Tuesday, November 16, 2004, 13:39 GMT
I have now spent one week in Shanghai promoting my book and website, giving speeches at universities, and one week in Taipei. I attended the English Teachers Association of Taiwan conference this past weekend. As the president of a lumber trading company in my real life, it was my first opportunity to rub shoulders with the well known and less well known members of the world wide academic ESL/EFL community. Krashen, Nation, Cook, Christison and other luminaries were there. A great number of presenters from Taiwan, Japan,Thailand, and others from the English speaking world gave serious papers and I gave two lectures that were less serious.
I was encouraged that many of the views that Tom and the anti-moon gang hold ( and I share) are gaining acceptance, in theory. The teachers still take great pride in knowing what a "modal verb" is, although most fluent speakers of English, native and non-native, have never heard of the term.
What disturbed me at the conference was the fact that so many people, in learning English, are forced to ingest the very culture that I avoid in my native Canada, American dominated modern pop culture.
Who here would be prepared to record themselves talking about their lives and their countries in English, or interviewing others in English? If you feel your accent is too bad can you provide some interesting content in written English for someone to record. We could create a corpus of world English for English language learners to listen to and read that might distract some people from the products of Hollywood etc. and expand horizons. I think many people would be interested. We could put it all up on a free website called "World English."
I was encouraged that many of the views that Tom and the anti-moon gang hold ( and I share) are gaining acceptance, in theory. The teachers still take great pride in knowing what a "modal verb" is, although most fluent speakers of English, native and non-native, have never heard of the term.
What disturbed me at the conference was the fact that so many people, in learning English, are forced to ingest the very culture that I avoid in my native Canada, American dominated modern pop culture.
Who here would be prepared to record themselves talking about their lives and their countries in English, or interviewing others in English? If you feel your accent is too bad can you provide some interesting content in written English for someone to record. We could create a corpus of world English for English language learners to listen to and read that might distract some people from the products of Hollywood etc. and expand horizons. I think many people would be interested. We could put it all up on a free website called "World English."