The real secret to making magic is a bunch of people all working together.
- Tony Jeary

This is a very special occasion. It was instigated and inspired by Anne Gordon. Anne was
adamant that after 25 years we have a special story to tell and that it should be used as
a time for us to join together in celebration, motivation and inspiration. I, myself, am not
much of an “occasions” person. I like to keep a low profile and “get on with it”.

But this isn’t just a story about me. This is a story of a group of people who came
together to promote something revolutionary that could change the lives of children and
families. This is a celebration of every teacher and every franchisee in this hall, especially
those of you who have been with me over many years.

This is about “us”. And it is well worth celebrating!

My talk today is a different look at the way HDEE started, where it is and where it
is going. It involves a short review of events and goes on to examine our moral role as effective teachers of English in today’s world.

Most men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and continue as if nothing happened.
- Winston Churchill

A Teacher says to his student: “Billy, name two pronouns“.
“Who, me?” Replies Billy.
“Oh!” Said the Teacher: “Very good!”

Sometimes one gets it right “by accident”. My enterprise wasn’t an accident, but it came out very naturally and effortlessly.

It was 1985 when I stumbled over what I deem to be the truth of how to teach babies and children spoken English and indeed, any oral language. It was so obvious to me that I didn’t realize that no-one else was doing it.

It all started when I took my 4-year-old daughter, Ella, to Suzuki violin classes in December, 1984.

In the Suzuki Method, the children learn to make music first, and learn to read music later. From Dr. Suzuki’s perspective, what had gone wrong with traditional music teaching methods was that they forced children to first read notes. Notes aren’t music, he insisted. It would be like forcing a child to read a book before she was allowed to speak! For me, this was a revelation. I thought, if there is a mother-tongue way to teach music, why don’t we have a mother-tongue way to teach language? If Suzuki is teaching the language of music, why aren’t we teaching the music of language? Why aren’t we teaching the music of language?

What is required is sight and insight then you might add one more: excite. 
- Robert Frost

The idea was intensely exciting, particularly as my BA had included a course in just this specialty area (child language acquisition). I had enjoyed this course very much, but I hadn’t realised at the time that it held the key to my future business.

This happened when I was thinking about returning to the work force. After being a full-time mum for five years, I was looking for a career or business that interested me. Inspired by the simplicity and elegance of the Suzuki Method, I began to consider applying those concepts in some sort of English programme. As I looked around, I saw how Israeli children were struggling to learn English. It confirmed everything that Dr. Suzuki had said about learning music: that is, the schools were trying to teach reading and writing at the same time as verbal language acquisition. The children were struggling, not through lack of intelligence or motivation, but because reading and writing are inherently very different skills to speaking.

Initially, I assumed that someone else out there must have already developed a mothertongue methodology for teaching English, but all I found were the same traditional methods, which started too late and forced too many conflicting skills simultaneously. But I kept looking. After all, if it wasn’t here in Israel (despite the obvious need), then surely the programme existed elsewhere.

To my surprise, there didn’t seem to be any ready-packaged programme available at all. In my search, I began to dig more deeply into research and the work of others in related fields. With Dr. Suzuki as a starting point, I returned to examine more closely the work that Glenn Doman had done with the Institutes for Achievement of Human Potential. His focus on infants and very young children was in line with the premise that a child’s brain grows (both in size and in the number of neural connections) until the age of six.

The human spirit is nurtured by praise, as much as a seedling is nurtured by the soil, the water and the sun. 
- Mario Fernandez

A child comes home from his first day at school. His Mother asks, “What did you learn today?” The kid replies, “Not enough. I have to go back tomorrow.”

The corner-stones of child language acquisition in all the text books are: Teach Early, Repeated Hearing, Positive Reinforcement. Let’s examine these components.

Teaching Early after the age of 7, a child cannot ever know any language as a mother tongue this includes his own mother tongue.

Repeated Hearing a child has to hear words and language portions again and again and again in order to learn them

Positive Reinforcement a parent finds every opportunity to praise the language produced by her child. This gives a feeling of success which in turn motivates the child. This is unlike the child in the joke who felt going back to school was a punishment for not doing well enough!

Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right, decide on what you think is right and stick to it. 
- George Eliot

Emphasizing the importance of a good vocabulary, the teacher told her young charges, “Use a word ten times, and it shall be yours for life.” From somewhere in the back of the room, came a small male voice chanting, “Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda.”

I started by working with small groups of children aged 1 6 years old this was the age I wanted to ‘study’. Indeed, as the brain grows to the age of 6 or 7, research indicated that we were increasing the child’s overall abilities for life by learning the extra language at the age where the brain neurological connections were being made. This excited me.

I advertised myself as “the” teacher. The first 3 groups were in Karmiel and Ya’ad (a small village near Karmiel). I couldn’t find any more students to teach. I based the lessons on the concepts of Dr. Suzuki, using homemade cassette tapes for the children and parents to use during the week; by doing this, I was replicating the Suzuki concept of a repeated background melody. To make the cassettes, I plonked on the piano while singing, I told stories and I chanted rhymes. To my ears, these early tapes, intended for twice-daily background hearing at home, sounded awful, but at least they were in English! During the once-weekly classes, the children came with the sounds and songs of the language already in their ears, even though they didn’t know the meaning. They learnt the meaning through flashcards, games, song movements and lots of fun activities all in English. The knowledge came naturally and intuitively, layers of understanding and comprehension revealing themselves the same way they did with the children’s mother tongue. Initially, there were no books. I spent a lot of time coming up with props, and also recording those early, primitive tapes.

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome. 
- Samuel Johnson

Early one morning, a mother went in to wake up her son. “Wake up, son. It’s time to go to school!” “But why, Mom? I don’t want to go.” “Give me two reasons why you don’t want to go.” “Well, the kids hate me for one, and the teachers hate me, too!” “Oh, that’s no reason not to go to school. Come on now and get ready.” “Give me two reasons why I should go to school.” “Well, for one, you’re 52-years-old. And for another, you’re the Principal!”

The next year, word had got around and I had a lot more groups to teach. The more I researched, the more excited I became, and the more convinced I was that this was absolutely the correct approach. Parents from all over Israel called me. Parents of the children learning with me were asking to enroll their 8 year olds, their 10 year olds and even their 12 year olds. Amazed, I asked why - as surely the 12-year-olds were learning a lot at school already. But parents insisted that their 6-year-old already knew more and better English than their 12-year-old.

My husband, David, and I came to the conclusion it was time for me to duplicate myself. For that, professional materials and teacher training were necessary. Yet people kept telling me that before I poured my life savings into creating the first learning set, I should do market research to see if parents would buy into such a concept. I replied that market research was useless as parents needed to be explained to as to why this was essential for their child. Clearly we had to create the market. It seemed so obvious to me, and I was amazed by the amount of resistance I encountered. I was told repeatedly that you can’t teach such young children. Or, if you could, people wouldn’t want it.

In addition, it seemed that the more enthusiastic I became, the stronger the negative reaction I got from the national mainstream educational community.

Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps. 
- David Lloyd George

The first learning set came out in 1987 English for all Children.

The first Teacher Training Course was in the summer of 1987. I’ll always remember the first phone call from the first newspaper ad. It was Lori Fagelston. I answered the phone in my tiny, cramped kitchen. Lori was enthusiastic, said that this is what she had been waiting for and she signed up on the spot! What a wonderful start!

Others needed a lot more persuading. But the first TTCs were underway with the avantgarde would-be teachers who were just waiting for HDEE to come along.

Personal responsibility is the root of all personal and professional success.
- Bud Bilanich

We are like tea bags... You don’t know how strong we are until you put us in hot water

I had vision but lacked financial understanding. I was so ignorant that I thought the first 1000 sets sold would bring me in enough money to live off of for some time. How unaware can one be?! I had no idea of business expenses or costs of production.

We moved the office out of the 60 sq m house we lived in into a village office building where we hired two rooms.

We had a part-time secretary.

David took over the computers, finances and the warehouse.

I was: development, teacher, teacher trainer, MarCom, legal desk, marketing and sales.

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. 
- Benjamin Franklin

 

The story of the lucky businessperson who gets rich quickly tends to be an urban legend. Malcolm Gladwell who wrote ‘Blink’ and ‘The Tipping Point’ researched the world’s greatest successes in various areas of their lives. His conclusion was that they weren’t blessed by luck and had no great inborn talent or skill. What they had in common was hard, hard work. Gladwell even came up with a new axiom that he called ‘the 10,000 rule’. Which is, to attain excellence at something, you have to practice it for 10,000 hours.

Well, ours was more like ‘the 70,000 rule’.

People need me they depend on me. We’re doing something important here. And knowing that gives me the energy to carry the sack, lead the pack, and keep coming back. - Santa Claus

A propos the quote, here’s a little grammatical joke.

Q: What do you call Santa’s Helpers?
A: Subordinate clauses!

Year blended into years. Nearly every year I had to bring out a new teaching set (I hadn’t initially taken that into account). Some have since been abandoned and others updated.

After many 12 years of working very hard to produce materials, we could still barely afford staff, the children seldom had holidays and still wore passed down clothes (from neighbours). Don’t get me wrong they did not feel deprived. They lived on a mountain in the Galilee with parents working near the house and felt a part of it. When asked, they will tell you (at least while I’m listening) that they can’t imagine a better childhood.

But I knew we had to change the business model. We shouldn’t be struggling on the brink of survival for so long. We had a gem. Now it was time to let the world know. And by chance Nili Gross, an Israeli teacher, took HDEE to Austria when her husband was working there. She built up a business there as she taught children, organized teacher training courses and then sold materials to the teachers. She did well during the few years she was there and then sold her business when she left to a lady who signed with me as a franchisee.

Knowledge is power and knowledge shared is power multiplied. 
- Bob Noyce

Franchising was born in 1997. Initially I didn’t realize I was franchising. I thought I had created an ingenious way of marketing. But the first person to take such an agreement in hand told me that his lawyer said that this was franchising.

I had re-invented the wheel. Franchising it was. This gave the power to advance as a group a group who knows what its clients need and who can help bring the best products.

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. 
- Samuel Ullman

It is 2010. Where are we today?

We are THE global leaders in English for babies and children.

Yes, I have trained my competitors, but in quality and scope and in student numbers, we are the leaders.

I believe that we are towards the end of the beginning of our journey. But:

Where are we going?
What are our goals?
What are our business goals?
What are our educational goals?
What are our moral goals?
What do we see as our mark and effect on the future of humanity?

I am aware that that the last question may sound bombastic. But I am a true believer that every person, whether they are living alone and tending a small patch of garden and looking after one cat, to the head of state who has a wider responsibility ... every person plays their role and can make their little corner of the universe a better place. It is that tapestry of corners that creates a larger picture.

Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value. 
- Albert Einstein

The little boy wasn’t getting good marks in school. One day he surprised the teacher. He tapped her on the shoulder and said ...”I don’t want to scare you, but my daddy says if I don’t get better grades, somebody is going to get a spanking.”

Teachers have a great responsibility.

You have already heard Rita Falter talking today. Yes, we are touching the lives of children and their families. Rita gave us some poignant and inspiring examples. But how far does it really go? Can we quantify that influence?

Please turn to your neighbours and in groups of about 2 3 discuss ideas. Write them down. After about 4 minutes, I’ll ask some of you to put forward your ideas. I am aware that you are many and will have many ideas. Put forward your best idea and I hope we’ll have time to take it during the talk. If not, you will be able to out the ideas written in this bag so we can add it to the final talk record.

The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn. 
- John Lubbock

In which way are we influencing the world citizens of tomorrow?

The individual influence

• Self-confidence
• Self-esteem
• Knowing another language like a mother tongue.
• Greater brain capacity
• Greater tolerance
• Better job prospects

The wider influence

• Bilingual = bicultural
• Multilingual = multicultural
• More so if the child starts early enough.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one’s mother’s womb. 
- Italo Calvino

What do you call a person who speaks 3 languages? Trilingual.
What do you call a person who speaks 2 languages? Bilingual.
What do you call a person who speaks 1 language? American.

Does language colour our world view, or does our world view colour our language? How many of you grew up seeing those tall leafy things as ‘trees’ and only later grew to appreciate them and their qualities when you learnt their name perhaps when your children were in kindergarten? Is it the language that created your view of the trees or the fact that the different trees needed to be named that created the language?

The Sapir-Whorf theory, named after the American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, argued that language colours our world view. Writing in 1929, Sapir argued in a classic passage that:

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached... We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. (Sapir 1958 [1929], p. 69)

A different language is a different vision of life. 
- Italo Calvino

This position was extended in the 1930s by his student Whorf, who, in another widely cited passage, declared that:

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds - and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. (Whorf 1940, pp. 213-14; his emphasis)

In its most extreme version ‘the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’ can be described as consisting of two associated principles. According to the first, linguistic determinism, our thinking is determined by language. According to the second, linguistic relativity, people who speak different languages perceive and think about the world quite differently.

 

The individual’s whole experience is built upon the plan of his language. 
- Henry Delacroix

Whilst few linguists would accept the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in its ‘strong’, extreme or deterministic form, many now accept a ‘weak’, more moderate, or limited Whorfianism, namely that the ways in which we see the world may be influenced by the kind of language we use.

Here’s an example on language and world perception. The Guugu Timithirr language speakers of the Cape York Peninsula in northeastern Australia are Aborigines and they do not have words for left, right, front, or back. They use absolute rather than relative directions. When they refer to people or objects in their environment, they use compass directions. They would say “I am standing southwest of my sister” rather than “I am standing to the left of my sister.” Critics of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis would point out that the Aborigines who speak this language also usually learn English and can use left, right, front, and back just as we do. However, if they do not learn English during early childhood, they have difficulty in orienting themselves relatively and absolute orientation makes much more sense to them.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow. 
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Children learn language as members of a speech community, which lays down “rules” for appropriate use of language. As children learn a language, they also learn their culture and develop their cognitive abilities.

Does a world speaking English colour the way people think? And if so, how and to what extent? i.e. is it moral to want everyone to speak a high level of English and from an early age? Is there a difference in the way the world is viewed between the person who learns English before the age of 7 or the person who learnt as a teenager or older?

Does English belong to a particular culture today? Or is English a world language with many cultures?

Clearly these are all relevant and important questions. We do not have time to examine the multitude of directions that cane manate from what I am saying. I am simply posing the questions as food for thought.

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas. 
- Ferdinand De Saussure

So, we are introducing another world view alongside that the child already has. Yes. Is multiculturalism healthy? I would argue very much so. Especially when introduced before the age of 7 when the child’s brain is still growing and in maximum plasticity. Indeed, many of us who moved to live in another country in our twenties or thirties, many learn to appreciate different aspects of the new cultures around us, but we often find that we remain outsiders.

Just as the only age in which a language can be learnt as a mother tongue is by immersion up to the age of 7 and again a certain window of opportunity remaining open until the age of 10, I believe this is true of learning a culture too. Indeed, language and culture are inextricably interwoven.

The EU White paper on Teaching and Training of 1995 wrote:

Languages are also the key to knowing other people. Proficiency in languages helps to build up the feeling of being European with all its cultural wealth and diversity and of understanding between the citizens of Europe.

Learning languages also has another important effect: experience shows that when undertaken from a very early age, it is an important factor in doing well at school. Contact with another language is not only compatible with becoming proficient in one’s mother tongue, it also makes it easier. It opens the mind, stimulates intellectual agility and, of course, expands people’s cultural horizon. Multilingualism is part and parcel of both European identity/citizenship and the learning society.

In order to make for proficiency in three Community languages, it is desirable for foreign language learning to start at pre-school level.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland --and no other.
- E. M. Cioran

One day in heaven, the Lord decided He would visit the earth and take a stroll. Walking down the road, He encountered a man who was crying. The Lord asked the man, “Why are you crying, my son?” The man said that he was blind and had never seen a sunset. The Lord touched the man who could then see and was happy.
As the Lord walked further, He met another man crying and asked, “Why are you crying, my son?” The man was born a cripple and was never able to walk. The Lord touched him and he could walk and he was happy.
Farther down the road, the Lord met another man who was crying and asked, “Why are you crying, my son?” The man said, “Lord, I work for the school system.” And the Lord sat down and cried with him.

Why should children start learning foreign languages before school?

The European Union is launching the Piccolingo campaign in all Member States. The campaign is aimed in particular at parents, and seeks to raise awareness about the fact that young children who start learning languages at a very early age will confidently approach foreign languages and cultures. Through the Piccolingo campaign, many parents will realise that learning languages before starting school is beneficial because their children will:

• Find communication easier
• Learn and memorise through play - good preparation for school
• Learn to be open-minded
• Feel at home in any country
• Increase their chances of finding a job
• Find foreign cultures alluring rather than threatening
• Appreciate their own culture

To have another language is to possess a second soul. 
- Charlemagne

We are preaching tolerance.

We are speaking about knowledge

We are speaking of citizens of the world who are not limited to one culture - one language.

We are speaking of citizens of the world who have many languages and many cultures.

The question remains can English serve many cultures? Can English express many cultures? What is English?

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them. 
- Bill Vaughan

We are standing at an unprecedented time in history where we are about to experience one agreed-upon world language of communication English.

How did this come about? Some of the history is a dubious colonial past that left enormous countries such as India with English as the lingua franca. However, that in itself would not have been a reason. With the USA and the UK emerging strongly in the middle of the last century after the last World War, the influence of English started to grow.

It is well-known that in order to want to learn a language, you have to want to be associated with the culture. People want to be associated with a language that is looked upon as having a higher social status. Of course, if this language can help them communicate worldwide, get better jobs and improve their own social status way to go!

There is more to life than increasing its speed. 
- Mohandas Gandhi

“Are you ambivalent?” I was asked? “Well, yes and no,” I answered.

So, English is being spoken more and more. Does it and should it replace the mother tongue?

And what happens to the mother tongue. A language dies when the last person who speaks it dies. There is nothing unusual about a language dying. Civilisations have come and gone throughout history, and with them, their language. Who today speaks Hittite or Aramaic (a previous Lingua Franca)? Language extinction has always happened. But today it is happening more. Much more. It is generally estimated that of the 6,000 or so world languages, about half are going to die out in this present century. Actually that there is a language becoming extinct every 2 weeks.

How do we know by comparative data collected by linguists. Many languages are no longer passed on to the children. In fact, a 1999 survey showed that 96% of the world’s languages are spoken by 4% of the people.

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth. 
- Elias Canetti

Why are so many languages dying? Natural disasters, cultural assimilation or genocide cover most of the reasons. Small communitie s can be wiped out by hurricanes, Tsunamis, drought, disease etc.

Cultural assimilation is the biggest threat. About 500 years ago, colonialism spread a small number of languages around the world; I am talking about English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. And when one culture assimilates to another the sequence of events appears to be the same worldwide. According to Professor David Crystal, this happens in 3 stages: 

The first is strong pressure put on the native peoples to speak the dominant language. This can be a top-down political pressure, or it can be a bottom-up pressure coming from fashionable trends that emanate from admiration for the language with the culture it represents.

The second stage is a phase of bilingualism. That is that people acquire the new language while still retaining competence in their old. In a short time, this bilingualism begins to decline with the old language being replaced by the new.

So the third stage is that in which the young prefers the new language, identify with it and finds it serves their needs better than the old language. Both the young and their parents may feel ashamed of the old language. The old language is used less and yes eventually just in the home. And then monolingualism is almost inevitable.

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost --that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization - is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization. 
- Victor Hugo

I don’t want to go into what can be done it is basically a programme called revitalization which is possible once linguists have documented. It involves government funding. It involves the desire to keep a culture alive. It usually doesn’t happen.

One outstanding example is that of modern Hebrew. It is the only example of a language being revived after 2000 years of not being a live language. (It was used in prayer and as a lingua franca over the 2000 years. But it wasn’t a mother tongue.) This was done to establish a common culture and national identity. Welsh has stopped its decline toward extinction and is showing signs of a real revival. The government has established this in two language laws and you see increasing signs of Welsh language presence all over Wales today. 

My point isn’t to go here into how to revive languages. My goal is to explain how I see the use of English.

Listen lady, I only know two languages, English and Bad English. 
- Bruce Willis, The Fifth Element

Before I continue, a word about Dialects.

Dialects have always been a form of bilingualism esp if the dialect is very different from what is expected in the written medium. Dialects are regional. Once people traveled less and you could clearly distinguish what side of the river people lived on according to their dialect. Today dialects exist as strongly as ever. If once they were more rural, they are now more urban.

Some people see dialects are a more primitive form of speech. But there is no primitive language. All languages are complex; all languages have complex phonology, grammar and lexicons. And all languages can be analyzed into a range of dialects that reflect not only the regional, but also the social background of the speaker. Standard English (what we are teaching!) is a dialect like any other, but one with more extra prestige.

Language is the means of getting an idea from my brain into yours without surgery.
-Mark Amidon

Please note the difference between dialect and accent. Accent is pronunciation. Dialect is also grammar and vocabulary. i.e. in my dialect we say ‘small child’. A Scottish dialect may say ‘wee bairn’. Normally speakers of a dialect will have the same accent. But in some cases, such as Standard English, the dialect is spoken by a large range of accents across the world. Most people in Britain will have their dialect and also understand (but often not speak) Standard English. 

On my first day of my BA in Linguistic Science, I had a class in which we had about 20 sentences. We had to mark which were grammatical. I marked about 50% grammatical and 50% ungrammatical. To my surprise, the reply was that all were spoken by native English-speakers and were part of their dialect’s grammatical structure. And in Linguistics, if it is spoken by a native-speaker, it is correct. Yet, if these native-English speakers were to take an exam in English and write like they speak, they would fail it. So, these native English-speakers may be proficient in their dialect as well as Standard English.

Two languages or two dialects? Where is the boundary between language and dialect? That is a fuzzy border. We could use mutual intelligibility as the criterion for dialect. Yet we often have a continuum of dialect - even across borders, as between Sweden and Norway where there is mutual intelligibility between the dialects, but at either end of the chain, the speakers no longer understand each other. Yet the Swedes by the border understand that Norwegians on the other side.

Language is the inventory of human experience. 
- L. W. Lockhart

The Jews who lived in medieval times in the regions of northern Iraq brought a plethora of languages to Israel with them, some of which were classified as Neo-Aramaic. Aramaic was the Lingua Franca of ancient times. The Jewish communities from early medieval times - were so isolated in the mountains that the Aramaic dialects that developed were very different, so different that the speakers of one could not converse with speakers of another and so needed a third language normally that spoken by the Muslims of the region in order to communicate with one another. 

So we see that the borderline between language and dialect is fuzzy. But we can talk of a type of bilingualism especially if the dialect is very different from the standard language, should such a standard language exist, as it does in the case of English.

To help you understand the richness that can exist in local dialects, we’ll take the example of Cockney. Indeed, most of you know Cockney as an accent. We say ‘bu??er’ (use of glottal stop) instead of butter and ‘ve fumb’ instead of the thumb etc. But it is more than that. It has its own grammar and and vocabulary so qualifies as a dialect. Here are some examples of Cockney rhyming slang:

Cockney rhyming slang:

Apples and Pears is slang for Stairs.
“Up the Apples (and Pears) to Bedfordshire”

Adam and Eve is slang for Believe.
“Can you Adam and Eve it?”

Pony and Trap is slang for Crap.
“I’m not taking any more of your pony and trap”
“I’m not taking any more of your pony”

Trouble and Strife is slang for Wife.

Bag for life is slang for Wife.
“I took me Bag for Life to the Dolly Mixtures.”
(what could Dolly Mixtures be? Yes, ‘pictures’ cinema)

Lah-di-dah is slang for Cigar.
“Two pints of bitter and a Lahdi please.”

Jumbo Jet is slang for Bet.
“I’ll put a jumbo on that horse.”

Mary Rose is slang for Nose.
“Keep yer Mary outa me business mate”

He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own. 
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I would like to draw your attention to a principle of fundamental significance: multilingualism is the normal human condition. Are you surprised? If you have lived your life in a monolingual lingual environment, you could easily believe that this is the regular way of life around the globe. Yes, and all these studies about if multilingualism is harmful or beneficial many of these studies have the slant of IF the child should learn another language. But this is the way of the world for about ¾ of the world’s population.

There are no official statistics, but with over 6,000 languages existing in about 200 countries, there must be a tremendous amount of language overlap and clearly there must be multilingualism or at least bilingualism.

And there is no such thing as a monolingual country. Even in Britain over 350 minority languages are in regular use. For example, in the Philippines: Elizabeth is a Philippine lady who looks after my mother-in-law. Her mother tongue is a language called ‘Iba‘loi. But she has a second mother tongue as many of her relatives have a different mother tongue, as a small child, she also spoke Ilocano. At school she received bilingual education (like all the children in the Philippines) but not with either of her mother tongues. She was educated in the official language - Ta‘galo - and also the second official language English. This is the normal state of affairs for people in the Philippines and also for many others in many countries.

Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably English. 
- Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

The reasons for this multilingualism or bilingualism are multifold. They can be political, cultural, educational, economic or because of natural disasters. Quite often research has been done on populations who had moved for economic reasons and research has concluded that the educational level of the bilinguals is not as good as the monolinguals. And example of this is research done on the Porto Ricans in the USA. Clearly in such cases, the dominant factor being social factors, the linguistic elements are difficult to analyze. 

Sometimes people can speak a language, but read and write in another. Indeed, what level of proficiency can be judged to be bilingualism? Perfect fluency in two languages does exist, but it is the exception rather than the rule.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future. - George Bernard Shaw

We increasingly hear today that English no longer belongs to the English - it is an international language, with Standard English as the preferred dialect.

So, do we care if languages are wiped out? Won’t we all understand each other better with one language (English of course!)?! Won’t a more universal world view better serve world peace and harmony. Are we HDEE teachers envoys of this goal?

Here’s my “I believe”. I believe that English (outside of English-speaking countries) should continue to be a lingua franca, but not as sole language taking over the world. Lingua Franca means that it is a bridge language a language that allows two people that speak different vernacular languages to be able to communicate. If one person’s mother tongue is Swahili and the other person’s mother tongue is Portuguese, they will be able to communicate in English, as example, as the lingua franca.

This preserves the person’s mother tongue and their culture. Research indicates that people who are true bilinguals (learnt the language in a mother tongue fashion before the age of 7) will be more intelligent, have wider concepts, see the world through more than one type of mental viewpoint, be more tolerant, be more able to express themselves, be tuned to their own culture and the needs to their own corner of the world.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. 
- Leonardo da Vinci

And why English and not Esperanto? Esperanto was the invention of a Polish oculist called Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof who died in 1917. It is perhaps the most successful and heard about of artificial languages and has about 1.5 million fluent speakers at various levels of proficiency. Like other artificial languages, it was and is seen as the key to mutual world understanding and peace. However, natural languages foster identity and internal variation in the form of dialects. And for a host of reasons, artificial languages, of which Esperanto is one, have not gained popular following. It appears that language needs to have a status that motivates people to speak it, and it needs a culture that stands with it and behind it. 

What have we talked about until now?

Happinessis not a destination: it is a manner of traveling. Happiness is not an end in itself. It is a by-product of working, playing, loving and living. 
- Haim Ginott

And what is your role in all of this?

It is in endowing true bilingualism. I’ll repeat that: 

Your role is in endowing true bilingualism. 

How do you do that? By teaching babies and children English with background home listening, positive reinforcement and with the best, the most positive and most suitable learning materials. You are giving children year after year of consecutive learning, joyfully, systematically and a love of learning English and other disciplines .. for life.

Well done!

As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. - Marianne Williamson