What we read
As we have already seen in Unit 5, Boyle and Warwick introduce Unit 6 of Skillful, "Legacy" (2014, p. 57), with a large image and some discussion questions to start us thinking about the topic of this unit.
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Boyle and Warwick's questions
Think about these questions for a minute, then respond in a three paragraph comment.
You can answer the questions in any order you like.
As you write, imagine that you are writing for readers who have not seen the questions. That is, make your answers stand as clear statements independently of the questions. This will make your writing here stronger.
- What languages do you speak? Do your parents and grandparents speak the same languages?
- Think about the idioms, expressions, and other ways of speaking you use in your first language (or in English). Which of these things has had the biggest influence on the way you speak?
- Would the world be better off if everyone had the same first language? What are some advantages and disadvantages of this?
You can answer the questions in any order you like.
As you write, imagine that you are writing for readers who have not seen the questions. That is, make your answers stand as clear statements independently of the questions. This will make your writing here stronger.
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Reference
- Boyle, M. & Warwick, L. (2014). Skillful Reading & Writing, Student's Book 4. London: Macmillan Education
Since I'm from Australia, my first language is English, which I learned before I ever studied in school. Thai, in contrast, is a second language for me. I only learned it after I came to live in Thailand, and I began by studying it in a school, at AUA in fact.
ReplyDeleteMy parents both spoke English only, although my father also spoke some Italian as a child. His father, my grandfather, spoke Italian as his native language, and was not very fluent in English, although my other grandparents all spoke English fluently.
I was very shy as a child, and still am today, which led me to reading a lot more than most children in my school or elsewhere. I often read a book a day, and I think this had an effect on my English, which was bit more formal than most people. I notice the same when I go back home now: my nieces and nephews especially sound different when they speak. They have a stronger Australian accent, which I don't really have, and they use a lot more slang and unconventional grammar in their speech. I speak less formally than I normally write, but I suspect they think I'm very old-fashioned in the way I speak. Perhaps the influence of Facebook has had some impact recently, although I still write at least a full phrase even for a quickie comment on something. I just can't bring myself to comfortably write things like LOL, although I can occasionally manage a 555 comment on friend's post in Thai.
Even when I used to use Twitter, I couldn't bear to use abbreviations. Academic writing does not use things like etc., eg, ie. in text, and those habits seem hard-wired into me after decades of practice. (Some of you have already seen my comments on such abbreviations in your own written work, although they would be fine in a blog post or comment.)
Would the world be better off if everyone spoke one language? I'm not sure, but I think this question might be becoming academic as the world moves in practice to using one language, English, for an increasing number of people. Like Latin the West for almost 2,000 years, English is the de facto educated language of communication, even in countries like China, India and elsewhere. I wouldn't want other languages to fall out of use, but wide fluency in one language probably is helpful for effective communication across cultures.
I found Twitter useful because it forced me to be brief, which is something I've always had a problem with. 140 characters was barely enough to write even one grammatically well-formed sentence.
DeleteBut I haven't used Twitter for a couple of years now.
I am speaking two languages. My first language is same as my parents and my grandparents spoke. There are many parameters influence on the way I speak right now. The biggest one is books. Nowadays, most people speak two languages. They learnt a second language for many reasons such as study or work. However, in order to speak a second language fluently as first language, perhaps you need a long time with spending a lot of time and money, and this is one of disadvantage of everyone in the world has the same language. On the other hand, the learning of many languages leads to improve the brain skills and this is one advantage of there are many languages in the world.
ReplyDeleteSo, what is your first language?
DeleteMy first language is Arabic.
DeleteMy first language which i could speak is Thai and it had been professionally improving along my age. My parent and my entire relatives are spoken Thai, even though my grandparent originally from China, but they don't speak Chinese with me, that's why I'm a native speaker of Thai. As to say about my language, the most influence of the way I speak is my friends and books. I commonly use some sentences that I talked to my peers, jokes, towards my family and borrow some from the book. With my mother language is Thai, so that I can communicate to other Thai people easily, but what about people in other region?, probably too hard to understand because of different usage of language. So, would it be better if all people in the world using the same language?, for me, I would say "yes", but It will be a little bit boring and has no aspiration to improve myself.
ReplyDeleteMy grandparents had done the same with Italian. They tried not to speak it at home, so my father couldn't really speak it. I think that was a mistake, and would like to have grown up also speaking Italian, but at the time, people thought, wrongly, that a second language at home would interfere with learning English.
DeleteI strongly agree with your idea because restricting me only to speak Thai cause me to lost the opportunity in the future and has no more intention of study that language.
DeleteAll of my family speaks Thai. For the same first language, it takes a long time to be that, because our world has many people more than ten billions humans. For good advantages, the people can easily connect each other, and people don't go to learn extra class. For me, the biggest influence is the books because they are founded every places.
ReplyDeleteThat was kind of my idea, although I'm sure the spoken English around me was more important, certainly for learning English before I ever got to school. But books were also influential there becuase we had a library in our house and my parents always read a lot, so spoke a little differently to most of the people in the farming area I grew up in.
DeleteYes it's true that billion of people are difference from each other but every people will connect to each other by language.
Delete-Thai is my first language and I can speak English too.I started to speak Thai since I was born and started to learn English when I was 6 years old.
ReplyDelete-
-Now, I do speak 3 languages; Thai as my mother-tongue language, English as ESL students and a bit Japanese, I've studied for 4 years. In my family, there's just me and my brother who are able to speak English because He used to went to Australia studying English for 6 months. By the way, My mom is able to speak and understand English a bit. But no one in my family can speak Japanese tho.
ReplyDelete- Presently, All phrases and idioms I use are from television,i.e. series, songs, and the internet such as YouTube. When I listen to the new vocab, I'll go search the meaning of it in the internet immediately.
- I think it would be better if there's just only one language in this world as first it's easy for communication, second it makes unity of people. However, if there's just only one language, there would have no difference or diversity of each countries as There's no individual. In accordance to that, culture would not be created.
Great, I like your ideas.
DeleteI born in Thai-Chinese family but my parents can't speak any Chinese. I sometimes heard my grandmother speak in Cantonese with her sister but I've never learned the language.
ReplyDeleteThe big influence on the way I speak in Thai is friends. But for English language, I tried to learn from watching movies. When I went to study in Belgium, my English improve a little bit because people there mostly speak Flemish (similar to Dutch).
I speak three languages. My mother tongue is Thai. I could speak Thai before I even started school. At first, I found it difficult to learn Thai language due to its numerous and complicated alphabets. However, I managed to speak Thai fluently because of the necessity in my daily life. My second language is English. When I was 2 years old, my dad used to let me watch English cartoons like Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan and Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer. The third language that I can speak is Spanish-Castellano. It is a type of Spanish language in Argentina. It is a little bit different from normal Spanish.
ReplyDeleteAccording to the questions above, I speak Thai language as the mother tongue as well as my family. Some idioms and phrases that I usually speak in my language is very vary such as Sa-wad-dee krub, Sa-bai-dee-mai and Pen-yang-rai-bang mostly use for greeting; moreover, in Thai language has a lot of idioms and metaphors, for example, Ka-khong-kon-yue-tee-pon-khong-ngan and it means that a valuable of man depends on work or behavior. different to an English language, I use it when I talk with foreigners, writing research articles and sometimes talking with Thai friends. Most phrases that I use to talk such as Good morning, How are you?, how do you do?, what are you doing? etc.
ReplyDelete