09/12/2016

It is 9th of December in the morning. 

We are shown a funny video which as the title says, shows the importance of being bilingual. This video is a wonderful metaphor of the importance of learning languages, since as the video perfectly shows, knowing a language can "save us from many situations" (literally and metaphorically).

    After that, we are shown a power point presentation titled Learning languages to live. This title is a perfect definition of all the members of this group. Why? Because languages are our passion, WE ARE ALL IN LOVE WITH LANGUAGES. ♡

    First we started with a warm up quiz to show the importance of English nowadays which is a global language. And after that, we started a discussion about global languages:

- Which factors do you think that make a language to be 'global'?     

    · A high number of speakers.

    · Economic and political powers.

- What could be a definition of Global language?

A widely learnt and spoken language, that is, a language spoken and learnt by a large number of people as a second language. And also a language which is used by international organizations.

- How does David Crystal defines Global language?

According to David Crystal, "a language achieves a genuinely global status when it develops a special role that is recognized in every country. This role will be most obvious in countries where large numbers of the people speak it as a first language - in the case of English, this would mean the USA, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, several Caribbean countries, and a scattering of other territories."

    Then, we watched a video about David Crystal as well and we had to answer some questions:

- Do we need to teach English as a "global" language to learners? Yes, because there's a wide variety of non-standard variations and if not, they would think that the only English they are going to encounter is the British standard English that they have learnt in the classroom. How can we do it? By means of teaching comprehension (listening and reading comprehension).

- Should we focus on the receptive skills? Why/why not? Yes, we should focus on listening and reading because of the non-standard variations we willl find in the street or in written sources such as newspapers, journals and Internet websites, therefore, the more the student realizes that most people in the world don't speak RP, don't speak general American, but they speak different accents, the better.

    Finally, we got involved on a debate on:

THE ROLE OF ENGLISH AS A GLOBAL LANGUAGE

English is a very important language because it can help us to communicate in almost any part of the world. It is spoken almost everywehere, so it is a tool which allow us to communicate everywhere. Therefore, it is a lingua franca that in a way unites us all in this global world as well as it is a tool of social cohesion.

Moreover, it does not only allow us to communicate with people from all over the world, but it can also be used as a means to denounce injustices from the world and it is the dominant language in the sciences and research in scientific fields, so that it can be accessible to everyone.

However, despite the importance of this global language, we MUST NOT forget minorized languages which "are not that important", but we NEED TO PROTECT THEM and make use of these languages so that they do not disappear.