1346 Owning Our Other Tongue: new resource, new system
austraLasia 1346
Owning Our Other Tongue: new resource, new
system
ROME: 4th December 2005 -- Owning Our Other
Tongue is a set of resources for the study of English, especially
geared for Salesians who are taking up such a study... in Houses of
Formation, in a missionary context, or because they have decided that
an improved knowledge of English is to their benefit. It is also
an ideal set of resources for those teaching English to anyone for whom
the language is 'an other tongue'. It is best consulted by
someone with at least a threshold knowledge of English - a vocabulary
of approximately 1,000 words. The text has been checked out to
conform broadly with that. As a book it would have 130 pages, but
here is the good news: you can receive it as a CD, and the CD edition
contains many more resources of a digital kind which obviously cannot
be included in a book. If you want to have both sides of the
coin, then the CD version also offers the book in PDF format.
There are something like 200Mb of contents on the CD edition.
Such an edition costs only the postage.
Coming from within the Social Communications
Department, OOOT (to give it its easier acronym) trials a new system
that may help us reduce costs enormously. In the knowledge that
the computer is ubiquitous these days, a
work of the magnitude of OOOT can be produced on CD at almost no
cost. It opens automatically, presents the viewer/reader with a
virtual book (the opening screen even looks like a book), and a search
mechanism which enables quick location of any term or phrase - two or
more words are automatically recognised as a phrase. The entire
item opens up in a web browser. We trialled this approach with
the recent World Salesian Bulletin Editors meeting. Each
participant eventually received a CD with all the contents of the
meeting in a variety of formats - text, presentation, image... It
would appear that this was well-received. And in places where a
book tends to be rendered useless by climatic conditions in a short
period of time, the CD is a boon. It can also be easily copied in
its entirety - as many copies as one wishes to make. Hopefully
other Departments in the Congregation will consider a similar approach
where the circumstances indicate that a CD would be better than a book.
As for OOOT's contents, it contains several chapters
explaining language features in general, but with an emphasis on the
kinds of English one finds in 'other tongue' contexts, be they African,
Indian, Pacific, so-called 'Chinglish', 'Taglish', 'Finglish' and so
on. The point made in these chapters is the important reality
that people living and working in these contexts have developed local
forms of English. English is 'owned' by 750 million speakers
plus, many of whom are not native speakers. It is often better to
speak of local standards than of 'correctness' as if there is only one
English standard. The version now accepted as 'the Queen's
English' (but even she has shifted her style!) was once looked down
upon as a rough country dialect. We need a sense of history, also
in our attitudes to language. But OOOT does recommend a Standard
Written English.
OOOT offers an important chapter on methods for
learning English, followed by application to the key areas of speaking,
listening, reading, writing. An emphasis is placed on the
importance of vocabulary and on ways of learning vocabulary, indeed on
the value of 'word grammar'. In doing so it draws on recent
insights in second language learning (or third, or fourth...).
Each chapter is followed by exercise frameworks, meaning that they
offer productive ways of exercising the material which the learner or
teacher can develop further. One chapter is devoted to
cross-cultural language issues and another to the interface between
Italian and English in a Salesian context. The CD also contains
two sub-webs, one being SELECT, the full version of Salesian Etymology
and Lect (or in other words the Salesian glossary and thesaurus), the
other being ESP, English for Salesian Purposes. This is a set of
resources developed for those who have Italian as either a mother
tongue or well-established other tongue. There are additional
digital resources - useful software, word lists, including the most
recent version of Wordnet.
If you would like a copy, email me directly and
indicate a mailing address. The cost, for anyone requesting this
before 8th December, is one Hail Mary!
JBF
VOCABULARY
ubiquitous: everywhere
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