Teach English in Haotang Zhen - Chenzhou Shi

An anchor hosted a professor of economics on his TV show series, he opened the show by saying: "Our world today has become economically more globalized than ever before". The professor proceeded to say: "Economically, it was always meant to be. Have you ever heard of the gold standard? It is, in its simplest meaning, gold as a global currency; after that, the dollar took over the gold. Our world is not merely globalized economically, but culturally as well". The fact, in terms of economy, that there is a global currency. Then, in terms of culture, there should be, among different things, a global language. English might be the most possible candidate language to be the global language for several reasons. Almost everyone uses the internet today, because it made the world a smaller place. More and more people communicate than at any time before through different means of communication. The question that arises here is: what is the lingua franca? Certainly, it is English. Some statistics shows that more than one billion and 500 million English speakers worldwide; however, 81 percent are non-native speakers, versus 19 percent of natives. This high proportion of people use English more often in numerous ways of communication, either formally such as commercial transactions or informally such as chats over the social media. Historically speaking, the internet grew up in the United States, where English is the main language. Therefore, the greatest amount of its content currently is in English. Several social media websites that are probably the most used ones, such as Facebook, Twitter, snapshot or Emails and many others. People daily use these websites for different purposes, that helps strengthen this language even more. For this reason, we believe that English will remain the common international language for decades ahead. No one can argue these days that English is the medium of a great deal of the world's knowledge in many different areas of scientific research, especially science and technology. The number of publications in English has increased significantly since the second half of the 20th century announcing the dominance of this language over other languages. More than 75 percent of the articles in the social sciences and humanities and well over 90 percent in the natural sciences are written in English according to an article published in 2007 by (Rainer Enrique Hamel) *. Another study in 2012 found that 80 percent of publications were written entirely in English. Today; however, most scientific research around the world is in one single language, English. Also, people tend to do research in their native and at least the abstract in English. Furthermore, as research goes further, and as it is well known that knowledge is cumulative, and from the point we stand, we believe that the pre-eminence of English over other languages will last for a very long time; not to exaggerate however, English is at some point where it is impossible to be replaced at least for several centuries. After the Second World War, the world witnessed the rise of the greatest economic power on the surface of the earth, the United States. Ever since the end of the war, the world has changed dramatically, and many countries became dependent on the American economy because of the debts owed to the United States. The currencies were valued against the American dollar. Therefore, all the transactions had be done in one language; The American language, English. Thus, no doubt that the power of the American economy empowers English to be the universal language. We have mentioned in a previous section that most English speakers are non-natives; what caused this situation is the spread of different means of transportation and the advanced tools of communication. People today travel more, study and work overseas, and sign business deals. And by focusing on the business deals that take place between two governments, private or international companies with totally two different languages are done in English. Most of the agreements and contracts are also done in English. It seems that by far the most reasonable reason for this widespread expansion of English language is due to the economic power of the United States of America. After all that we have mentioned, why nations do not adopt completely English? This question may come into anyone’s mind. This question has been asked once in an international conference, it was a suggestion of using English in the educative system around the world instead of the national language. The France representatives totally disagree with this idea, and they claimed that, in terms of science, a country which its mother language different than English will have a gap of at least two years late learning the language than a country with English as its first language, and that is unacceptable. Others saw it differently, the mother language symbolizes the national identity. The negotiations eventually failed. Some of them had a strong standpoint; however, I never read about a religious claim from a Moslem, which I will state here. There is a fact that many people convert to Islam each day around the world; for example, an outlook from the UN expects that half of the German people will be Moslem by the mid of the 21st century. Knowing that Arabic is the language of the Quran, it could be the rival of English. No one knows what is going to be in the future. In conclusion, the world is progressing in one direction in many different areas especially technologically, and one way to push this progress forward is the use of the right language. Thanks to the huge amount of participation of English in science, international economy, international relationships between both people and governments, we believe that in English is a global language for today and generations ahead. Resources: David Crystal. English as a global language, Cambridge University press, second edition, 2003. Rainer Enrique Hamel, "The dominance of English in the international scientific periodical literature and the future of language use in science". url: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233660049_The_dominance_of_English_in_the_international_scientific_periodical_literature_and_the_future_of_language_use_in_science English language: Wikipedia, url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#English_as_a_global_language.