than the happiest
Irregular Adjectives : good better than the best
bad worse than the worst
much/many more than the most
little less than the least
far farther/further than the farthest/furthest

N.B. :   Adjectives ending with a vowel and a consonant double the consonant
big  –  bigger  –  biggest
except when the consonant is ‘w’ or ‘y’ :
new – newer – newest.

Now, let´s practice!

First, do the three online quizzes with correction bellow. When you have finished, prepare an exercise similar to the ones you have just done and share it with your peers.

1-  http://englishteststore.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1459:english-grammar-comparisons-test-001&catid=165&Itemid=321

2- http://www.learn-english-today.com/lessons/lesson_contents/exercises/adjectives-com-super_quiz1.html

3-  http://esl.about.com/od/intermediatelevelquizzes/a/comparative_superlative_quiz.htm

If you need any help you can send me a text message or use Google.

Good luck and Happy Learning.

The Future of English

Here is a long but good text from an online course I am taking at University of Southampton. It is about the changes in English as a Lingua Franca and what to expect in the future.

What are your expectations Share with us.

A piece in the EL Gazette in October 2001 (p. 3) under the heading ‘It’s now official: English is hard’ announced: ‘you can now motivate your students by telling them that English is the hardest European language to learn’. It went on to report a study carried out at the University of Dundee, Scotland, which compared the literacy levels of British primary school children with those from fourteen European countries (Finland, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Norway, Iceland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Denmark). Children with one year’s schooling had been presented with lists of common words in the mother tongue. It was found that all but the native English speakers were able to read 90 per cent of the word correctly, while the British children could only manage 30 per cent. The researchers concluded that the gap between the English-speaking children and those from the other fourteen countries was the result of difficulties intrinsic to the English language. And at a conference of the Spelling Society, held at Coventry University in the UK in June 2008, in which new research by the literacy scholar Marsha Bell was reported, the same point was made again, with English being described as the worst of all the alphabetical languages for children to learn.

Rather than ‘motivate’ learners, such difficulties could, if widely publicised, discourage them from attempting to learn the language at all. The difficulties divide into three main categories: orthographic, phonological, and grammatical. Spelling difficulties are of various kinds although all relate to the fact that English orthography can often not be predicted from the way in which a word is pronounced. There are, for example, several ways of pronouncing the sequences ‘ea’ (e.g. as in ‘bead’, ‘head’, ‘bear’, ‘fear’, ‘pearl’), and ‘ough’ (e.g. as in ‘cough’, ‘bough’, ‘tough’, ‘dough’, ‘through’, ‘thorough’). A large number of words contain silent letters, such as those which begin with a silent ‘p’ or ‘k’ (‘psychology’, ‘pneumonia’, ‘pseud’, ‘knife’, ‘know’, etc.), another group which end with silent ‘b’ (‘comb’, ‘thumb’, ‘limb’, ‘climb’, etc.), and a third with a silent medial letter (e.g. ‘whistle’, ‘castle’, ‘fasten’, ‘muscle’). Other problems are doubled consonants (e.g. ‘committee’, ‘accommodation’, ‘occasional’, ‘parallel’), and the spelling of unstressed vowels (e.g. the underlined vowels in ‘woman’, ‘persuade’, ‘condition’, ‘success’, ‘infinity’, all of which are pronounced as schwa in RP and many other, but not all, native accents.

As regards pronunciation, difficulties relate particularly to English vowels. Not only does native English have more vowel phonemes than many other languages (twenty in RP as compared with, for instance, five in Spanish and Italian), but it has a particularly large number of diphthongs (eight in RP) and makes extensive use of the central vowel, schwa, in unstressed syllables regardless of the spelling – as was demonstrated in the previous paragraph. In addition, many accent varieties of English including RP andGeneral American (GA) make copious use of weak forms in connected speech. That is, schwa replaces the vowel quality in words such as prepositions (‘to’, ‘of’, ‘from’), pronouns (‘her’, ‘them’, etc.), auxiliaries (‘was’, ‘are, ‘has’, etc.), articles (‘a’, ‘the’) and the like. There are also several other features of connected speech such as elision (loss of sounds), assimilation (modifications to sounds), and liaision (linking of sounds across words). All these aspects of English pronunciation conspire to make it more difficult both to produce and to understand than the pronunciation of many other languages.

Grammatically, difficulties relate very particularly to verb forms and functions. Firstly, English has a large number of tenses all of which have both simple and continuous aspect (present, past, perfect, past perfect, future, future perfect) and none of which have a straightforward link with time reference. Second, there are many modal verbs (‘may’, ‘will’, ‘can’, ‘should’, ‘ought to’, etc.) each with its own problems of form and function. Third, one of the most problematic areas for learner of English is that ofmulti-word (or phrasal) verbs such as ‘get’ (‘get up’, ‘get down’, ‘get on’, ‘get off’, ‘get over’, ‘get through’, etc.) and ‘take’ (‘take up’, ‘take on’, ‘take off’, ‘take out’, etc.). Each has several meanings both literal and metaphorical, along with complicated rules as to whether the verb and particle can or must be separated for an object, depending on whether the verb is classed as adverbial or prepositional.

Because of these difficulties, it would not be surprising if there was eventually a move to abandon English in favour of an international language with fewer complicating linguistic factors along with a slightly les obvious colonialist discourse attached to it (although we see strand 6 [in the book] for another possibility, i.e. that users of ELF will adapt English to suit their own lingua franca purposes rather than accept that they should acquire and use a native version). Spanish appears to be a major contender, with its simpler pronunciation, spelling and verb systems, and its increasing influence in both the EU and America. As Moreno-Fernandez and Otero (2008: 81) point out

The sum of native Spanish speakers and non-native Spanish speakers plus those learning the language gives a total figure of 438.9 million Spanish speakers according to the estimations based on the latest consolidated census information and on other sources such as the Cervantes Institute.

And according to an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement (14 December 2001, p.23), ‘Spanish is … the second international language of business as its importance in the United States grows’. In Europe, there is a massive increase in demand for Spanish, with the number of people travelling to Spain and sitting Spanish-language examinations rising by 15 per cent a year, according to the Instituto Cervantes (Spanish equivalent of the British Council). In addition, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Mexico are becoming increasingly popular tourist destinations, while the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language is spreading to many parts of the world. In this process, it is being ‘overtly promoted by the Spanish government as part of its aim to strengthen and enhance a pan-Hispanic community across the world’ as well as ‘a desire to consolidate a power bloc with some claim to compete with the overwhelming march of global English’ (Mar-Molinero 2006: 82). As Mar-Molinero continues, ‘[t]he Spanish language learning/teaching industry is thus a flourishing and expanding one’ and ‘whilst smaller in scale, in many senses it resembles the enormous EFL/ELT industry’.

Meanwhile, in the US there were found to be 50.5 million native speakers of Spanish in the 2010 census (see unit C1 [in the book]), making this the second largest L1 group in the US after English, and comprising almost a fifth of the total population. Already non-Hispanic whites are in a minority in California and there are also particularly large numbers of Hispanics in Arizona and Texas. However, it is not only a case of numerical increase: the US Hispanic community appears also to be experiencing ‘a resurgence of cultural pride and confidence’ (The Guardian, 8 March 2001, p.12), while politicians are beginning to pay far greater attention to the Hispanic community’s needs than they have done hitherto. Meanwhile, Latinos such as the Puerto Rican Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez have, respectively, topped world pop music charts and won important film awards, and still more recently, the Latin music of artists such as Daddy Yankee, Don Omar, and Molotov has been achieving worldwide popularity (see Mar-Molinero 2008: 39-40).

Further evidence that English may eventually give way to another language as the world’s lingua franca is provided by the internet. As Crystal (2006: 229-231) points out

[The Web] was originally a totally English medium – as was the Internet as a whole, given its US origins. But with the Internet’s globalization, the presence of other languages has steadily risen. In the mid-1990s, a widely quoted figure was that just over 80 per cent of the Net was in English.

However, as he goes on to say,

The estimates for languages other than English have steadily risen since then, with some commentators predicting that before long the Web (and the Internet as a whole) will be predominantly non-English, as communications infrastructure develops in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America.

He also cites a 2004 Global Reach survey which found that 64.8 per cent of a total online population of 801.4 million was in countries where English is not the mother tongue, and notes that Chinese is expected by most sources to become the majority language of internet users. And a few years later, this seems even more probable. In a table showing the top ten internet languages at the start of 2010 (Internet World Stats 2010, in Crystal 2011: 79), although English still has the largest number of internet users (496 million users, 27.5 per cent of all internet users), Chinese is catching up fast (408 million users, 22.6 per cent of all internet users).

The rapid increase in the amount of Chinese on the internet (1,162 per cent growth between 2000 and 2009, as contrasted with English’s 252 per cent growth) leads Crystal to believe it will soon replace English in the leading position on the internet. On the other hand, Graddol’s earlier point that ‘there remains more English than is proportionate to the first languages of users’ (2006:44) is still true. In other worls, a large amount of internet use in English is by NNESs [non-native English speakers] rather than NESs [native English speakers]. And we cannot discount the possibility that a sizeable proportion of NNESs may continue to use English on the internet as well as, or instead of, their L1, especially for intercultural communication.

Thus, although it is possible that English-medium internet use has passed its peak, it is by no means certain. Meanwhile, the implications for both the spread and type of English used in other forms of communication are as yet far from clear.

References

Crystal, D. (2006) Language and the Internet. 2nd edition. Cambridge: CUP

Crystal, D. (2011) Internet Linguistics. London: Routledge.

Mar-Molinero, C. (2006) ‘The European Linguistic legacy in a global era: linguistic imperialism, Spanish, and the Instituto Cervantes,’ in Mar-Molinero, C. and Stevenson, P. (eds) Language Ideologies, Policies and Practices. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mar-Molinero, C. (2008) ‘Subverting Cervantes: language authority in global Spanish,’ International Multilingual Research Journal 2: 27-47

Moreno-Fernandez, F. and Otero, J. (2008) ‘The status and future of Spanish among the main international languages: quantitative dimensions,’ International Multi-lingual Research Journal 2: 67-83

Further information

Jenkins, J. (2015) Global Englishes. A resource book for students, 3rd edition, Abingdon, GB: Routledge

Further free resources from ‘Global Englishes’ by Jennifer Jenkins

Find this book (with a discount of 20% for users of this course, enter codeGEFL1 at checkout) on the Routledge website

© University of Southampton / British Council 2015