Профессиональное чтение на английском языке = Professional Reading in English. Учебное пособие

II. ENGLISH IN ACADEMIC LIFE

communication through English, but also present challenges to educators who have no other common language to go to when they want to clarify meaning or check understanding, and who have to perform to students with a range of expectations, norms and experiences.

Varying linguistic requirements

A final point about EMI is that different disciplines and programmes have different linguistic requirements in EMI contexts. Many occupational areas require both written and spoken work from students, which puts a greater pressure on the educators and institutions to support different kinds of academic engagement. For example, medical fields can involve assessment through oral exams or role plays, as well as written exams and research projects. Using English on such programmes puts more pressure on students and staff than a course that has just one written assignment at the end.

Therefore, EMI is a diverse phenomenon, and each EMI setting can have a very different relationship with English. Policies and resources are often aimed at either supporting the use of English or preventing potential damage to the quality of learning that could accompany the use of English. Also, the presence of English in different programmes of study can present different needs and pressures for students in terms of the understanding they have to develop and how they should express this.

Questions:

•What transitional forms of EMI are used by some universities?

•What happens if there is another dominant language (other than English) that students and educators can understand?

•What happens when the capacity to study through English attracts a diverse student population, and therefore no other commonly understood language is available?

•Comment on the statement: “EMI is a diverse phenomenon”.

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И. И. ИГНАТЕНКО. ПРОФЕССИОНАЛЬНОЕ ЧТЕНИЕ НА АНГЛИЙСКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ

I. I. IGNATENKO. PROFESSIONAL READING IN ENGLISH

The Truth About Harvard

At the beginning of every term Harvard students enjoy a one-week “shopping period,” during which they can sample as many courses as they like and thus – or so the theory goes – concoct the most appropriate schedule for their semesters. There is a boisterous quality to this stretch, a sense of intellectual possibility, as people pop in and out of lecture halls, grabbing syllabi and listening for twenty minutes or so before darting away to other classes.

The enthusiasm evaporates quickly once the shopping period ends. Empty seats in the various halls and auditoriums multiply as the semester rattles along, until rooms that were full for the opening lecture resemble the stadium of a losing baseball team during a meaningless late-August game. There are pockets of diehards in the front rows, avidly taking notes, and scattered observers elsewhere-students who overcame the urge to hit the snooze button and hauled themselves to class, only to realize that they’ve missed so many lectures and fallen so far behind that taking notes is a futile exercise. Better to wait for the semester’s end, when they can take exhaustive notes at the review sessions that are always helpfully provided – or simply go to the course’s Web site, where the professor has uploaded his lecture notes, understanding all too well the character and study habits of his seldom-glimpsed students.

But during the shopping period the campus bubbles with academic energy. Every seat in the lecture hall is filled; the overflow jams the aisles and windowsills and spills out the door.

The students’ ambitions are those of a well-trained meritocratic elite. In the semi-aristocracy that Harvard once was, students could accept Cs, because they knew their prospects in life had more to do with family fortunes and connections than with GPAs. In today’s meritocracy this situation no longer obtains. Even if you could live off your parents’ wealth, the ethos of the meritocracy holds that you shouldn’t, because your worth as a person is determined not by clan or class but by what you do and whether you succeed at it. What you do, in turn, hinges in no small part on what is on your résumé, including your GPA.

It doesn’t help that Harvard students are creatively lazy, gifted at working smarter rather than harder. Most of my classmates were studious primarily in our avoidance of academic work, and brilliant largely in our maneuverings to achieve a maximal GPA in return for minimal

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effort. It was easy to see the classroom as just another résumé-padding opportunity, a place to collect the grade (and recommendation) necessary to get to the next station in life. If that grade could be obtained while reading a tenth of the books on the syllabus, so much the better.

Harvard’s Core Curriculum is a late-1970s version of a traditional liberal arts curriculum, and it has long been an object of derision among students (during my junior year the Crimson called it a “stifling and stagnant attempt” at a liberal arts education), and a curricular-review committee recently joined the chorus, observing dryly that the Core “may serve to constrain intellectual development” and recommending that it be replaced with “a new system of general education.” At its inception, in 1978, the Core was seen as a less elitist alternative to the Great Books programs offered at Columbia and other universities. It has no universally required courses, mandating instead that students take, at some point before graduation, at least one class in seven of eleven areas – areas whose titles and subject matter sound suitably comprehensive. They include Literature and Arts, Historical Study, Science, Foreign Cultures, Quantitative Reasoning, Moral Reasoning, and Social Analysis.

But although these subject areas are theoretically general, the dozen or so classes offered annually in each of them (nearly all Core courses are designed for the Core) tend to be maddeningly specific and often defiantly obscure.

As if in reply to this complaint, the Core’s mission statement asserts, with a touch of smugness, that “the Core differs from other programs of general education. It does not define intellectual breadth as the mastery of a set of Great Books, or the digestion of a specific quantum of information… rather, the Core seeks to introduce students to the major approaches to knowledge in areas that the faculty considers indispensable to undergraduate education.”

As in a great library ravaged by a hurricane, the essential elements of a liberal arts education lie scattered everywhere at Harvard, waiting to be picked up. But little guidance is given on how to proceed with that task.

My experience of the Core was probably typical. I set out with the intention of picking a comprehensive roster of classes that would lead me in directions at once interesting and essential, providing perspectives that were unavailable in my concentration: American history and literature.

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И. И. ИГНАТЕНКО. ПРОФЕССИОНАЛЬНОЕ ЧТЕНИЕ НА АНГЛИЙСКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ

I. I. IGNATENKO. PROFESSIONAL READING IN ENGLISH

I remember vividly the moment late in my high school senior year when Harvard’s course catalogue arrived in the mail. It was a doorstop of a book, filled with descriptions of hundreds, maybe thousands, of classes. I pored over it, asking myself how I could choose just thirtytwo classes, four years’ worth, from the sea of fascinating choices.

Harvard never attempted to answer that question – perhaps the most important question facing any incoming freshman. I chose my classes as much by accident as by design. There were times when some of them mattered to me, and even moments when I was intoxicated. But achieving those moments required pulling myself away from Harvard’s other demands, whether social, extracurricular, or pre-professional, which took far more discipline than I was usually able to exert.

Mostly I logged the necessary hours in the library and exam rooms, earned my solid GPA and my diploma, and used the rest of the time to keep up with my classmates in our ongoing race to the top of America (and the world). It was only afterward, when the perpetual motion of undergraduate life was behind me, that I looked back and felt cheated.

Afterward, too, I began chuckling inwardly when some older person, upon discovering my Harvard affiliation, would nod gravely and ask, But wasn’t it such hard work?

It was – but not in the way the questioner meant. It was hard work to get into Harvard, and then it was hard work competing for offices and honors and extracurriculars with thousands of brilliant and driven young people; hard work keeping our heads in the swirling social world; hard work fighting for law-school slots and investment-banking jobs as college wound to a close … yes, all of that was heavy sledding. But the academics – the academics were another story.

Whatever nostalgists think, there was never a golden age when students did all their work and attended every lecture. When Aquinas held forth in Paris, and Heidegger in Freiburg, lazy undergraduates were doubtless squirreled away in their rooms, frantically skimming other people’s notes to prep for the final exam. What makes our age different is the moment that happened over and over again at Harvard, when we said This is going to be hard and then realized No, this is easy. Maybe it came when we boiled down a three-page syllabus to a hundred pages of exam-time reading, or saw that a paper could be turned in late without the frazzled teaching fellow’s docking us, or handed in C-quality work

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and got a gleaming B-plus. Whenever the moment came, we learned that it wasn’t our sloth alone, or our constant pushing for higher grades, that made Harvard easy.

No, Harvard was easy because almost no one was pushing back.

Questions:

•What one-week “shopping period” do Harvard students enjoy at the beginning of every term?

•Where can Harvard students take the lecture material from?

•What does the ethos of the meritocracy hold?

•Describe Harvard’s Core Curriculum.

•How did the author choose his classes at Harvard?

•Does the author consider years at Harvard to be hard work?

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English as lingua franca (ELF)

We are going to discuss the history of the study of English as a lingua franca (ELF) and explore its relevance to the growth of English Medium Instruction in universities. You may be familiar with the term ‘ELF’ or perhaps you have used different terminology such as EIL (English as an International Language). Professor Jenkins will now outline how an understanding of how English is used as a lingua franca around the world has shaped the development of English.

Normally, we associate the English language with the native language. But actually, native English speakers are a very tiny minority of English users in the world. I think it’s probably true to say, now, that we would be less than 20% – that at least four out of every five users of English in the world is a non-native English user. The vast majority of English users come from countries where it has no function – no official function in the country. We’re talking about places like China, Japan, Germany, Spain, Chile, and so on, where people learn English and use English, but it’s not an official language. It’s certainly not a native language.

And this vast majority of users have been affecting the way English is used around the world over the last few decades. And this is something that we’ve been researching for over 20 years, in fact. And in our Centre for Global Englishes, we’ve been researching it for nearly 10 years now.

What we’re calling the kind of English that we’re researching is English as a Lingua Franca. Or we call it ELF. And the kinds of things we’ve been finding are that they do all sorts of things with the English that native English speakers don’t do. So for example, they might not use the third person “s” in the present singular tense. They might say, she think, rather than she thinks, as a native English speaker would do it. And this is very, very common. It’s not 100%, but it’s very, very common, especially in the spoken language. They might do things like nouns that would be uncountable in native English, such as information or feedback. They might turn them into countable nouns.

So they might say informations, instead of three pieces of information. They might say feedbacks, instead of two pieces of feedback. They might not use the “th” and “the” sounds. They might, instead, use “tuh” and

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“duh” or “suh” and “zuh”, zese or dese. And this is very, very common and hasn’t been found to affect the listeners’ intelligibility. What seems to have been happening is that people seem to be focusing on what they feel more comfortable with, what is their preferred way to speak, but also what they find is going to be intelligible for the people who they’re talking to.

What we’ve been finding more recently is, actually, that the use of ELF, especially among its non-native English users, has turned out to be very flexible, very fluid. That people adjust the way they speak very frequently. They do what’s called accommodation. They change the way they speak according to who they’re speaking to, what they’re speaking about, and so on. And so it turns out that the aim is really to use English effectively in intercultural communication contexts. They’re all thinking about what is going to be most communicative for each other, not what is going to be most like the way a native English speaker speaks.

The most recent research in ELF has shown that, actually, multilingualism is very important. That the majority of ELF users are multilingual. They speak not only English, but at least one other language and often another two or three languages. And so it’s obvious that when you’ve got a group of people together speaking in English, if they have other languages in common, where appropriate, they’re going to be moving in and out of those other languages. This is quite normal and natural. It’s actually called translanguaging.

English medium instruction settings are prime examples of ELF use – of the use of English as a Lingua Franca. All around the world, places where English is being used as a medium of instruction, you have not only lots and lots of students, but lots and lots of staff who come from all sorts of different first languages. And they’re communicating together in English. And this is where ELF research has very important implications for EMI. It shows that people are often much more comfortable using English in different ways. Not using the third person s. Not obsessing about what is supposedly a countable or uncountable noun.

It may be much more natural for people to use certain nouns in countable ways, rather than this very odd sort of uncountable use that native English speakers still persist in using.

Once you think about English as the Lingua Franca, as the approach within EMI, you take a tremendous amount of pressure off both EMI lecturers and EMI students. They no longer feel that they have to mimic

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И. И. ИГНАТЕНКО. ПРОФЕССИОНАЛЬНОЕ ЧТЕНИЕ НА АНГЛИЙСКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ

I. I. IGNATENKO. PROFESSIONAL READING IN ENGLISH

native English speakers, but that they can engage in intercultural communication in whatever way is going to be most effective, in that setting, at that time.

Questions:

•Why are native English speakers a very tiny minority of English users in the world?

•Where do the vast majority of English users come from?

•What is the main trend in ELF?

•What is translanguaging?

•What does the use of English as the Lingua Franca, as the approach within EMI, mean?

BBC won’t employ ‘posh’ voices any more, says Charlotte Green

Her warm yet slightly formal tones led to her once being voted the “most attractive female voice on national radio”. However, Charlotte Green says her diction means that she is now an outcast at the BBC.

“Received pronunciation, or accent-less accent, is on the wane,” she says. “The BBC’s days of employing people who sound like me are more or less over.” Green, 57, whose melodious voice was once described as “a marvel, something to make one feel safe and secure, like being tucked up in bed with a hot water bottle”, accepted voluntary redundancy from the BBC earlier this year. The alumna of Haberdashers’ Aske’s School for Girls had worked at the corporation since she joined as a studio manager at the World Service in 1978. She specialised in news reading since 1998, and her work on the Radio 4 Today programme and on The News Quiz made her voice one of the most recognisable on the BBC. She is not bitter about the corporation’s changing demands. “If you listen to announcers of 40 years ago, they again sound different to me – everything progresses,” she tells Country Life.

The accents of other Radio 4 announcers have upset some listeners. Kathy Clugston, a native of Belfast, once received a poem from a man complaining that “‘Gordon Brown’ should not rhyme with ‘Battle of the Boyne’ ”. Neil Nunes is another announcer who divides listener opinion. Nunes was raised in Manchester but born in Kingston, Jamaica.

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His deep tones prompted a number of complaints when he was hired in 2006, with some claiming that he sounded “too American” to introduce shows such as The Archers.

In 2004, some of the country’s best-known actors warned that a shortage of actors who could speak “posh English” was destroying the quality of British drama. Dame Eileen Atkins, Prunella Scales, and the Oscar-winning screen writers Sir Ronald Harwood and Julian Fellowes argued that greater emphasis should be given to Received Pronunciation rather than encouraging regional accents.

Questions:

•Why is Received Pronunciation, or accent-less accent an outcast at the BBC now?

•Is Charlotte Green bitter about the corporation’s changing demands?

•Why did some of the country’s best-known actors and screen writers argue that greater emphasis should be given to Received Pronunciation rather than encouraging regional accents?

Lamb to the Slaughter by Roald Dahl

The room was warm and clean, the curtains drawn, the two table lamps alight-hers and the one by the empty chair opposite. On the sideboard behind her, two tall glasses, soda water, whiskey. Fresh ice cubes in the Thermos bucket.

Mary Maloney was waiting for her husband to come home from work. Now and again she would glance up at the clock, but without anxiety,

merely to please herself with the thought that each minute gone by made it nearer the time when he would come. There was a slow smiling air about her, and about everything she did. The drop of a head as she bent over her sewing was curiously tranquil. Her skin – for this was her sixth month with child – had acquired a wonderful translucent quality, the mouth was soft, and the eyes, with their new placid look, seemed larger darker than before. When the clock said ten minutes to five, she began to listen, and a few moments later, punctually as always, she heard the tyres on the gravel outside, and the car door slamming, the footsteps passing the window, the key turning in the lock. She laid aside her sewing, stood up, and went forward to kiss him as he came in.

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И. И. ИГНАТЕНКО. ПРОФЕССИОНАЛЬНОЕ ЧТЕНИЕ НА АНГЛИЙСКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ

I. I. IGNATENKO. PROFESSIONAL READING IN ENGLISH

“Hullo darling,” she said. “Hullo,” he answered.

She took his coat and hung it in the closet. Then she walked over and made the drinks, a strongish one for him, a weak one for herself; and soon she was back again in her chair with the sewing, and he in the other, opposite, holding the tall glass with both his hands, rocking it so the ice cubes tinkled against the side.

For her, this was always a blissful time of day. She knew he didn’t want to speak much until the first drink was finished, and she, on her side, was content to sit quietly, enjoying his company after the long hours alone in the house. She loved to luxuriate in the presence of this man, and to feel – almost as a sunbather feels the sun – that warm male glow that came out of him to her when they were alone together. She loved him for the way he sat loosely in a chair, for the way he came in a door, or moved slowly across the room with long strides. She loved the intent, far look in his eyes when they rested on her, the funny shape of the mouth, and especially the way he remained silent about his tiredness, sitting still with himself until the whiskey had taken some of it away.

“Tired, darling?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m tired.” And as he spoke, he did an unusual thing. He lifted his glass and drained it in one swallow although there was still half of it, at least half of it, left. She wasn’t really watching him, but she knew what he had done because she heard the ice cubes falling back against the bottom of the empty glass when he lowered his arm. He paused a moment, leaning forward in the chair, then he got up and went slowly over to fetch himself another.

“I’ll get it!” she cried, jumping up. “Sit down,” he said.

When he came back, she noticed that the new drink was dark amber with the quantity of whiskey in it.

“Darling, shall I get your slippers?” “No.”

She watched him as he began to sip the dark yellow drink, and she could see little oily swirls in the liquid because it was so strong.

“I think it’s a shame,” she said, “that when a policeman gets to be as senior as you, they keep him walking about on his feet all day long.”

He didn’t answer, so she bent her head again and went on with her sewing; but each time he lifted the drink to his lips, she heard the ice cubes clinking against the side of the glass.

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