Are you really so old, Stevie?
LOL! And you the WASP weed.I think you and Crystal would do best to lay off the ganja!
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lolwhites wrote:I think you might have to have gone back rather more than just " a few" years to see how my comment was then. Probably before most of us were born, actually.
I hope we do all live to see IE take over though. It'd mean we'd had a long, happy retirement spent posting on Dave's
Which 5% - 6% counts.There are obviously a far larger number of people who speak English as a second language, and many of them have full mastery, but it is doubtful if the number of competent speakers exceeds 5-6% of the population.
I hope Stephen sees that post and learns something from it.Anuradha Chepur wrote:Well, India is already exporting English! The prestigious Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages (CIEFL), Hyderabad, is doing that since 1999. Learners from Kazakstan, Kyrgystan, the Middle East, China, Korea, Japan, etc. come to CIEFL for a three-month-program. Also professors from CIEFL are deputed to those countries to teach senior government officials there. I remember, a professor left his job at CIEFL when he got a high-paid offer in Brunei. He migrated there and is doing very well.
What Crystal probably meant could be, that India is a bridge between the English speaking and the non-English-speaking countries. Among the NES countries, India is the one that speaks a considerable amount of English, and has enough good speakers and trained teachers to help spread the language.
How many competent speakers of English - in your use of that term - are there in the USA? How many use AE as their second language? And when you mention competent speaker, in which variant are you expecting Indians to be competent? Yours?One thing is clear; there aren't going to be three hundred million competent speakers of English in India in our lifetimes.
And what am I supposed to learn. I have long known of the existence of CIEFL. I was responsible for hiring English lecturers for six years and a qualification fron CIEFL was an automatic ticket to the shortlist.I hope Stephen sees that post and learns something from it.
Please don't think I'm doing anything of the sort. However the US & UK are outsouricing a relatively puny number of jobs (maybe ten million or so and more in the future, but I have seen figures that point out that even under the most optimistic suggestions for outsourcing the number of jobs outsourced to India will not come close to the number of new jobs produced in the economy in that period).Notwithstanding, Indian's competence in English is not to be underestimated either. The US companies don't outsource to India (not only IT, but also spoken-english based call center work) for being politically correct or polite.
But does the English in that book reflect the Englishes spoken around America and Britain or does it reflect the ESL idea of what British English is?I don't doubt that the book teaches British English, but I commented to the kids that I thought it was a bit silly to call it British English with so many different people speaking the "language" and each speaking it as he or she likes. I pointed out that it would be silly to call the book American English when there are so many different ways of speaking in America.
Well, I lived and studied in Kerala for a year once.<(metal 56 as far as I can see hasn't got any, and takes his arguments from short excerpts from journalistic articles more in tune with political correctness than reality)
And what population on non-native Spanish speakers could hold a converstaion or give directions in Spanish to a Spanish speaking to a tourist in the USA. Also, what percentage of the US population have regular contact with tourist to the US?Not even 15% of the population speaks sufficient English to hold a short conversation with a tourist (sure the front of house hotel staff will, but the kitchen and cleaning staff will scarcely know more than a few words), let alone enough English to use it as a primary means of communication in their job.
In a recent book on Sri Lankan English, two varieties of Lankan English were referred to, the second variety being considered socially inferior as it marked the speakers as coming from the Sinhala or Tamil medium, as opposed to a purely English or bilingual one. On top of that there is what one writer has described as Sinenglish (...