Inspiring Youth to learn English

Have to speak to a class of youngsters

[pmkpmk]

A friend of mine is an English teacher at some sort of engineer school. The German school system is a bit complicated - the pupils of this type of "vocational school" will never be the front row cutting edge engineers, but rather the lowly peasants of the 4th echelon - the guys who make the wheels turn. Nevertheless, they too need another kind of education for a globalized world if we do not want to write them off directly from the beginning.

My friend had the idea that they might believe an outsider a bit more than they believe her, and asked me if I would like to come in for a session and tell them a bit about the need for English in a modern business environment.

I'm not supposed to give a lecture along the lines of "Thou shalst learn English!", but rather to get an insight in how many aspects English is important.

So my question goes to native speakers and non-native speakers: How essential is English for a job in the IT industry?

For the non-native speakers: How often do you actually use it?
For the native speakers: What level of English do you expect from someone from abroad calling or emailing you?

Though I think I know the answers, some mindshare will be appreciated.

[zCat]

As a native speaker working in a German IT environment, I've noticed I have a huge "competitive advantage" over colleagues who don't read or write English fluently when it comes to using the Internet to solve problems. Particularly as the more cutting edge information is only available in English, so anyone unable to access this is at a distinct disadvantage.

[jecasc]

As a non-native english speaker I need English every day.

- to read technical documentations like Request for Comments
- for manuals only available in english
- to get the latest information in my niche
- to install and configure software that is only available in english
- to communicate with customers
- to register .com domains
- for webmasterworld.com

All in all: Without english you are cut of from at least 4/5 of information.

And last but not least it is simply fun to be able to communicate and exchange thoughts with people all over the world.

[DamonHD]

Hi,

If nothing else, most of the critical Wortschatz is (American) English, and it is hard to get along without nouns and verbs...

For example, I can listen to two of my Maltese developers chatting about our system and guess fairly well what they are saying simply from the English words that they have to use... B^> They get scared when I jump in (in English) with my views...

Rgds

Damon

[Matt Probert]

As an English speaker and a professional writer, I hate to admit it, but from an international IT perspective American English is more universal than true English.

For example, the Americans say "program", as indeed does the IT world, but in real English one says "programme". We also tend to use nought, while IT and the USA use zero.

<sigh>

American English is a bonus for work in IT :(

Matt

[vincevincevince]

As a developer I hate working with people who don't have fluent English! It makes it very hard for them to write specs, and even their variable names in code can be hard to understand...

[lawman]

We also tend to use nought, while IT and the USA use zero

What about Jethro Bodine? He referred to himself as a double-nought spy. :)

[JollyK]

I guess I'd say that if they don't want to advance, and they're happy to stay at "4th echelon," there's no reason to learn English. In the USA, we might refer to it as "working at McDonald's," in other words, a job that requires pretty much no education or skills and pays the lowest legal wage. If that is what you're happy to do with your life, great! Do not bother learning English, or much of anything.

In fact, they shouldn't learn English, because if they do, they might end up being reasonable competition for me. I don't need competition, so they should definitely not bother with English at all.

Okay, sorry. :-) To answer your question:

"For the native speakers: What level of English do you expect from someone from abroad calling or emailing you?"

I actually don't have much of an expectation, other than that I hope to be able to understand them. I have had some interesting emails where the person obviously typed it into Babelfish or somesuch -- Korean is almost impossible to understand after machine translation to English. And then there was the fellow from Spain who had "27 anos." (He was trying to say he was 27 years old, but leaving off the ~ on the n, combined with machine translation, gives unintentionally hilarious results.)

Tell the students to avoid machine translation at all costs. No matter how bad their English is, it is probably more understandable than the computer's "German to English."

I wouldn't hire or subcontract work to someone unless they had reasonable English writing skills. ("Reasonable" for a programmer means clearly documented code, understandable sentences, and so forth, plus the ability to write and respond coherently to emails.) If I'm contracting for work, or they're wanting to contract me, we're going to have to do the conversing in English. I can converse simply in a few non-English languages, read several others, and puzzle out still more with the help of Babelfish et al, but I just don't have the vocabulary to discuss technical subjects in any of these languages. English seems to be widespread enough to be a common denominator for many.

Not sure if that's helpful at all.

JK

[saoi_jp]

real English

...

[pmkpmk]

Yes?

[percentages]

I'm English, living in the USA.

Tonight was the season premier of a show called "The Amazing Race".......a very popular show in the USA.

The participants (USA residents) were immediately sent to Brazil. One team immediately determined they had the advantage because they could speak Spanish......the language of the "World"......LOL.

No offence to anyone, but, Spanish is not the language of Brazil or the "New World". English is the language of the "Internet" until the Chinese say otherwise!

I think it is most likely that English will become the adopted language of the World simply because of the current American influence.

The Internet is certainly dominated by English at this point in time, and the Internet is also the place where other nations have to look to learn.