Sociolinguistics Ten

Phillipson’s got a bee in his bonnet, hasn’t he? Can’t say I disagree. I read From the Ruins of Empire not so long ago, and it makes for an interesting companion piece here.

Despite it rather being a case of biting the hand that feeds me, I remain hugely skeptical of ‘The Native Premium.’ The analogy I like is that the best football players (Bobby Moore, Maradona) generally don’t make great coaches because the game has always come so naturally to them. They’ve never had to think about why it works or how to play it, so they have real difficulty in communicating that to lesser players. It’s a problem level lower down the scale, as this interview with Tony Adams demonstrates.

The same is true with language teachers. The best ones are probably going to be those who’ve been there and done that. They won’t be the best speakers, probably, but the will be the best at explaining it to others. Yet, fortunately for my wallet, ol’ blue eyes here can rock up and command a fat paycheck merely on the strength of his passport. I can completely understand people being pissed off about that.

There's so much I’d like to say about this module. It permeates everything I do professionally, and to an extent personally. So it’s kind of annoying that I wasn’t able to spend more time on it, either for the reading or for the write-ups here. In a way it, still, almost feels too big. For all the frameworks and models that try to impose some sort of order it still feels like trying to drink from a fire hose. But we’ve got another couple of years to go here, so there’s still time yet, and I reckon it’ll crop up often enough.