(Image from http://bit.ly/a184ha)
Here goes a brief piece at the NYT - English-Language Teaching Deserves Its Due. And there is a passage in it that hits the spot:
Learning French, Greek or Chinese is considered neither an easy nor basic task even for your exceptional Ivy League student; why should learning English be considered differently?
It has developed that it is rather cumbersome for an individual to cross the dichotomy between the Indo-European languages, English for one thing, and the East Asian languages, including Chinese and Japanese. And that is precisely why it is far easier for an English speaker to acquire Spanish and so on than the Chinese language, and on the other hand, for a Chinese to master the Japanese tongue than the English one.
Enormous difficulties notwithstanding, the imperative to gain fantastic English proficiency is not to be ignored by a speaker of an East Asian language, given the omnipresence of the one and only sucking global economy. The better part of the 21st century will see some intriguing realignment of global resources, especially human capital and cultural capital, along the dimensions of distinct languages families.
