Robert Patnicroft’s letter (Saturday, 11 June 2005) made absurd reading.
He seems unaware that Thai students find any strong accent confusing. Some Indian accents (and there are many aside from those caricatured on TV or in the movies) are difficult to understand but so are many British, American and the typical Australian one too.
What the Thai authorities should be concentrating on is hiring educated teachers with neutral or “international accents”.
To state that the quality of teaching will deteriorate if teachers from the subcontinent are hired, smacks of racism. I am sure that he is aware that many of the westerners teaching in Thailand are semi-literate or poorly educated and have managed to get jobs as teachers solely because the Thais have a complex and look up to anybody, especially a white man, who knows a little more English than they do. In my opinion, hiring teachers from the subcontinent would improve the level of education and ensure that students in Thailand are not shortchanged. One of the main reasons for the poor standards of English in the country is that the Thais have not been very discerning about the quality of the people they hire, very often choosing people who would be unemployable anywhere else in the world.
Further, Mr Patnicroft states that it is an indictment of the level of funding if the educational system cannot afford native speakers of English. This clearly shows that he does not know the meaning of native speaker. A native speaker of English would be somebody whose principal or sole language is English. Some educationists define it as the language one speaks before the age of seven. In either case, there are millions of such people in India.
I wonder if Mr Panticroft is aware that an increasing number of teachers from the sub-continent are being recruited to teach in the U.S, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. And if he cares to switch on some of the international news channels on TV, he will find many newsreaders from the subcontinent.
It seems to me, that Mr Panticroft is worried that the days are numbered for those westerners, who with little or no skills, have managed to dupe themselves into jobs as “teachers” of English.
(Published in the Bangkok Post, 16 June 2005)
COMMENTS
Jan
Couldn’t agree with you more on this one.
However, I am certain, that this applies not only to Thailand but to most other Asian countries as well, especially Japan, China and Korea, just to name a few. Globalisation and the dominance of English has somehow given many cause for concern and a reliance on so called “native English speakers”.
Jansan
Jan
I would very much like to share this discourse with your other readers:
http://timesofindia.indiati…
Jansan
Devinder
You are spot on. Very often teachers who are non-native speakers of the language make better teachers because they can relate to the difficulties students face in learning English. If teaching pronunciation is a problem the there is no shortage of tapes and other listening material in the market
Devinder
Trophime D’Souza
I could write volumes on this topic…and will perhaps eventually do. I’ve now been around on this England-USA circuit rubbing shoulders with ‘qualified’, ‘half-qualified’ and ‘poorly-qualified’ academics who parade ‘English’ and really leave a lot to be desired in terms of knowledge or delivery. But the British Pound is strong and the American Dollar still holds sway, with the Euro fast catching up and the Australian and Canadian Dollars travelling places in those ‘western’ concentric circles. Somewhere along the line ‘colour’ interferes and then the image gets blurred…
Colour takes over and you are just made to believe!!!
Money and colour are two dangerous bed-fellows, but strangely today they dominate a world of show; not too many days back, our own great ‘Ponting’ made quite a show of ‘coloured’ aggression, and he’s nearly got away with it!
Language is a skill, an art. it is not related to any one species. the sub-continent speakers (you have rightly pointed out) would perhaps bring in education, and English alongside. Many of our ‘bright-coloured’ brethren perhaps only get the flip side of the need.
More on this another time…heaps of experiences to recount. but lest you should generalise….there are some good ones, and some really good ones, among all that host of experimenters…who almost by accident claim affinity to the ‘native English’ clan.
I’d like to write more about also how Indian English should move forward with improved usage and diction. Maybe use more of ‘Cobuild’ and ‘Daniel Jones’ and less of ‘desi’ experiments.
CNN-IBN and NDTV need a makeover in language. I’d be willing to help out.
Trophime D’Souza
Cert TESOL, Dip TESL, LTCL (Sp. Dr), MA (Lit), BA. Hons. (E.Lang)
trouza@yahoo.co.uk
Troy
I think another few points to add to this debate are the questions of, “Why are the students learning English”, and “What is English?” They could sound like absurd questions, but in fact they aren’t.
The first point regarding the WHY is extremely important. Are the students learning English in order to travel to an English country, and in that case which? Are they learning English for business purposes, and in this case, who will they be using their English with? Americans? Indians? Japanese, Italians? In all of these cases, in order to learn expediently, should the students therefore be exposed to the style of English spoken in their target area, or should they be taught a more international English?
Which leads me to my next point, what exactly is English? A mix of languages that was given birth to on a very small island and then exported overseas. Native and proficient speakers alike know the inherent flexibility that exists in English, there is no official academy that dictates what is correct English or not and even the Oxford dictionary appears to be loosening its mothball ridden criteria, though surely more for economic reasons than academic.
Prejudice against speakers of one style of English doesn’t only exist in Asia but here in Europe where I teach as well. I constantly come across learners with the ingrained idea that for some reason British English is the ‘real’ English. What does this mean? That hundreds of millions of people using the language around the world are somehow using a pirated version?
My point being, the English that should be taught is the one that the particular teacher uses and is most comfortable with. Learners only stand to benefit from being exposed to the broad spectrum that is English and hopefully motivate them with the realization that it is indeed the world’s language now. Debates around this topic will then hopefully migrate to the more important issues that affect the English teaching profession, those of qualifications and methodology. A native speaker is not a teacher for the simple fact that s/he speaks the language. A teacher is someone with the tools to guide learners with the most efficiency possible.
Troy
© Percy Aaron
Wow Laos 