Well, obviously: the web is a neat place! The most recent example is this: a couple of weeks ago, Sue from ELT Notebook emailed me an interesting article about Frananglais in Cameroon. I soon passed it on to the team at ESL Pundit as well as to Chris at the Bootsnall Paris Logue and asked both sites for their thoughts on it. Chris explained her opinion from the point of view of a long-term resident of Paris, and ESL Pundit actually discussed the article with a linguistics class and posted the group’s ideas here. Within the course of a few days, this topic and line of communication went from three countries in Europe to a linguistic class in the US.
Certainly the web is not a panacea (take that, GRE verbal ability test!) and I think we can all agree that there are many occasions on which it does add an extra layer of complication to life. But overall, the advantages are amazing, especially for a field like TEFL. If you think you might want to teach, you can read some travel stories or TEFL blogs or message boards to get a better idea of what’s out there waiting for you. If you are sure you want to teach but don’t yet have a job, you can compare what’s on offer in different countries before arriving. If you’re already teaching, you can visit sites like ESL Base, OneStopEnglish.com and Breaking News English to get ideas for classes. And that’s just the beginning. Leaving your country to teach in a foreign one is still somewhat of a leap of faith, but twenty or even ten years ago, these things we consider the bare bones of preparation today were just not available.
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Hi Katie,
I’ve just read what the other people have said about Frananglais, and I’m afraid I think they’ve missed the point. A Creole is not just a matter of “catching a few words here and there and guess(ing) the rest of the context of the sentence”. It’s a rule governed labnguage. In Frananglais you can’t just shove in a couple of words into a sentence of the other language - there are clear and definite rules which emerge even from the few examples given in the BBC article. A comparison would be with code switching what bilinguals ( and I speak as a bilingual who code switches all the time) do. Code switched sentences may be mixed, but each phrase is always grammatical in terms of one or other language. We might start a sentence in one language and finish in the other, or insert a phrase from one into the other, but not mix up the grammatical structures as in “Tu as sleep hier?” I could imagine saying “Tu as dormi yesterday?” or “Did you sleep hier?” but not creating a new past form which was a mix of the two.
And that seems to me to be crucial from the linguistiic point of view - in Frananglais they’ve invented a new grammatical form - Have auxiliary + infinitive - which doesn’t exist in either of the two original languages. If you look at the other examples given, it’s quite regular : Subject +avoir/etre auxiliary in French is always followed by infinitive main verb in English - tu as go / il est come etc. And presuming that these examples are representative, it always happens that way round - never for example Did you dormi yesterday? Code switching is more random, in that I might say something in one language one day, and the same thing in the other language the next.
So Frananglais is regular, with definite rules that can be codified. Which qualifies it linguistically as a new language.
It is such an interesting topic - some questions that come to my mind are:
- Given this - that it is a new language with its own (new/unique) rules - does that mean the schools should start teaching it or considering it correct language? I can think of arguments on both sides.
- Is the claim that it is affecting students’ respective grasps of French and English accurate? I know there is research on learning two languages or growing up bilingual…but the situation in Cameroon seems unique.
I brought this up briefly with some students who grew up hearing/reading both Czech and Slovak (but generally only speaking in their own) - two similar languages though they are officially (and unofficially, if that makes sense)acknowledged as in fact different. Again, the situation is not parallel because no third “common” language emerged - people already understood the other language. Most people felt “Why not let them speak it if that’s what they prefer.”
-In conclusion, I don’t know! Comments? Sue? Anyone who has yet to join the discussion?
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