thank you I know what you're thinking you think I've lost my way and somebody's going to come on the stage in a minute and Guide Me Gently back to my feet I get that all the time in Dubai come to visit the children how long are you staying well actually I hope for a while longer yet I have been living and teaching in the Gulf for over 30 years and and in that time I have seen a lot of changes now that statistic is quite shocking and I want to talk to you today about language
loss and the globalization of English I want to tell you about my friend who was teaching English to adults in Abu Dhabi and one fine day she decided to take them into the garden to teach them some nature vocabulary but it was she who ended up learning all the Arabic words for the local plants as well as their uses medicinal uses Cosmetics cooking herbal how did those students get all that knowledge of course from their grandparents and even their great-grandparents it's not it's not necessary to tell you how important 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 I don't know but I do know that I've seen a lot of changes when I first came out to the gulf I came to Kuwait in the days when it was still a hardship post actually not that long ago that is a little bit too early but nevertheless I was recruited by the British Council along with about 25 other teachers and
we were the first non-muslims to teach in the state schools there in Kuwait we were brought to teach English because the government wanted to modernize the country and to empower the citizens through education and of course the UK benefited from some of that lovely oil wealth okay now this is the major change that I've seen how 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 and why not after all the best education 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 you're not a native speaker you have to pass a test now can it be right to reject the student on linguistic ability alone perhaps you have a computer scientist who's a genius would he need the same language as a lawyer for example well I don't think so we English teachers
reject them all the time we put a stop sign and we stop them in their tracks they can't pursue their dream any longer till they get English now let me put it this way if I met a monolingual Dutch speaker who had the cure for cancer would I stop him from entering my British University I don't think so but indeed that is exactly what we do we English teachers are The Gatekeepers and you have to satisfy us first that your English is good enough now it can be dangerous to give too much power to another
segment of society maybe the barrier would be too uh Universal okay but I hear you say what about the research it's all in English so the books are in English the the journals are done are in English but that is a self-fulfilling prophecy it feeds the English requirement and so it goes on I ask you what happened to translation if you think about the Islamic golden age there was lots of translation then they translated from Latin and Greek into Arabic into Persian and then it was translated on into the Germanic languages of Europe and the
romance languages and so light Shone upon the dark ages of Europe now don't get me wrong I am not against teaching English whole English teachers out there I love it that we have a global language we need one today more than ever but I am against using it as a barrier do we really want to end up with 600 languages and the main one being English or Chinese we need more than that where do we draw the line this system equates intelligence with the knowledge of English which is quite arbitrary and I want to remind
you that the the Giants upon whose shoulders today's intelligencia 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 and lots of tests of English and millions and millions of students do take these tests every year now you might think
you and me those fees aren't fad they're okay but they are prohibitive to so many millions of poor people so immediately we're rejecting them brings to mind a headline I saw recently education The Great Divide now I get it I understand why people would want to focus on English they want to give their children the best chance in life and to do that they need a western education because of course the best jobs go to people out of the western universities that I put on earlier it's a circular thing okay let me tell you a
story about two scientists two English scientists they were doing an experiment to do with genetics and the four Limbs and the hind limbs of animals but they couldn't get the results they wanted they really didn't know what to do until Along came a German scientist who realized that they were using two words for fall limb and hindlim whereas genetics does not differentiate and neither does German so Bingo problem solved if you can't think a thought you are stuck but if another language can think that thought then by cooperating we can achieve and learn so much
more my daughter came to England from Kuwait she had studied Science and Mathematics in Arabic at an Arabic medium school she had to translate it into English at her grammar school and she was the best in the class at those subjects which tells us that when students come to us from abroad we may not be giving them enough credit for what they know and they know it in their own language when a language dies we don't know what we lose with that language this is I don't know if you saw it on CNN recently they
gave the heroes award to a young Kenyan Shepherd boy who couldn't study at night in his village like all the village children because the kerosene lamp it had smoke and it damaged his eyes and anyway there was never enough kerosene because what does a dollar a day buy for you so he invented a cost-free solar lamp and now the children in his village get the same grades at school as the children who have electricity at home and when when he received to the board he said these lovely words the children can lead Africa from what
it is today a Dark Continent to a light continent a simple idea but it could have such far-reaching consequences people who have no light whether it's physical or metaphorical cannot pass our exams and we can never know what they know let us not keep them and ourselves in the dark let us celebrate diversity mind your language use it to spread great ideas thank you very much Supreme
