Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

I think diversity as in the sense of minorities being allowed (not just in a legal sense but in terms of societal resistance) to succeed and rise to prominence IS progress.

Just to come back to this - maybe there is progress. Because I just read an article with the Lib Dems response to Yousaf's election as "same old same old". Maybe the most striking thing is less Yousaf's background than that he was the continuity, party establishment candidate - arguably something similar with Sunak

That's also perhaps why it doesn't really necessarily feel like progress?

Out of curiosity looked a bit at what English textbooks in Germany now look like. They still have the usual thing of picking kids as "main characters" for students to latch onto but the cast has become a lot more diverse since I was taught with the "Clark Family".

I don't know why but I'm surprised they're in Britain at all In my head I always thought German English learning was more American focused. I don't know why I thought that - maybe the relative popularity of the NFL in Germany, all the American bases etc

[The Larch]

I don't know why but I'm surprised they're in Britain at all In my head I always thought German English learning was more American focused. I don't know why I thought that - maybe the relative popularity of the NFL in Germany, all the American bases etc

It seems to me that all the English language classes in Europe are focused on British English rather than American English.

[Syt]

Yes, and even in my time teachers were unhappy when students used American words/pronunciations instead of British - but hey, the American stuff was often easier (theater vs theatre - Theater in German, truck vs. lorry, how to say 'dance' ....).

Usually you would have a semester or two contrasting American and British English. I recall one of my text books had an excerpt from a US TV guide, with the text saying "there's even advertisement breaks during news broadcasts"

I do recall the listing had "The Mechanic" with Charles Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent.

[Sheilbh]

It seems to me that all the English language classes in Europe are focused on British English rather than American English.

Weird. That seems very strange to me. I thought there might be some teaching of British English but the dominant mode would be US-focused, not least because American spelling makes more sense

Having said that I think Spanish in British schools is Spanish Spanish, although I'm not sure - and I think the set texts are often Latin American so who knows

[HVC]

The uk is closer so more teachers (especially pre brexit). All my portuguese cousins have British accents. It's off-putting 

[Syt]

The uk is closer so more teachers (especially pre brexit). All my portuguese cousins have British accents. It's off-putting 

That presumes that Brits go to teach English in schools, which is not common in Germany. At least I've never run into a Brit teaching English in German public (really public, not private-public like in UK ) schools.

[Josquius]

The uk is closer so more teachers (especially pre brexit). All my portuguese cousins have British accents. It's off-putting 

Portuguese people I find are pretty unique in this. They tend to have shockingly good and British English.
Stark contrast to other Latin countries where they have their own accents or northern European countries where they tend to sound American (except ze Germans of course)

[Sheilbh]

Same. It might have shifted but when I was at school all the French and German teachers were Brits who studied French or German at uni. I think Spanish has since overtaken them both but wasn't an option at any of the schools I went to - and back then French and German were the standard options.

We had exchange teachers sometimes but they were normally in another subject. And I don't think it would work because it's the one subject you don't have in your home country's school. For example, an English teacher from the UK would not be able to teach English in a German school - and vice versa. They are used to teaching a very different subject.

Although I think it shifts in teachers of foreign languages for adults who are almost always native speakers.

[HVC]

Guess portugal just has (had?) more Brit expats

Exception for the azores,  they have american accents.

[Legbiter]

So a new posh bloke in Scotland is set to take on an even posher bloke in England/London; remind me again what exactly has changed here? 

A Hindu and a Muslim will be discussing the partition of Britain...

[Sheilbh]

Disagree here.
At A level sure but at the level most learn in school language teaching is pretty interchangable.

Sure but an English teacher in the UK or a German teacher in Germany is not teaching people English or German. It's a very different job. Especially when we grew up when they decided not to teach grammar

Teaching your own language as a foreign language is probably the one skill most schools don't have in a teacher exchange setting There might be some settings - for examples schools with lots of kids with English as a second language - where it is something a school would have, but I don't think an English teacher (normally an English Lit background) necessarily has the skills/knowledge to teach English to a bunch of German kids - or vice-versa.

The trouble my gf has found is getting a bloody job. So many these days asking for French and Spanish in one person where if she'd been hunting 20 years back as you say with French and German shed be set.

Yeah. Generally this country's awful at teaching and learning foreign languages - but the decline in German especially (mostly replaced by Spanish) has been really severe. We're down to under 35,000 German GCSE students compared to still over 100,000 for French and Spanish.

My impression is that when I was growing up was that in English schools especially German was the default other language (in Scotland it was very much French - auld alliance in action ).

[HVC]

So a new posh bloke in Scotland is set to take on an even posher bloke in England/London; remind me again what exactly has changed here? 

A Hindu and a Muslim will be discussing the partition of Britain...

Don't know if longshanks is rolling or laughing in his grave. The possibility of scotland getting its independence and its not a Scott who's going to do it.

[Syt]

In (West) Germany, the default foreign language was English, followed by French. At classical Gymnasium they'd add Latin and (less and less) Old Greek. To pass Abitur you need a certain amount of years in two foreign languages (again, usual default was English & French).

And yeah, teaching foreign languages at school requires a university degree - there's dedicated teacher's branches for the studying of those languages parallel to "normal" philology of the language (where you might focus more on the academic, historical, cultural or literary side of of the language). That also obviously exists for German, though there's the further distinction between "normal" German teachers (and yes, we learned grammar at school but also had to learn about poems, did dictation, text composition, analysis of texts ... ) and "German as Foreign Language", usually focused at educating teachers for adult immigrants/expats.

[The Larch]

Brits (and Irish) teachers are very commonplace in the private sector. Every language school in continental Europe has been historically staffed by a good chunk of Brits and Irish kids doing gap years, as historically the only requisite for them was being native English speakers. Some of them ended up staying and made careers as private teachers of English. When I was young I had two different English language private tutors, a guy called Mark and a woman called Judith, both of them English.

Things have changed in the last decades, and for instance here in Spain there's nowadays a well established program to bring native speakers, many of them Americans, to publich schools to support English language lessons, so American English is making headways into what was historically a monolythical British English educational framework.

[Sheilbh]

Don't know if longshanks is rolling or laughing in his grave. The possibility of scotland getting its independence and its not a Scott who's going to do it.

Humza Yousaf is absolutely a Scot

As I say he's generally not been a particularly competent minister, but I have always admired his fashion sense of merging South Asian and Scottish traditional dress (he's also a big wearer of the Islamic tartan) as I think these are very cool looks: