Inexpensive TESOL Lessons

Is english the New RussianIn 1963, at the height of the Cold War between the united states and the former Soviet Union, I was ten years old and my older brother a junior in high school. As a young man keen to study politics when he got to university, he elected to study Russian to fulfill his foreign language requirement. The Soviet Union seemed a genuine threat to our economy and our military, indeed to our very existence, and thus it was felt by many educators and national leaders that educating more young people who could speak Russian was a valuable investment both in our national security and their own careers. American students enrolled in Russian classes in droves--it became for a while the ‘glamour’ language, much more exciting (if unpronounceable) than the tired offerings in spanish and french, where year after year a student re-named Pedro wore a sombrero and hit a pinata on his birthday (yes, we actually did this in my third-grade spanish class) or Madame taught her pupils to make mousse au chocolat (in reality, chocolate pudding--but who knew). By the time I graduated from university in 1976, Russian had disappeared from most American high schools, its importance apparently an embarrassing example of delusional group-think as we belatedly realized that spanish, the native tongue of vast numbers of people pouring into our country, was the language we should have been studying all along. (There is still hot debate about that in some corners of the US, but the argument is basically settled--almost as many Americans speak spanish now as english.) The collapse of the Soviet Union would not take place for another 20 years, but the handwriting was already on the wall: the signs of decay were everywhere and it was clear that the US, not Breshnev’s crumbling empire, would emerge as the world’s only superpower. The spread of english, ignited centuries earlier by the British, now became a full-fledged wildfire as everyone hastened to do business with Americans. Today, thirty-five years on, the fire rages on, and shows no signs of abating: according to the British Council’s website for online learners (http://www.englishonline.org.cn/en/learners/english-for-work/business-bites/global-language), two billion people, about a third of the world’s people, now speak english as a non-native language. More people in China are currently studying english than there are native speakers in the Unites States, and in ten years’ time non-native speakers (so-called majority speakers) are expected to outnumber native speakers by four to one. These facts seem indisputable. And yet to anyone who has lived in the united states in recent years, it is clear that our country is in decline. This is one of the few things, in fact, on which our viciously polarized electorate seems to agree: America is a mess. Our public schools are terrible, our cities are in desperate financial straits, gun violence is an appalling national embarrassment, our infrastructure is dangerously antiquated and unsafe, and despite the desperate need for new roads, bridges, and schools, to say nothing of investment in basic research and solutions to our environmental ills, millions of our people are out of work. Yet we can’t seem to summon the political will to solve any of these problems; thus far, as in many European countries, the only solution offered or tried has been to impose a draconian ‘austerity plan’ on those who are most vulnerable and least able to challenge its basic unfairness. Meanwhile, China, with India and Argentina not far behind, is coming on like gangbusters. Its political system may be as repressive and dispiriting as ever, but its embrace of capitalism has all the fervor of a religious conversion--when it comes to making money, the chinese are True Believers. (To Americans who always believed that money was their exclusive national religion, this is no small cause for consternation.) And guess which language is suddenly all the rage in American schools--especially elite private schools? Mandarin. So is english is destined to be the new Russian--the language the world will look back on twenty year hence and wonder what all the fuss was about? Most Americans grow indignant at the idea that there will come a day when we are not the world’s only superpower, our present difficulties notwithstanding. I have three words for my countrymen: The British Empire. (I certainly don’t mean to insult my friends from the UK, but I think they’d be the first to admit that the world is not studying english to be like them, however many tuned in to watch the latest royal nuptials--I was one of those, by the way.) It wants to sell things to Americans, whose appetite for consumer goods seems insatiable. But will people still want to learn our language if we’re not such a big deal anymore? To my contemporaries, people in their fifties or older, such a possibility seems unimaginable. But to Americans my children’s age, the 20- and 30-somethings who are facing the enormous burden of supporting their aging Baby Boomer parents, it seems not just possible, but all too likely. But I believe there is still cause for optimism for us EFL teachers, and for the durability of our glorious, protean, infinitely malleable language, even if America ceases to be the world’s #1 (which, let’s face it, would be a good thing, because the truth is, we aren’t: the only people who insist upon our superiority are Americans themselves, and it’s time we got over our adolescent posturing and took our place as equals among the family of nations). The good news is that english has outgrown its originators, who mistakenly thought of themselves as its owners. It will go on being the world’s global language long after we native speakers are vastly outnumbered by the millions of people the world over who prize their native tongue, yet who want to speak to those who live in Brazil, Poland, Chile or Niger. The scientists from Heidelberg and Mexico City and Shanghai who want to share their discoveries about genetic engineering, the software designer from Sao Paolo who wants to speak to his compatriot in Paris, the fashion merchandiser in Madrid who wants to buy fabric from the designer in Hanoi, all want and need a common tongue; and as we have all seen during this recent Arab Spring, youth throughout the Middle East are keen to let the world know what they are doing to throw off decades of autocratic tyranny--and they are telling us on Facebook and Twitter in english. Last night walking home from a restaurant in Barcelona, I crossed paths with a very young Palestinian boy who asked me for some spare change. (Seconds before I had heard him speaking Arabic to his friends, and we were in a mostly Palestinian neighborhood.) I was astonished by his request--not that he asked me for money, but that he had made it in such perfectly un-accented American english. I couldn’t help smiling, and I asked him where he had learned to talk like someone from California. He smiled back and said, “Here--on the street. I listen and then I talk like all of you--english, spanish, American, I can do it all.” Indeed he can. And more power to him.