We have different names for ourselves depending on what we are doing. A person walking in the street is called a pedestrian, for example, whereas someone driving a car is a motorist. A person’s day quickly fills up with many roles: coffee-drinker... parent... commuter... cat lover... bystander... consumer... viewer... The list goes on!
But what about when you are speaking or listening to English – at work and at home, on holiday, online, on the phone, on TV, in the classroom? How do you define yourself in this part of your life?
There are a number of names you could give yourself. A very common one is ‘non-native English speaker’. It’s estimated that non-native English speakers outnumber native English speakers by approximately 2 to 1, so if you are not from an English-speaking country but you do speak English, you are in a very big majority!
But how useful is it to define yourself as something you are not? Nowadays English is used by people of all nationalities in countries all over the world with other people from other non-English-speaking countries. So to say “I’m not a native-speaker” seems more and more irrelevant.
OK, so what about these terms: ‘global native’ or ‘world citizen’? Is English your passport to travel the world? Are you ‘bilingual’ or even a ‘polyglot’? Do you pride yourself in your linguistic skills? An ‘anglophile’, perhaps? Do you love the culture as much as the lingo? Are you a ‘digital native’, who uses English to live in cyberspace? How do you feel about these names? Can you relate to any of them?
Perhaps the most common name people call themselves in relation to their English is this one: ‘English learner’. Which makes sense! After all, a lot of the time you spend with English is probably in studying the language. Your relationship with English may have started in the classroom; books you read in English are mostly textbooks and dictionaries; you keep a record of new words in a notebook and you assess your progress with exams. If you speak much English it’s with teachers, and it’s primary goal is to improve your English.
But stop and think about this for a second. Is English something you learn or something you do? Is it a body of knowledge to learn like Physics and History or is it a skill to use such as cooking or information technology? People don’t
often learn to cook in any formal way, we just start making omelettes. They become better at cooking by... well, by cooking!
Also, if you call yourself a learner, aren’t you saying you haven’t really started yet? A learner driver wears his ‘L’ badge as a warning to other drivers, but you don’t need to tell people you can’t speak English very well! As soon as you say “Hello” to someone who doesn’t speak your language, you become part of a growing global community of people who can understand each other and who articulate their needs, beliefs and desires to one another with a common language.
It might be useful to compare the way we talk about our English skills with the way we describe our I.T. skills. If you are reading this then you are probably a regular ‘I.T. user’, a person who downloads mp3s, sends emails and surfs the internet. You might be an expert programmer or just a basic user, but the distinction isn’t important – the fact that you’re not very fluent with a mouse doesn’t stop you using one. We are all IT users.
Can’t we all be ‘English users’, too?
I like the cooking metaphor Dan.In schools language learning has been traditionally treated as an academic subject with emphasis on knowledge to be learned and memorised, Useful perhaps for training the mind but not very helpful for using the language any more than reading a book of recipes helps you to cook.
ReplyDeleteThe learning / doing distinction crops up everywhere for me at the moment. I remember my first Chemistry lesson at school where we donned lab coats and goggles to see if we could make acidity indicator out of red cabbage. We did it, and I still remember the conclusion (yes, you can use red cabbage to measure pH!)
ReplyDeleteBecause of a lack of resources, fewer and fewer children experience science in action. At the school I work in, kids sit through 'chalk and talk' lessons and make notes in order to regurgitate info come exam time. Look through the door of any lesson and it isn't clear what subject they are studying - they all look the same. Makes me feel lucky I got the experience of science the way I did.
They even do exams here for P.E! It's like everything needs to be tested in the same way.