Interesting article on Englsh Teaching in 'The Economist'

[Olympian]

Hello,

There is an interesting article in The Economist about English Teaching. According to the forum rules, I am only quoting a part of the article and in case readers find it interesting, I am providing a link to the article.

"SOME advice is worse than useless. A short list of bullet points from eHow, a website, that is passing around social networks purports to show “how to write good.” (Each rule was jokingly broken in explaining it.) Unfortunately, it will not help most people write good. Two of the rules explained not to split infinitives or end sentences with a preposition. But both “split infinitives” and sentence-ending prepositions have been native to English, used by the finest writers, for centuries. The rest of the eHow list included the injunction that “the passive voice is to be avoided”. But sadly, many writers, even professionals,cannot recognise the grammatical passive voice. (Here is a compendium of examples of writers calling out others for using the passive, when no passive has been used.)"

Full article: http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/03/english-teaching

I hope you find it interesting.

 

[Tdol]

It is an interesting article and I agree with the general drift. However, I am not sure that their solution would resolve everything. In my English degree, we did have to take language courses- at least a quarter of the degree. This could include Old or Middle English, but half of the language courses had to be about contemporary linguistic views of English. Many felt that they were there to study literature and regarded the language options as something of an imposition. I agree that including language courses in English degrees makes sense, but that wouldn't necessarily translate into the writer's ideal world of English teaching. Also, the writer says that English majors become English teachers; some do, others go on to do other things and not all English teachers were English majors.