About English Online

by Hugh M. Lewis

Principles and practices

These pages are devoted to promoting English learning through providing on-line resources for both teachers and students. The design of our materials has been based on research and teaching in English as a second language in Malaysia and in Mainland China, and their presentation here is intended to assist students and teachers of English with special but different sets of needs. We provide a variety of materials in a holistic approach that combines basic and non-basic vocabulary, whole language and phonics approaches, and analytic-synthetic English acquisition approaches in a combined curriculum. Needs, levels and abilities in English acquisition vary between students and between different groups of students according to a number of different factors--often needs remain unmet because they are poorly understood. Learning to recognize clearly what the needs are in what areas is a first step towards tackling the tremendous problem of English acquisition.

The method to teaching English used here is to be considered a descriptive and non-didactic approach based on linguistic principles rather than the conventional and more common prescriptive and didactic style of teaching English found in traditional English departments all around the world.

It is our intention to promote not only improved English skills in the world in a manner that is suitable to the special needs of otherwise resource-deficient schools and communities, but also to convey a sense of the inherent beauty and power of the English language. It is our intention to convey the central importance of the English language and its practice in English-speaking cultures the world over.

English acquisition represents unique problems for many foreign speakers in part because the structure and vocabulary of the language represents a complex and variegated history of the language that has been influenced for at least two thousand years by various exogenous sources. The basic problem in English acquisition will depend centrally upon the relative proximity or distance of the native language of the foreign speaker to English itself, as well as on the relative oral skills and cognitive background of the student in their own society. These differences appear in many ways--in the phonetics and phonology of the spoken and heard language, in the structure of phrase construction, in idiomatic expressions and in the connotative implications of its vocabulary.

Needless to comment, English has a huge lexicon of words. The challenge of learning English is daunting even for English speakers, and people spend their lifetime in the mastery of the language. It is important to understand that learning English at an advanced state is learning to see the world in a different way, and to learn to think about and understand the world in foreign terms. Learning the language opens the door to a whole new way of construing and responding to the world.

While in China I had been asked repeatedly such questions as whether it is better to emulate the British or the American dialects--being facetious I would usually respond that a thick Australian or Southern Appalachian accent were the prettiest sounding. The received and implicit standard of Mainland China, that heard on the evening news and on the radio programs, was in fact a poor and strained version of the Queen's English. It needs to be understood that the language context of the acquisition of English varies substantially from area to area, region to region and nation to nation. Understanding this context is a key to understanding both the needs of speakers of these areas and the kind of tactical working program that might be tailored for them.

For example, in China, there are enough students and teachers of English as to comprise a very significant number of total English speakers in the world. Their "dialect" of English is unique, one that I dubbed "Chinglish" after similar English dialects heard in Singapore (Singlish) and Penang (Penglish). The critical question arose as to whether their English language as it was practiced so diligently in schools, in business and frequently found on the media represented a "true" dialect of English. My conclusion was "no, not yet, but it might very well become so." Outside of the functional integration of English in the schools, there would otherwise be no native platform of the language in the society. There is no natural speech community of English speakers who identify with English as their primary or even alternate language.

On the other hand, "Crazy Chinglish" as it is spoken and used in China has enough of its own quirks and predictable traits of pronunciation, error pattern, idiomatic expression and praxis among an on-going community of speakers, as to qualify it as a possible candidate for a new kind of English dialect. It will become a true dialect if and when its speakers become relatively independent in their use of the language. The Chinese community of English speakers can be represented as having a "fused" form of English that in general and on average tends to rely heavily, if not completely, on "back-translation" to Chinese. While this alone might serve to technically disqualify it as a genuine kind of English, the shear weight and mass of this Chinglish speaking community entails that it has an historical momentum that should not be ignored.

Before proceeding, it is important to dispel some common myths about English programs. There is no program on earth that can teach fluency in a short period of time. Those expensive programs that promise more than they deliver do students a disservice by leading them on with false expectations about English. On the other hand, if English is approached in the correct way, it should never be construed as a language so difficult to learn that it can never be mastered. It is not impossible to achieve remarkable improvement in oral, listening, speaking and thinking skills in English within a relatively short period of time (3 to 6 months, if you already have some background in the language and enough immersion.)

With these caveats, we wish you luck in your English experiences, and invite you to openly correspond with us regarding our English pages or other interesting inputs you might have for us.