JEDDAH, 2 May 2003 — In one of the 19th century’s better-known foreign language phrasebooks designed for the use of travelers from England in Europe, there appeared the informative but entirely useless phrase “Ostler, my postillion has been struck by lightning.”
It’s just possible that the occasional wealthy itinerant on the Grand Tour took a postillion, but it is unlikely that any ever got struck by lightning. Even if they did, there were plenty more where they came from and the loss of one or two barely needed reporting.
Impressive in German, Italian and French, the phrase was perfectly correct grammar, but was it useful, relevant or anything other to advertise the grandness of the writer in a feeble attempt to be thought of as a man of linguistic stature?
“Yuck” and “Have you ever tried frog’s legs?” is what one professor, a “recognized authority on methodology, teacher development and material design” who has “consulted widely” in East Asia wide came up with as a less grandiloquent but equally useless format that he thought a learner of English should know. I venture to suggest that he is wrong; it’s not among the first words necessary to teach a learner of English.
It takes two to tango in any institution involved in teaching: the people who write the material and those who buy it. Why then do colleges, technical and even military institutions buy material that imports a culture in the teaching material that the Kingdom eschews, yet uses it as a basis for English language teaching?
Why, in a country with no cinemas, bars, nightclubs, discothèques, teenagers or girlfriends as part of youth culture are students inflicted with irrelevant teaching material that assumes familiarity with these institutions? What relevance does this have to the reality of Saudi Arabia?
There is one institution that is using a book initially written 50 years ago, designed for non-native speakers of English to teach English to foreign students in the rarified environment of San Antonio, Texas. Female military officers stepping out of showers is just one of the “culturally inappropriate” — or downright irrelevant — topics used to convey a language exponent. There are many more, the stuff of ribald humor in English teaching circles.
The government has wisely decided that learning English is important. De facto, English or local versions of it including Pidgin, Indo-English and American, comprise the language of business, science, and a great deal of industry around the world. It is equally true that learning a language involves learning something of the culture that the language derives from. Language cannot be learned in isolation from the culture that produced it. However, it can be made more relevant to the culture that is learning it.
Hopefully, the days when the old sore “a language is a dialect with an army behind it” rang true have gone. It still true though that language has a culture behind it, and it follows that the best way to learn a language is to spend time in the country that produced it. Clearly that is not an option open to all.
In that case, the alternative is providing teaching material and teachers that relates the target language meaningfully to the local culture and gives the language some relevance.
