God I hate school

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The first thing I notice when reviewing this passage - and one of the most important issues - is the obvious lack of foreign language knowledge in the US. It paints the US and its citizens in a bad light, which may be well-deserved, as the education system here has been criticized time and time again by other countries as well as domestically. This image that Americans are stubborn and refuse to learn a second language, rather, that everyone else should learn English, has only been exacerbated by the recent leadership and decisions made in the governmental aspect of things.

The fact that the author is a native English speaker makes them sound somewhat ignorant when speaking on others learning 2+ languages, but the description that 10% of Americans can speak another language in comparison to 56% of EU citizens does some good in the whole self-awareness area.

Actually, the author sounds at some points like they’re trying excessively hard to make it seem like they’re unbiased. For example, they say “for better or worse – it seems that English may be the most essential language for global business success at the moment.” It may have been unnecessary to include the “for better or worse” before the following statement. This also seems contradictory when the other brings up examples solely FOR English being a worldwide language, with none against it. The author being an English speaker, paired with some of the statements brought up, gives a hint of bias.



A concept that one might think about while reading this, is, why doesn’t everyone in international relations learn a new language that is intended for that area of work, and made as simple as possible in order for people to communicate and learn it quickly? There are those who would discourage this, with the argument that language factors heavily into culture and it would take away from people’s cultural pride. However, it does make you think that rather than everyone learning multiple languages with no guarantee they’ll be useful, we could invest our time more efficiently all learning a very commonly-spoken language.

Comments

  1. Max HeadroomMay 22, 2020 at 5:39 PM

    Julian.
    I'm pretty sure it's obvious but this is nowhere close to being minimum word count. Your others are just a few dozen words or less off but this is hundred. Next, the first paragraph is wildly off topic. These claims are not supported by any substantial evidence and they are really all assumptions on your part and an analysis is always going to be flawed if it's based on assumptions. There are lots of ideas that have to do with English becoming a world language that could be discussed, but you do not really go into any of them. The quotes that you give are things that can be expanded on to make a strong paper, but they really only count if they are discussed. I am giving this a band six.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousMay 22, 2020 at 7:35 PM

    Julian,
    To start off, I think your title explains it all. I would have to give this a band 6. For what you do have, you don’t truly get into the points made in the article. For example, in the text it even states two of the most important takeaways from the study. If you were to clean up what you do have into one or two paragraphs about English as a global language, and then add two paragraphs, one for each of the takeaways, I think your blog would not only meet word count, but also be much more thorough and result in a higher score. Back to what you do have, I think you used decent quotes, but did not expand upon them as they should have been expanded upon.

    ReplyDelete

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