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Literature Review of cultural diversity
Emergence of English as a global language
Literature Review of cultural diversity
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This essay describes the global spread of English, its advantages and disadvantages, and its’ affects on language from my perspective as an ESL/EFL teacher at the Shanghai Singapore International School (SSIS) located in the outskirts of Shanghai. SSIS differs from other international schools in Shanghai due to its’ large Asian student population . As a Singaporean international school, many places are given in preference to Singaporean students irrespective of their level of English . This policy has caused differentiated levels of English in the classroom - from students who do not speak English at home to those who are fluent English speakers, and has opened the door to other Asian students who have low English levels who struggle through the curriculum under their parents’ belief that their future success lies in being able to communicate in English. In this context many of the students are learning English at the expense of their first language. Parents, pursuing future economic success for their children, choose to educate them in schools where English is the medium of instruction instead of their native language. This is a reaction to the growing dependence of trade from China which has seen a necessary increase for communication – either the west learns to speak Chinese or the Chinese will have to learn English to do trade (Phillipson 2008, p. 37). This results in a monolingual language policy that glorifies and allocates resources to learning English and renders other languages invisible (Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas 1996, p. 437). My personal narrative in this essay includes my own background and how it has influences my observations of my students in watching them struggle to gain knowledge through their second or thi... ... middle of paper ... ...2005, p. 41; Rajagopalan 2004, p. 111). DY’s context epitomizes Phillipson’s (1996) ‘ecology-of-language’ over the ‘diffusion-of-English’ paradigm, English speakers are able to understand non-standard British and American English and cope with a variety of accents, pronunciation, and dialects in English. A further issue to be considered is of what may lie in the future for DY when she leaves this community and experiences a monolingual environment of standard English where she may be seen as threatening to the linguistic power structure, or stigmatised through ‘linguistic prescriptivism’ (Kachru & Nelson 1996, p. 89) because of her dialect of English and nationality. Under the World English paradigm, Kachru & Nelson (1996) state that it is important to overcome monolingual views of people, language, cultures, and boundaries to give way to a broader view of English.