Week 8 ( 課文) The War of the Two Languages

Week -8 ( 課文 )

The War of the Two Languages

By Prof. Stephen Ohlander

In the short video you see a country divided by--as the reporter, Morley Safer, calls it--“a war of words.”  But, ironically, they are words from two different languages: French and English. 

Here’s the general situation: the province of Quebec, which is in Eastern Canada, is mostly French-speaking (francophone) and the majority of its residents wants it to stay that way.  In other words, they don’t want their language and their culture to be dominated or “swallowed up” by the English language and its cultures—something that, they point out, has happened in the rest of Canada.

In fact, along with other like-minded politicians and their support groups, Louise Beaudoin, the female minister that you see interviewed in the video, is in favor of Quebec breaking away from the rest of Canada entirely and forming its own nation.  Actually, the people of Quebec have already voted this idea down (rejected it) twice in the past so, as of now, it doesn’t look like this will happen any time soon.

Nonetheless, the government of Quebec clearly feels: if we cannot get enough popular support to separate (secede) from Canada, at least we can prevent a wholesale takeover of our French language by English by making laws that limit the written usage of English in public notices. 

Specifically, written public notices can be entirely in French—without any English—or they can be in French accompanied by English translations.  But that’s not all: the English letters (fonts) must be smaller than the French letters.  In the video, someone mentioned that the English words must be half the size of the French words.

Also in the video, I was surprised to learn that the government of Quebec also wants all business dealings to be conducted (spoken) in French.  If true, that means that the government wants to control not only the written use of English, but how much English is spoken in certain settings as well!  OMG!  The government really wants to restrict their people’s use of English, whether the people like it or not! 

That doesn’t sound like a free country to me.  As you can see from the dialogue I have written between Jeff and Marge, I believe in giving people the right to speak the language of their choice, though I do agree that every country should have one official language spoken by everyone, or nearly everyone.  By having one official language, a nation has a better chance of maintaining unity and not splitting apart, which would be an unfortunate outcome if the people really have common interests and want to stay together.

In Quebec, however, I think the government has gone too far in its demands regarding restrictions on English usage. And quite of number of its residents agree with me:  as reported in the video, over 250,000 have left the province, having gotten fed up with all its restrictive language laws. 

To sense their frustration, you can listen to the PowerPoint slides in which Rebecca Wolfe, who runs the café Mandy’s along with her sister, complains to the reporter about how difficult it is to run even a small business like theirs when they have to worry about the language restrictions of the OQLF.

To sum up, the government of Quebec may have good intentions, but it has gone too far!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
影音對話參考
The Language Police – Quebec’s Own

Presented by Prof. Stephen Ohlander
--------------------------------------------------

Under the headline, “Quebec language police order Mandy's Salad Bar to remove English signs from shop in anglophone [English-speaking] area,”…
…Canadian newspaper, The National Post, filed the following report…

Mandy’s, a Montreal salad bar, is under fire from (in trouble with) the Language Police because its décor (decorative signs) features vintage (very old) English signs.

The Office québécois de la langue française (Quebec Language Police) told sisters Mandy and Rebecca Wolfe they would have to remove the decorative signs from their shop in the traditionally anglophone Westmount district.

Rebecca Wolfe, who doesn’t plan to remove the signs, spoke to the National Post’s Hillary Robert on this matter.
(Next slide shows a photo of the two sisters with one of their signs.)

Rebecca & Mandy with their English Sign

Recently, the OQLF went after the Facebook page of a boutique (small shop) in Chelsea, Quebec called Delilah in the Parc.
It was operating a “supposedly prohibited [forbidden] unilingual [one-language] social media presence.”

Though the store’s staff was fully bilingual and its signs and documents were in line with the law (i.e., legal), its online updates had to be in French, too, according to the OQLF.

The agency sent owner, Eva Cooper, a letter threatening legal and financial action (e.g., a fine) if she did not translate into French her Facebook page.
Fortunately, both sides were able to reach a mutually satisfying agreement.
At Mandy’s, however, the problems were not as easy to solve…

Here is a series of questions and answers between the reporter and Rebecca:
Q (by reporter, Hillary Robert): Did you ever think that your décor might be a problem?

Rebecca: No, we take pride in having bilingual images all over our store and making sure that it’s 90% French.
We do have a little English because 95% of our clients in Westmount are English.
Q: Is your other location different?

A: If you go to our store in the French community, we have zero English. It’s all French.
At our English location because we do have English clients, we felt that it wasn’t the end of the world [i.e., not very serious] if we put up some anglo [English] text.
Rebecca and the OQLF


Q: What was your reaction when you were confronted by the OQLF?
A: We said our signs were artistic. They were “decorative pieces that we picked up along the way of our travels with our family, pieces of our heritage, of our background.”

“It was at a place that we go to in Maine that we picked them up. We do have other pieces of décor in the store from that same place.”
We want our shop to have a vintage-feel.

Mandy’s Decorative English Sign

Q: The name of your store is in English, has that ever been an issue with the OQLF?
A: No, we don’t have the apostrophe on the outside of our store, so they can’t really come after us for that. It just says “Mandys.”
And it says “Salades Gourmands” in French underneath it.

Mandy’s Window Sign (in French)

(N.B. The photo does show the apostrophe, and it says “Salades Gourmandes.” –ed.)
Q: You seem to be shocked by the OQLF’s response to your décor--that it attacks the way you run your store. How do you feel about the French images of things?

A: We love them! We have a lot of French-speaking clients, we have a lot of French-speaking employees, and we have a lot of French-speaking suppliers.
We’re very proud to be in Montreal.
We love that it is a bilingual community.

Mandy and I are both very bilingual.
We have Quebec francophone [French-speaking] members of our extended family.
It is a part of the richness of living in Montreal in terms of its culture, so I just think this [the OQLF] is a very unfortunate turn of events.

Q: Do you feel your shop was targeted because it is in Westmount?
A: I don’t know why we were targeted. I think that they go door-to-door in Westmount because it is an English-based community.

The only person that has ever criticized [us] was an employee of [the OQLF] that came in, took photos and sort of intimidated [made anxious] our customers.
He stayed here for a long while during our busy lunch hour and just took photos of everything, took notes and then took off.

Q: How do customers react when an OQLF employee is present?
A: All the customers were very clearly disgruntled [upset], and know what [is] going on when this happens. This climate of animosity [ill-will, conflict] between the two communities is so unnecessary.

The English community is well aware that it’s an issue [problem] since it has happened twice; … people have noticed what is going on.
Q: I understand that the first time you were contacted by the OQLF was over a separate issue regarding your menu, could you elaborate on [explain] that?

A: They don’t want to have English translations.
We [had] a double-sided menu [English on one side, French on the other], with the English & French texts the same size.

[But] the English has to be significantly smaller than the French text.
Everything had to be reprinted.
(N.B. The OQLF say it does not seek to control the spoken language, only written English. –ed.)

Q: In other interviews, you have mentioned feeling like you are “fighting to stay here,” could you elaborate on that?
A: It’s more of an inner conflict. We’re fighting with ourselves.
What are we really doing here if our own people don’t want us here?

We have a lot of friends that are leaving, most of whom are going to Toronto, [though] some are going to the states
 We’re sort of at a pinnacle [peak, high point] of political unrest here.

It’s based on these small petty [trivial] roles that we feel quite frankly is a waste of everyone’s time.
(End of interview)

Everything is a little bit scary and unstable in Quebec right now.
It is more of a fight against, do we leave? Do we stay? Are we made to feel comfortable?
Are we encouraged as small businesses in Quebec to thrive [prosper] or are we just made to feel uncomfortable?

Week 7 (課文) Tips for Improving your English Reading

Tips for Improving your English Reading

1. Always Make Special Time to Read

Reading for fun can be done anywhere. You could take a fun book out on a bus, in bed or at the office, and you can enjoy it. However, if you’re reading to improve your comprehension, you need to focus and study.

This means you need to make a special time for this reading. Making time for your reading will let you focus well without risk of being interrupted. This time should be quiet, and you should avoid being distracted. You should try to spend at least 30 minutes every day on focused reading. That’s how to improve your reading skills seriously and successfully. The more you read, the more you’ll improve.

Try this:

Turn your reading process into a ritual, something you repeat every time you sit down to focus on reading English.

Follow these steps, or any other steps that you’d like to make a part of your reading process:

·         Find a quiet, comfortable spot with bright lighting to sit.

·         Get everything you might need ready before you sit down. For example, you might want to have a pen, your notebook, a dictionary and something to drink.

·         Decide how long you will read. (30 minutes is a good minimum amount of time.)

·         Put all your electronics on silent mode (or turn them off) and put them away.

 

 

2. Ask Lots of Questions

Speaking of questions—ask them. Ask a lot of them! The more you question what you read, the deeper you get into the meaning.

Asking questions is also a good way to make sure you understand what you’re reading. Asking questions like “what’s happening now?” or “who’s speaking here?” can help keep you focused. Asking questions like “why did he do that?” or “what is she thinking?” can help you think deeper into the story.

Try this:

Keep some Post-it notes and a pen nearby. Write down any questions that come to mind as you’re reading on the Post-it notes. Stick them in the text.

When you finish reading, go back and see how many of the questions you can answer now. If there are any questions you still don’t know the answer to, re-read that part of the text and try to find the answer.

3. Read It Again

The poet Ezra Pound says that with books, “no reader ever read anything the first time he saw it.” Sometimes reading a text just once isn’t enough to understand it. This is true if you’re reading something difficult, or even if you’re not—reading something more than once can help you understand it much better.

Re-reading is great for those times when you read the words but can’t get them to make sense. It’s also great for finding things you might have missed the first time. If there are any new words in the text, you’ll see them again every time you read again, helping you remember them.

In short, reading things again is great!

4. Read Many Kinds of Texts

Today we don’t just read books and newspapers. We read blogs, emails, Tweets and texts. The more you read anything in English, the better you’ll get at the language.

Don’t just read books and news. Read anything and everything! Find a magazine that you enjoy, follow some interesting people or websites on Facebook, or visit a blog you like reading.

Magazine Line is a good place to go to find digital or print magazines on just about any subject. They give you lower prices on magazine subscriptions, and you may be able to save even more if you’re a student (check the “Student and Educator Rates” section for details).

Week-6: (課文) How to Improve your English Listening

Week-6: 課文

How to Improve your English Listening

Tip 1: Start with a Positive Mindset

The first thing you want to learn to do is to listen optimistically.

Why? You have to actually believe that you can hear and understand what people are saying.

I know English listening can be very difficult, especially with speakers who have a strong accent or who talk really fast. But you’ve actually done it before! You learned how to listen and understand and speak a language when you were a baby. Why should it be any different now that you’re an adult? If you listen with a good frame of mind, you’ll see it’s not impossible.

Tip 2: Choose Diverse English Listening Materials

Don’t just listen to the same kind of English audio materials all the time.

Don’t stick to listening to only the news, or only watching the same TV shows over and over. Instead, listen to a variety of different kinds of situations and topics.

As long as you find a resource that makes you happy, keeps you learning English by listening and lines up with your goals and interests, you have my full support.

Tip 3: Predict Audio Content

Pretend you’re listening to the radio.

You hear a helicopter in the background, and a speaker is mentioning the names of streets, roads and avenues, and talking about how many vehicles are currently on these roads.

What do you imagine he’s talking about? Most likely, you’re listening to a traffic report.

You can then expect to hear other words like “bottleneck,” “traffic jam” and “rush hour.” You’ll probably also hear the imperative (command form of verbs): “Don’t take the highway” or “Avoid 4th Avenue.”

Based on the context, you can often predict the words and even style of language you will hear. That’s a big first step forward!

Next time you’re watching or listening to an English TV show or the radio, pause after every few sentences. Try to predict what’s going to happen or what the speaker might say next.

For instance, the words “avenue,” “vehicle,” “jam,” “bottle” and “neck” all have their own separate meanings, but when you hear them together, they form the context of a traffic-related conversation.

Tip 4: Listen for the Big Ideas

At first, you should resist the impulse to try to understand every single word people are saying.

It’s more important to keep up with the conversation and try to understand the main ideas.

English is like a road. As with any road, there are “signposts,” which are words that help us follow the sequence of what’s going on—in this case, they help us understand what we’re hearing. These words link ideas and help us understand what people are talking about. They’re especially relevant in talks or presentations.

For example, if a university professor giving a lecture says, “I will talk about three reasons supporting…” be on the lookout for expressions such as “first of all,” “moving on to” and “in summary,” that link the ideas and indicate the next parts of the lecture.

Focus on keywords like these to grasp the most relevant parts of a conversation. Once you relax and make it a priority to understand the main idea, you’ll have the freedom to complete your comprehension with the details and clear the air later by asking questions.

Tip 5: Listen for the Details

After you’ve focused on the big picture, now look for specific details that will help you understand better.

When listening for details, you’re interested in very specific information such as a name or a number. Ignore anything else that doesn’t sound relevant to what you’re listening for. This way, you’ll be able to zoom in your search and get the details you need to understand the message.

For example, if you’re interested in knowing the age of a person, pay attention to any words related to age like “old,” “years,” “born in” or even a number, which could be that person’s age.