Check out this wonderful cinema-quality advertisement from CCAA, the Brazilian chain of English language schools – the biggest English-teaching organization in South America in fact – with over 400,000 students.
The big-name actors (did you ever in your wildest dreams think you’d see Mike Tyson in a commercial about learning English?), sky-high production values and humor on display go some way towards helping us understand how big a business English is in South America. But what it also does is to afford a refreshing glimpse of how industry players in other parts of the world sometimes show a far more playful, creative and emotion-driven approach to communicating English proficiency as a goal, as compared with the usual “prepare for your TOEIC (or other standardized test) so you can get a job” pitch seen all too often in Europe and Asia.
Whatever you think of CCAA itself as a school, from a pure communications point of view we could do with a lot more of this type of marketing from the English-teaching industry. Muito bom!
As an entrepreneur in the online English language-learning business, I continue to be amazed at how the technology that underpins my livelihood – computers and the internet – has taken so much from the English language, appropriating it for itself, while contributing so little.
Previous media/technology waves gave us completely new terms like atomic, radio, television, transistors, and frequencies (but not “broadcast,” originally a farming term referring to how seed was distributed in a field).
Digital technology, on the other hand, has preferred to co-opt everyday words having nothing to do with technology, and turning them into metaphors which today are just as powerful and instantly recognized as the source term – sometimes more so. For young people (“digital natives”… here we go!) learning English, we may sooner or later need an etymological guide to help them remember that the words and expressions they use everyday in a technology context were once – and mostly still are – also related to real (“3D”) items in the physical world.
I must admit this may sound all a bit fuddy-duddy: after all, I am old enough to remember when a printer was a rather harried-looking man working a big, dangerous-looking machine; when a mouse was something you bought a cat to get rid of; when a port was something ships headed for to load or unload cargo, and when a dock was something in a port that ships tied up against to stop them floating away. Notebooks were for school and tablets were something Moses carried around and harassed everyone about. Life was simple.
Then came the late 1970’s and the Apple II and, with it, hardware and software that usurped the meanings of words I’d grown up with. Now I had to worry about clutter across two separate and very different desktops. I had to remember to empty two trash cans, and organize my folders and files in both the real world and the one in the grey box on my desk. I had to remember that “program” could equally well describe “Star Trek” as it could a bunch of lines of spreadsheet code; that a “cache” could be something used for more than hiding weapons; and that “floppies” (already obsolete) referred to more than just rabbit ears. Alas, I even began to occasionally suffer from multiple meanings of the word “virus.”
The coming of age of the internet just made things worse, lexis-wise. Spiders were no longer kings of the web. They moved down in station to become, rather, underpaid minions of the “search engines.” Pages and browsing jumped ship from magazines to websites; and navigation was no longer something you only did with a sextant. Lately the “web” has moved to the “cloud,” which is now seen as the best place to “stream” stuff from. Try buying something online, and you’ll see that banners are no longer made of fabric; skyscrapers are a lot smaller than they used to be, cookies are something that follow you around, and shopping carts lack both wire and wheels. People still roam around in search of “hot spots,” though. Just not the same kind. Paper-based dictionaries around the world are begging for mercy.
The latest band of linguistic Vikings to rape and pillage are the social networks. Facebook is the biggest culprit, corrupting perfectly good words such as “like,” “poke” and “tag” to the point that they now seem intrusive and rather menacing. It is assisted by that little blue juvenile delinquent, Twitter, who has managed to subvert tweets away from the birds and followers away from the gurus.
What a world! It’s a place where some people just won’t do Windows; where an Apple is worth more than an International Business Machine, and where even Java can’t help you keep awake. Can our English language learners bear the linguistic duplication overload? I don’t know. I think I need to go home and reboot (and I don’t mean a change of shoes).
Based on an original idea by a friend, technology observer and visionary Robert Tercek.
Spare a kind thought for poor Cheryl Cole, the former “Girl Aloud” from Newcastle whose Geordie accent proved too much for the television audience of the U.S. version of talent show The X Factor.
Having pulled every string and called in every favor one can imagine to get herself hired as a judge on the show, and thus stage the launch of her persona and career in America, the former footballer’s wife was unceremoniously dumped by the show’s broadcaster, Fox, just three weeks and four shows after her debut. The cause: Americans just couldn’t understand the way she spoke, to the extent of being booed by the studio audience whenever she opened her mouth and becoming tearful when asked to repeat herself. At one point, she asked a contestant where he was from and he though she was asking how old he was.
Of course, there were reportedly other reasons for the ejection as well (notably a failure to hit it off with the other female judge, queen bee Paula Abdul, and even, incredibly, a lack of on-screen chemistry with her mentor, Simon Cowell, who got her the job in the first place). But what settled it for Fox boss Mike Darnell was her inability to make herself understood in plain English.
A failure of mother-tongue to mother-tongue communication on this scale is a rare thing. Plenty of British, Australian, New Zealander and South African actors and actresses have made it big in America, from Hugh Grant and Hugh Laurie to Mel Gibson, Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman, and Charlize Theron. There’s no doubt that for an American audience, even a non-Commonwealth actress with a passable version of a RP or American Standard accent, say a Juliette Binoche or a Diane Kruger, would have passed the intelligibility test. Hell, even Charles Aznavour would have probably scraped through.
Cheryl’s debacle raises an interesting question with regards to what flavor of English is best taught to those learning it as a foreign or second language. The current politically correct stance is to say that national and regional accents don’t matter, that we’ll all be speaking Globish anyway so there’s no use worrying about cadences, rate and intonation. Indeed, I have tended to think in this direction as well, but am starting to realize that it has its limits. There do seem to be some “native speaker” English accents that put the speaker at a purely linguistic disadvantage when speaking to English language speakers from other climes, as Cheryl found to her great surprise. A few years ago, I worked for a small Scottish mobile gaming start-up and had to travel to Dunfermline, near Edinburgh, once a month. The company would send a driver to pick me up at the airport, and therein followed 35 minutes of very one-way conversation consisting of the driver talking about football, or his wife, or local property speculation, and myself nodding, making noises of agreement but understanding hardly a word. Had he been your average intermediate EFL learner from almost anywhere outside the country, I probably would have been able to balance out the dialogue considerably better.
I realize that this little blog post may be taken the wrong way by people with thick regionally accented English, and I apologize beforehand if any offence has been given (as someone born in New York City, I can appreciate the sentiment). I would simply like to posit, based on the tribulations of our unfortunate Geordie warbler, that not all English accents are equally easy to deploy in the wider world, and that learners of English, while they should no longer be forced to choose between the British English and American English religions under pain of excommunication, should nevertheless beware of patterning their language after those native speakers who have difficulty being understood by their own linguistic brethren. Toh-may-toh; toh-mah-toh, both fine. Too-may-ter: you might want to think about it.
I had the pleasure of listening to Robin Walker at IATEFL a couple weeks ago during his excellent talk on pronunciation, during which he addressed the fascinating topic of national and regional accents. He made many well observed points, one of which was that for communicative clarity it isn’t really necessary to adopt or parrot a specific “brand” accent, such as RP or General American.
His talk reminded me of when I started working for CNN in 1994, in London, at the time when it was sometimes still referred to as the “Chicken Noodle Network” because of its perceived provincialism. This was no doubt fueled, in Europe, by the fact that most of the network’s news readers and journalists at that time were still American. Shortly thereafter, CNN International got a new President, Chris Cramer, formerly the head of newsgathering at the BBC. Within days of his appointment, he set about transforming the look and feel of the international channel, bringing in not just British presenters but Australians, Canadians, Indians, Pakistanis as well. The early morning Asian news bulletin was fronted by local journalists based in Hong Kong; our mid-morning European news bulletin was co-presented from London and Berlin by, respectively, Fionnula Sweeny from Ireland and a German journalist with impeccable English, Bettina Luscher; and Charles Hodson, a London-based business journalist and an Englishman, was given more prominence in the evening business bulletin. We of course had Christiane Amanpour, the Anglo-Iranian reporter, filing stories from the world’s hot spots; and we even had a Puerto Rican weatherman and a Portuguese sports journalist.
Of all the “new blood” journalists transforming the image and sound of the channel, the one whose English I found to be the clearest, most neutral and most precise was that of Ralitsa Vassileva, a Bulgarian based in Atlanta of all places. Very soon, our viewing figures (and advertising business) began to rise; cable and satellite operators no longer treated us as a marginal channel; and the quality of guests coming in to the London studio for interviews jumped several notches. It was a wonderful place to work in those days; a perfect example of “world English” not interpreted as some neutered form of “globish” but rather composed of a rich kaleidoscope of English flavored by national accents, both native-speaker and non-native speaker. CNN International’s output is, still today, one of the best examples of clear, precise English unburdened by a consciousness of place or national identity, and is is this form of English which, by good fortune, many of today’s current and future world leaders and decision makers have grown up with. There will always be a place for regional accents, of course, and they are important in different ways (more cultural than linguistic), but to me the fixation of RP vs. GA and debates over which should be taught seem, increasingly, to be an anachronism from another era.
Good article by FT columnist Matthew Engel in today’s Daily Mail on the continued colonization of the King’s English by Americanisms of all type and stripe. What seems to have gotten the Engel’s particular goat as of late was the mention on a recent BBC Breakfast Program that something was clear “from the get-go.”
The sentiment of rebellion against reverse-colonization-by-language, for an Englishman, is understandable: here in France, resistance to Americanisms is seen by some politicians as a quasi-patriotic duty. But even Engel pretty much acknowledges that any resistance would be of Canutian futility, and that Americanisms have been permeating British Engish for a couple of centuries now. He does, however, regret that the imported terms tend to establish themselves and eventually replace the home-grown alternatives seamlessly, with no Hong Kong-like handover ceremony or at least an awareness by the island natives that they are trading traditional, time-honored language chunks for imported, Made In USA ones.
The issue of Americanisms has been covered at length (and breadth) in the ELT / EFL literature, and occasionally is corralled into the sub-topic of “idioms” by compilers of guides to such things. By now, most purveyors of Business English publications and courses recognize the importance of American sports-related expressions as essential to survival in multinational corporations (woe betide the young Scottish executive who does not recognize “strike two” as a warning that performance had better improve, sharpish).
In the past couple of decades, California-speak — -both the first wave, Valley-girl slang (totally awesome!) ; and the more recent second wave, geek-speak (fail!) — have added to the sourcing of Americanisms currently spreading across the globe. I am not certain, however, that the various guides / compendiums (compendia??) or “idiom of the day” columns or tweets do much good in helping learners of English achieve a better understanding of, or ability to reproduce these expressions correctly. They really need to be heard and demystified in context; as they are typically very context-sensitive things. Boasting about a “home run” following a successful product launch is not quite the same as using the term to describe a successful romantic encounter, particularly in polite company.
Personally, as an American having left the United States at age nine and having lived in London for 13 years as an adult, I often find myself in the opposite situation, guilty of innocently placing “Britishisms” in conversations with Americans which seem, to them, confusingly at odds with my faint East Coast accent. Most recently, I committed the faux pas of using the word “university” when talking about where I did my studies (Americans say “college” in casual conversation). I also can’t help sprinkling my discourse with references to “prats,” “oiks,” and “jobsworths,” terms that elicit embarassing silences of communicated non-understanding when used with my countrymen.
I had envisaged my first “personalized” Entertainment English blog post (I’ve written and posted a few regarding company news) as a pithy and erudite compendium of insightful observations on various aspects of EFL pedagogy and EFL-related education technology, freshly fueled by my presence at the ISTEK EFL Conference just concluded in Istanbul.
Instead, a five-day jackhammer headache that started March 19th resulted in my admission to the Neuro-Vascular unit of the Pitié-Salpetriere Hospital in Paris (Europe’s largest by surface area) for tests to see if I’d blown a head fuse. Six days and multiple tests later, it seems I have the non-threatening but oh-so-bothersome condition of cluster headaches, which I guess I will have to deal with whenever these decide to pay a visit.
My convalescence did however result in a number of thoughts tangentially related to language and technology that I’d like to share here.
Firstly, technology: in the first 36 hours at hospital, I did not have my iPhone with me and no access to a computer either. Needless to say, I felt like a castaway forced to rely on the alignment of the stars for information and counting coconuts for amusement. The evening of my second night in hospital, my co-founder Frederic Tibout was presenting English Attack! at the Tech Crunch conference in Paris, something my temporary status as a “digital excluded” did not even allow me to follow via Twitter. To make matters worse, at that stage I still harbored a hope of being released in time to speak at the ISTEK conference, and I desperately wanted to hone my presentation.
When, the next morning, the doctors told me that I wasn’t going anywhere soon, I began to accept my predicament and started to notice things around me that shed some new light on an old hobby horse of mine, the connection between the human brain and language. In the bed next to me was a stroke victim, about 60 years old, who was being attended to by a therapist. She seemed to be giving him a rather elementary lesson in French, until I understood that she was actually seeing if his post-stroke brain wiring was OK based on his ability to use language. Following some “repeat after me” exercises, she moved on to language categorization drills (list everything you can think of that starts with a “b”; now list every different type of fruit you can think of; etc). It was the first time I had seen the link between brain function and language as used in a medical examination, on a real hospital bed, as opposed to simply reading about it in academic texts.
The second observation that came to me was how the nurses, therapists, and attendants (not so much the very harried doctors) would use banter, jokes, gentle teasing and irony, both among themselves – to lighten the mood – and with patients, to make them more at ease. It led me to ask myself whether, when teaching a second language, we may be entirely underestimating the crucial role of humor and light-heartedness in easing communication and being accepted as an interlocutor among the native-speaking population. Perhaps all the mechanical gearing that we provide learners with – the lexis, the structure, even the set phrases and other chunks which we persuade ourselves constitute “functional” language – are in fact of limited use without the “communications grease” constituted by humor that allows the language to be inserted in a social context. I don’t know what we can do about that – I certainly shudder at the thought of humor being “taught” to earnest L2 learners – but we can certainly expose them to a lot of it, via film clips from authentic sources and so on. As teachers, we need to impart the importance of humor and banter as a vital component of how people not only communicate functionally with each other, but also co-exist with one another in a continuous, self-reinforcing loop designed to ease conversation and relationships along.
When I was at last mercifully was re-connected to my iPhone, I went straight to my TweetDeck application and expressed my regrets, hashtagged #ISTEK, at not being able to be at the Istanbul event as planned. And here I had yet another hospital-induced epiphany. For the first time in my life, dozens of people that I have never physically met, plus others I have only met once or twice in my life, were Tweeting me get-well-soon messages from around the world. It was very uplifting, very heart-warming, and very appreciated – a very novel, for me, demonstration that a “virtual” PLN can also be a very human community and express emotions as well as wisdom. I was also able to follow the main ISTEK events and the comments around them, which lessened — a bit — the frustration at not being there. Technology popped up again as a subject – in an evil way this time – as my TweetDeck app decided to automatically re-broadcast my initial #ISTEK tweet several times over the next couple of days, making me sound either like someone with terrible medium-term memory damage, or someone repeatedly eliciting pity and attention from his hospital bed: neither of them the effect I was striving for. I did however get a few additional “get well soon” messages following the repeat Tweets, no doubt to humor me in case I had indeed blown a brain gasket.
So, to conclude this inaugural post, which has turned out very different to the one I intended : (1) many, many thanks to all of you for your kind words via Twitter; (2) apologies again to Burcu Akyol for the missed speaking slot in Istanbul, and congratulations to her for what I hear was a fantastic event; (3) thanks to Mike Butcher for having us present at Tech Crunch Paris last week; (4) thanks to Kirsten Winkler at Eduqwest for her recent article on English Attack!, and, finally, (5) please feel free to sign up to our Beta Test Program and share your feedback on the site with us. That’s all folks: I guess I’ll be seeing many of you at IATEFL in Harrowgate next week.
English Attack! website