WHY LEARN ENGLISH?
Why should young people learn English as a foreign language at school? In this essay I would like to mention the main causes that have set the conditions for the use of English as an international language and, therefore, the importance that this language has for the professional future of our students.
Nowadays over 360 million people speak English as their mother tongue and it is numerically the second language spoken in the world. Chinese is the first, but it seems quite obvious that this language cannot become a lingua franca as English is today, because English is not only the language of the United Kingdom and the USA; it is also the official language of more than 45 countries. In addition, more and more often students are choosing to learn English as a foreign language and, as a result, over a billion people speak English at least at a basic level. No other language can claim to be spoken in the five continents.
The influence of the British Empire was the primary reason for the initial spread of the English language far beyond the British Isles. Later, following the Second World War, the growing economic and cultural influence of the United States significantly accelerated the extension of the language.
Modern English is sometimes described as the global lingua franca because it is the dominant international language in communications, science, business, aviation, entertainment, radio and diplomacy. The reason is that important industrial and technological achievements, mainly coming from English-speaking countries, appeared accompanied by a corresponding word in English. This strong influence has even affected the structures and vocabularies of many languages in the world, as it is the case of Spanglish, a kind of speech very used by the population of Mexico that lives near the border with USA, which are exposed to both Spanish and English.
Furthermore, some international conflicts, such as the persecution of the Jews under Nazi Germany or the flight of scientists from communist countries to America, increased enormously the number of American citizens devoted to science. Therefore it is completely understandable that the new terms came up in English. The use of these terms in other countries is a subsequent influence of English.
We will not say that English is an easy language, but certainly some aspects of it are easy to learn and to remember. For instance, “off” and “on” to indicate that a machine is working or not are such simple words to express a notion that almost every machine in the world uses them. In addition, some grammatical features of English, such as the non-gender mark of common nouns, the simple verbal conjugation (once learnt, the irregular verbs do not pose any problem), the simple pronoun system, the use of “you” to indicate singular, plural, formal and informal and the easy adaptation of words from other languages, make English a very suitable language to use if anyone needs to try a different language from his mother tongue.
English is very important for the future professional career of our students, because this may be curtailed if they are not fluent in English, or at least have acquired a level of English that let them to cope with their work. Therefore, English teachers should make their students aware that some sort of fluency in English is no longer simply a merit to add to their curriculum, but a requirement, and the first and best place to become fluent in English is at schools.
