Whether Basic will make any progress remains to be seen. It has been criticized on various grounds. For one thing, its vocabulary shows some serious omissions — for example, the numerals — and for another its dependence upon verb phrases may confuse rather than help the foreigner, whose difficulties with prepositions are notorious; also, the superficial simplicity of its vocabulary conceals a multitude of homonyms with lexical and semantic pitfalls. Spelling is still a cruel difficulty to a foreigner. But Ogden waves this difficulty away. For one thing, he argues that his list of 850 words, being made up mainly of the commonest coins of speech, avoids most spelling problems; for another, he believes that the very eccentricity of the spelling of some of the rest will help the foreigner to remember them. Every schoolboy, as we all know, seizes upon such bizarre forms as through, straight and island with fascinated eagerness, and not infrequently he masters them before he masters such phonetically spelled words as first, tomorrow and engineer. In my own youth, far away in the dark backward and abysm of time, the glory of every young American was phthisic, with the English proper name, Cholmondeley, a close second. Ogden proposes to let the foreigners attempting Basic share the joy of hunting down such basilisks. For the rest he leaves the snarls of English spelling to the judgments of a just God, and the natural tendency of all things Anglo-Saxon to move toward an ultimate perfection. Unluckily, his Basic now has a number of competitors on its own ground, and it must also meet the competition of the so-called universal languages. Some of these languages, notably Esperanto and Novial, show a great ingenuity, and all have enthusiastic customers who believe that they are about to be adopted generally. There are also persons who hold that some such language is bound to come in soon or late, though remaining doubtful about all those proposed so far.
But this is only a hope, and no man now born will ever see it realized. The trouble with all the “universal” languages, leaving out their parochial devotion to the Latinate vocabulary and their blithe unconcern with all the languages of Asia and Africa, is that the juices of life are simply not in them. They are the creations of scholars drowning in murky oceans of dead prefixes and suffixes, and so they fail to meet the needs of a highly human world. People do not yearn for a generalized articulateness; what they want is the capacity to communicate with definite other people. To that end even Basic, for all its deficiencies, is better than any conceivable Esperanto, for it at least springs from a living speech, and behind that speech are some 260,000,000 men and women, many of them amusing and some of them wise. The larger the gang, the larger the numbers of both classes. English forges ahead of all its competitors, whether natural or unnatural, simply because it is already spoken by so many educated, or at least technically competent, people. A few years ago, Dr.Knut Sanstedt, general secretary to the Northern Peace Union, sent a circular to a number of representative European publicists, asking them “what language, dead or living or artificial” they preferred for international communications. Not one of these publicists was a native or resident of the British Isles, yet out of fifty-nine who replied thirty voted for English. Of the six Swedes, all preferred it; of the seven Norwegians, five; of the five Hollanders, four. Among the whole fifty-nine, only one man voted for Esperanto.
Aids to study the text:
1. What distinct periods can be singled out in the history of the English language?
2. Illustrate the origins of the English language
3. What are the main ways of enriching the Vocabulary of a language?
4. What borrowed elements are widely represented in the English Vocabulary?
5. Dwell on the Celtic element of the English Vocabulary.
6. Speak on the Roman Conquest and its consequences. Outline the role Latin borrowings in the English vocabulary.
7. Illustrate the linguistic result of the Scandinavian Invasion.
8. What linguistic changes did the Norman Conquest bring? Point out the role of the French element in the Vocabulary of the English language.
9. Present the facts concerning enrichment of the vocabulary in the Renaissance period.
10. Will you describe borrowings of the 18th – 20th centuries?
11. What are the basic features of Modern English?
12. What can be said about varieties and variations of Modern English?
13. Why does the English language strike most foreigners by its simplicity?
14. How can we characterize the vocabulary of Modern English?
15. Why is English considered a universal language?
16. Discuss the future of the English language.
17. Give some comments on the texts (see pp. 112 – 114).
Chapter 4. The Present-day Language Studies
What, is meant by 'Contemporary English'? According to professor P.D.Strevens 'Contemporary English' is a label, not a technical term. It is not the name of a single, self-evident subject, but rather a convenient label to refer to some particular branches of English studies, reinforced by the attitudes and techniques of modern linguistic thought.
The scope of the Chair of Contemporary English likewise embraces new grammatical descriptions. It includes two main kinds of work, each in a sense independent yet interlinked. They are, first, the study of the present-day language, and second, the study and teaching of English as a foreign language, the 'academic' and 'vocational' aspects respectively. The vocational programme is an application of the theories and the attitudes of the academic work and of the data which will be derived from it, and although the vocational programme - the study and teaching of English as a foreign language - will often seem more spectacular, will attract more money from outside sources, and will seem to the public to be more obviously 'useful' in a short-term sense, nevertheless it is wholly dependent upon the academic programme. Without the academic, the vocational could not exist in terms acceptable to a university, since it would lack the essential strength of theory and of data which the academic study of Contemporary English can provide for it; whereas the academic programme itself has its own independent existence.
1. The vocational side of studies of Contemporary English
In recent years the number of people learning English and using English for various purposes, but not speaking it as their mother tongue, has grown to an astronomical size. Estimates vary around the figure of two hundred million overseas users of English, with great diversity of quantity, quality and motives in then use of the language. By far the most urgent set of problems, naturally, relates to the teaching of English to this vast population; but to forestall the hasty conclusion that the function of Contemporary English is training overseas teachers of English, it is necessary to make two points; first, these are by no means the only problems; and second, the contribution lies elsewhere than in the area of classroom methods, education theory and normal pedagogical training.
Professor P.D.Strevens considers that the main contribution in Britain is of three kinds: first, giving academic and professional training to university and training-college staff from the countries concerned so that they can raise the standards of their own institutions when they return home; second, preparing British graduates as university staff and trainers of teacher-trainers;, and third, providing the best possible academic content for these courses of professional training and their overseas counterparts. It is the third of these sub-divisions that is the most relevant to their own interests in Contemporary English at Leeds.
As this point we approach a delicate question of doctrine in the matter of teaching foreign languages. It will be obvious that the problems of English as a foreign language are fundamentally similar to those of French as a foreign language, or Russian, or Chinese, and until comparatively recently the attitudes and techniques used by British teachers going abroad to teach English were similar to, and even based upon, the older, more conventional attitudes towards teaching foreign languages in this country which were current before the War. Similar methods used to be current in the United States, until America reached a point of crisis, during the War. They were faced with a sudden need to teach practical language ability in English and in several other languages to immigrants and to soldiers; they decided that conventional methods were not efficient or effective, enough for the purpose, and so they cast around for other means.
Out of this operation, reinforced by a traumatic reaction to the launching of the first Russian satellite, there emerged in the United States an attitude towards language teachers which said, approximately, 'Make them good structural linguists and the problem will be solved'. This point of view was widely held for a number of years. In Britain, on the other hand, at roughly the same period, the converse doctrine held sway: 'Make them good teachers, and the problem will be solved'. It is now clear to most people that neither of these exclusive attitudes is the best solution. It turned out, on the American side, that only those linguists who were also good teachers could make really effective use of the sophisticated linguistic materials they were given to teach with; while on the British side, even the best classroom teachers were handicapped by the rudimentary linguistics which underlay much of the teaching material used. In the nineteen-sixties, both attitudes have been modified. Some American institutions are increasing the methodology component of their courses, while some British professional training courses are illuminating their admirable methodology with a sound linguistic background. The point of this sketchy and compressed summary of recent history in teaching English is that it shows the genesis of our own outlook at Leeds, which is that there must be a marriage of the two components.
In other words, the teaching of English as a foreign language has become a joint activity, containing on the one hand both education and methodology (which are most properly provided, as at Leeds, by the specialists in Education), and on the other hand a sound background of linguistic thought and up-to-date descriptions of the present-day language (which are properly provided by the specialists in language and in English). There may well be some overlap in functions: this is largely a question of the number of specialist staff that any given institution can afford; but the principle is clear.
The particular projects which Leeds is building in this domain and to which Contemporary English contributes are of three main kinds. First, there are the professional qualifications which teachers of English overseas can take, and which involve collaboration between the School of English, the Department of Education and the Institute of Education.
Then there are longer-term proposals for links with university centres overseas, in America, Africa, and Asia. These links, when they can be achieved, will enable the countries which have problems of this kind to benefit in their own vocational programmes from the fruits of the academic side of Contemporary English at Leeds. In addition, they should give practical expression to the ideal (much talked-of but rarely achieved) of collaboration in this field between Britain and America.
The third kind of project concerns the development of mass media and technical aids for teaching purposes. Just as stylistics is an area in the academic programme where Contemporary English overlaps with another branch of English studies, to their mutual enrichment, so also there is an area in the vocational programme where Contemporary English overlaps with the pedagogical arts. It is no accident that specialists in Contemporary English should everywhere be called upon to assist in the exploitation of television, radio, language laboratories, audio-visual aids, and teaching machines, for the purposes of teaching English. It is simply a reflection of the fact that these -devices by themselves, effective though they may be in principle, are of little use unless they are programmed by specialists in language and in English.
We are called in, then, by those who teach English as a foreign language, to provide the theoretical basis and the best possible description of English, as part of the total language-teaching job. But the profession of teaching English as a foreign language is only one particular case of the general category of teaching foreign languages; and to the extent that teaching English as a foreign language can be shown to have improved in effectiveness by the marriage of our theory and description with the best possible teaching methods and techniques, to that extent we are likely to arouse the interest of those who teach foreign languages other than English.
There is at present in Britain a wave of interest in the teaching of foreign languages in the primary schools. New social and political pressures make it virtually certain that before long some European languages will be taught to all children, and from an early age, instead of only to a small proportion of children, late in their school career, as at present. But to many teachers this is a dangerous experiment: 'Who knows', many of them ask, 'whether young children can learn languages, without suffering psychological harm'? The answer is that some of those who teach English as a foreign language know, because they have been doing it for years in Africa and elsewhere.
There is yet a further extension of these collaborations. Many of those who teach English language in schools in Britain are unhappy about the aims and syllabuses of their profession, and about the text-books they have to use. It is a remarkable fact that a number of text-books designed to describe the present-day English language to foreign learners have suddenly begun to sell in quantity at home. Two trends seem to be at work, as far as one can judge: first, many teachers are seeking descriptions of English that relate to the way it is actually used, in speech and writing, today; and there are few works that meet this specification. And second, many teachers want to present a description that rests on a coherent framework of theory and description. Here I am back at my starting-place, the academic study of the present-day language; but the point I am making, is that Contemporary English can contribute to the teaching of English as a foreign language, to the teaching of foreign languages in general, and to the teaching of English in Britain.
2. The academic side of studies of Contemporary English
The academic programme as distinct from the vocational programme has its own independent existence. It is subdivided into two main parts: first, the subject of study and second, the methods used.
Start with the methods of study appropriate to Contemporary English. These methods rest upon the two disciplines sometimes called 'the linguistic sciences’, namely, phonetics and linguistics. According to professor P.D.Strevens ’linguistics' is a theory of language: an understanding of how language works. With this theory and the descriptive categories which it imposes professor P.D.Strevens with his colleagues in Education can describe any form of spoken or written English, and they can relate it to all other aspects of language behaviour. Naturally, in the course of describing English one hopes to go further and to analyse grammar, lexis or phonology to a deeper level of detail, or 'delicacy'; and this entails a close knowledge of the particular structures and systems that operate in the present-day language. But these are in a sense extra to the first requisite, which is a theory of language, and an understanding of how language works, of now all languages work.
In defining the field of Contemporary English professor P.D.Strevens acknowledged that it is not a single subject but a grouping of some branches of English studies. But there is nevertheless a unity in the grouping: the underlying similarity shared by all the varied aspects of Contemporary English that he describing springs from the sharing of a comprehensive theory of language. Every one of the teaching and research projects in Contemporary English begun or now being planned, both at Leeds and in other British universities, has as its basis this outlook on language.