A Global, Community Building Language?
نویسنده
چکیده
Although long championed, a global language has not come to fruition despite considerable efforts. Many fear that such a language would undermine the particularistic, identity-constituting primary languages of local and national communities. These concerns can be addressed at least in part by utilizing a two-tiered approach in which efforts to protect primary languages are intensified at the same time that a global language is adopted as an additional language and not as a substitutive one. Although the U.N. or some other such global organization could, theoretically, choose a language to serve as the global language, English is already (and increasingly) occupying this position as a result of the colonial period and post-colonial developments. In this respect, English is compared to the development of the railroad system in the United States, which although introduced at considerable human costs by overpowering corporations, later became an integral part of the economy and society. Whether English should be adopted as a second language, or as a third or fourth one, is heavily influenced by the level of difficulty involved—the labor to fluency ratio—in acquiring a new language.
منابع مشابه
Reflective Teaching in the Context of a Video Club: Nurturing Professional Relationships and Building a Learner Community
The purpose of this study was to examine how four teachers used the seven processes of videotape analysis to develop an analytic approach and reflective thinking towards their teaching. The study was organized within video clubs and was used to describe the interactions among four teachers about their experiences at a language institute. Data were gathered through videotaped recordings of lesso...
متن کاملHow Can a Global Social Support System Hope to Achieve Fairer Competiveness?; Comment on “A Global Social Support System: What the International Community Could Learn From the United States’ National Basketball Association”
Ooms et al sets out some good general principles for a global social support system to improve fairer global competitiveness as a result of redistribution. This commentary sets out to summarize some of the conditions that would need to be satisfied for it to level up gradients in inequality through such a social support system, using the National Basketball Association (NBA) example as a point ...
متن کاملDiscourse Community Collocations and L2 Writing Content
Taking the position that writing can be an important skill to foster knowledge building pedagogy, this article explores vocabulary as a supportive tool for this purpose. Having this in mind, a compilation of conceptually loaded vocabularies pertaining to seven discourse communities was developed, two of which were given to a group of L2 writers to investigate the implications of phraseology for...
متن کاملOntocop: A Virtual Community of Practice to Create Ontology of Information Science (IS)
science (IS). Ahlam Sawsaa, Joan Lu [email protected] [email protected] School of computing and Engineering –Huddersfield University Abstract Collaboration via virtual communities of practice (VCops) is one of the most important future strategies for the strengthening of global efforts for a collaboration environment. This paper presents building a virtual community of practice (Ontocop) as knowl...
متن کاملLooking at Globalization of English in the Context of Internationalism
The present study is an attempt to provide a current synopsis of World Englishes within globalized communities, as well as theoretical and applied feasibility of global linguistic features of English as an International Language (EIL). To do so, first, three main reactions against the spread of English by scholars around the world are discussed. Then, the possibility of describing and teaching ...
متن کامل