In one fell swoop, the UK Government has achieved a dual coup. They have given a beleaguered nation some real hope of a return to normal at the very same time as convincing us all to remain patient for four more months of tight social confinement. While everyone’s eyes may, understandably, be focused on the Read More
Read More...Author: Stephen Giles
Alumination – or just an allusion?
It’s 8am and you’re listening to Today with Nick Robinson and…a whole needless storm of pedantic nonsense. The UK’s flagship current affairs breakfast show was reduced to a maelstrom of frenzied listener criticism by Robinson’s innocuous reference to ‘alumINIUM’ as ‘aluMINUM’ in an interview with an American academic. Such was the force of Radio 4 Read More
Read More...The Final Countdown
And so, the end is near… Another year ticks by – and the countdown to Brexit has well and truly begun, without any real picture emerging of a post-leave world. We’re told that ‘English is Great’ by the government’s aggressive marketing of language skills in China, but that smacks of an increasingly desperate attempt to Read More
Read More...UK’s Eurovision showing makes a song and dance of cross-cultural communication
To the surprise of no one in particular, the UK’s entry for the Eurovision Song Contest failed to impress the voting public, meaning two of Europe’s powerhouse nations–UK and Germany–finished in the bottom three. Some argue that the contest is based on political affiliation, prejudice or even sheer spite. It’s more subtle than that. The Read More
Read More...Exporting is great–in theory
As Britain tears itself apart worrying over its EU Hokey-Cokey, the government is trying to reassure nervous industry leaders with a series of high-profile TV ads showcasing the many and various possibilities for exporting British ideas and products around the globe. This laudable campaign makes it clear that there is a world of choice out Read More
Read More...Worlds Apart
As a teacher and trainer I’ve worked in two very distinct but nonetheless related fields, namely academia and business. The relationship is the English language, but otherwise there are few correlations between these spheres. This begs the question ‘why?’ Why, when our world is so sharply focused on the ‘graduateness’ of students, do we instead Read More
Read More...The Lost Art of Languages
One of the least appealing traits of the globalisation of English is the flawed belief that we no longer need to learn local languages in order to communicate with other nations. This is an incredibly dangerous and short-term approach which denies one simple but unquestionable fact: the more we learn about languages, the better equipped Read More
Read More...Put Up or Shut Up?
Many of the ways we communicate are entirely instinctive–we do it because we always have. But what is instinctive is also sometimes thoughtless and when we communicate across language boundaries we need a lot more empathy and a much better sense of judgment. Here’s a quick and simple example of how something we do instinctively Read More
Read More...One Way Street
It’s a widely-accepted fact that English is the global business language, and that it will continue to be so for many years to come. What is less clear is to what extent this fact has allowed native speakers–the 400 million or so people on the planet fortunate to have been born in an English-speaking environment–to Read More
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