Around English with the IHT (again)

Here goes with another attempt to convince myself that I am reading the International Herald Tribune not just to keep myself awake on the Asakusa Line when the Japanese language newspapers or teaching books make my eyelids heavy, but am also learning something useful for my life. TEFL relevant links don’t exactly abound, but there have been a few choice pieces of the last couple of weeks to make me feel better after I slip into reading the gossip column:

There’s a nice piece on Hinglish, a language which we might need to add to our American English/ British English lessons if indeed “…more people speak English in South Asia than in Britain and North America combined…” and “…Hinglish… could soon become the most widely spoken form of English on earth”.

On the more teaching part of language teaching, there is a Syrian language school where students can choose their teachers by whether they wear a head scarf or not (so no more complaints about Japanese students thinking the quality of your suit is more important than the quality of your teaching please!) and yet another dubious survey comparing educational standards across countries and deciding Asians rule the world because they are good at maths.

An interesting thing about the Japanese and maths is that many people think the reason why the Japanese learn maths well and languages bad is that the rote learning style doesn’t suit languages. In fact, rote learning doesn’t suit maths either and way maths is taught in schools, especially primary schools, is much more like the discovery method of language learning than it is like Monty-Python-style Latin lessons. Rather than looking abroad for ideas on how to teach English better, all the Japanese have to do is look at the parts of their own education system that actually work and spread those ideas around.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 23rd, 2007 at 1:40 amand is filed under TESOL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.