English as a second language
More or less explicit in this hateful article (front page today) in the red top The Sun is the supposition that anyone living in the UK who does not have English as a first language is automatically less intelligent, or at least less worthy, than those who do. (Edit: the headline was 'Broken English'. Make of that what you will.)
The article presents facts (doesn't say from where) that indicate one in seven primary school children in the UK have a first language which isn't English. The article doesn't indicate whether or not this applies to England or the whole of the UK: I suspect the former, yet again showing the breathtaking inability in areas of the British press to distinguish between the two entities.
There are loads of words present in the article text which give it an antagonistic, nasty slant. Witness words like councils having to spend "scarce resources", the "difficult life" of a teacher who doesn't share a first language with the children in his class, staff who are "struggling", the "failure" of the Government, the "danger" (!!) of children growing up in communities where English is not the predominant first language, and calling the whole issue a "problem".
On one hand I can understand that if I were a teacher with a class where not everybody understood the same language, life would be difficult. But nothing explicit in the findings the article discusses indicates that these 2nd language Emglish children are actually incompetent at English: it seems that the fact that they speak Punjabi, Urdu or Bengali at home automatically makes them a hassle in the classroom.
Also note the automatic knee-jerk right wing reaction which links this to the topic of immigration, whereby anyone who doesn't speak good English is presumably unsuitable to live here.
The article makes no reference at all to the other 'indigenous' languages of Britain, e.g. Welsh, which is why I suspect it's England they're talking about (there are guaranteed enough 1st language Welsh kids around in Wales to make that top 10 list if it wasn't). But my first language is not English; it's Welsh. I don't remember any problems at all in my school because of this. Indeed, my reception teacher effectively managed to teach a whole class to speak English, and did so year after year. And now, every single Welsh speaker I know is fluent in English. Why shouldn't the same be true of the children who go to school in England with Gujurati or Polish as their first language?
The article presents facts (doesn't say from where) that indicate one in seven primary school children in the UK have a first language which isn't English. The article doesn't indicate whether or not this applies to England or the whole of the UK: I suspect the former, yet again showing the breathtaking inability in areas of the British press to distinguish between the two entities.
There are loads of words present in the article text which give it an antagonistic, nasty slant. Witness words like councils having to spend "scarce resources", the "difficult life" of a teacher who doesn't share a first language with the children in his class, staff who are "struggling", the "failure" of the Government, the "danger" (!!) of children growing up in communities where English is not the predominant first language, and calling the whole issue a "problem".
On one hand I can understand that if I were a teacher with a class where not everybody understood the same language, life would be difficult. But nothing explicit in the findings the article discusses indicates that these 2nd language Emglish children are actually incompetent at English: it seems that the fact that they speak Punjabi, Urdu or Bengali at home automatically makes them a hassle in the classroom.
Also note the automatic knee-jerk right wing reaction which links this to the topic of immigration, whereby anyone who doesn't speak good English is presumably unsuitable to live here.
The article makes no reference at all to the other 'indigenous' languages of Britain, e.g. Welsh, which is why I suspect it's England they're talking about (there are guaranteed enough 1st language Welsh kids around in Wales to make that top 10 list if it wasn't). But my first language is not English; it's Welsh. I don't remember any problems at all in my school because of this. Indeed, my reception teacher effectively managed to teach a whole class to speak English, and did so year after year. And now, every single Welsh speaker I know is fluent in English. Why shouldn't the same be true of the children who go to school in England with Gujurati or Polish as their first language?