Its the lingo by jingo

12 Apr 2009

Its the lingo by jingo

Current mood:sad

While I trained to become a music teacher I found that one of the biggest difficulty facing teachers were pupils that don't speak English, these pupils are listed as EAL 'English as an additioanl language', pupils at Woodside high school, in White Hart Lane, Tottenham speak a staggering 64 languages, 80% are considered EAL.  In Bradford more than 70 per cent of children at nearly a quarter of mainstream primary schools in the district do not speak English as their first language.  90-plus different languages are mother tongues of some 16,623 pupils in Bradford district’s 40 most linguistically-diverse primaries.  Keighley MP Ann Cryer said children learning a second language at school were being undermined by parents at home.  She said: “I’ve been talking about it for years of the importance for Asian families to speak English at home and I’m told I’m interfering but it’s their children that suffer.  There are families where one parent can speak English but the spouse can’t and it’s difficult to sustain a conversation so they speak in Punjabi".  Cullingworth and Denholme Tory MP Philip Davies said: “Everyone criticises Bradford schools and Education Bradford for the fact they are near the bottom of the league tables but there is little wonder when schools are having to deal with many children who do not speak English as a first language. The responsibility is largely down to parents, who should be encouraging their children to speak English or learn some of the language before they go to school. How do you teach a child when it cannot speak English? Teachers are in an impossible situation.  We cannot have other children held back because so much time and effort is being spent learning basic things that they should know already.”
Across Britain one in seven schoolchildren speak English as a second language.
The problem of language is an acute one in this country, what good is the opportunity for British people to work in EU countries when they can't speak, read or write the language.  Whereas all the people in Europe learn to speak English at school and therefore come to Britain, how many Brits at school learn't to speak  Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Latvian, lithuanian, maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene and Swedish.the answer is none.   It would be far more advantageous for Brits if we setup the free movement of labour and goods arrangements we have with the EU, with English speaking commonwealth countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the West Indies.  But the EU wouldn't let us, when we joined the EU would had to give up the special trading arrangments we had with these countries which mean't we enjoyed cheap fruit from the West Indies and  Butter and Lamb from New Zealand etc.  Many think this isn’t a unified nation anymore. It’s a class ridden overcrowded island divided between the have's ands the chavs in which the idea of English identity has been savaged by mass migration and the dogma of multi-culturalism.  And as Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel I predict that rising unemployment and poverty will lead to civil strife, the very least we can do to avoid this is start speaking English in England, when in Rome etc.