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posted by martyb on Tuesday August 11 2020, @04:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the intelligence!=wisdom dept.

The Conversation:

The love of all things English begins at a young age in non-English-speaking countries, promoted by pop culture, Hollywood movies, fast-food brands, sports events and TV shows.

Later, with English skills and international education qualifications from high school, the path is laid to prestigious international universities in the English-speaking world and employment opportunities at home and abroad.

But those opportunities aren't distributed equally across socioeconomic groups. Global education in English is largely reserved for middle-class students.

This is creating a divide between those inside the global English proficiency ecosystem and those relegated to parts of the education system where such opportunities don't exist.

[...] It's unfortunate so many schools view an English-speaking model as the gold standard and overlook their own local or regional wisdoms. We need to remember that encouraging young people to join a privileged English-speaking élite educated in foreign universities is only one of many possible educational options.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:26PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:26PM (#1034952)

    "Chinese" is only a language because China is a country. The only difference between a dialect and a language is that a language has its own army. The various Chinese "dialects" are no more closely related than the Romance languages of Europe.

    What's more, there are a lot of speakers of Chinese languages, but most of them are Chinese, or recent Chinese ancestry. People all over the world learn English (and Spanish).

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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday August 11 2020, @05:07PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday August 11 2020, @05:07PM (#1035017) Journal

    "Chinese" is only a language because China is a country.

    "Chinese" as the name of the language is a misapprehension by non-Chinese. Foreigners think "Chinese" is a monolithic language and ethnic group. They don't know that term comprises many dialects, as you pointed out, when what they mostly mean is Mandarin; they don't know the term comprises many ethnicities, when what they mostly mean is Han. But "dialect" is even a tricky term here because while the written form of the language is the same, the spoken forms are mutually unintelligible.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.