Federico Fellini famously said, “A different language is a different version of life.” Being able to speak one or more languages other than your mother tongue thus gives you the opportunity to live a different life for each new language. […]
English is now the world’s third most common native language, and remains, for now the preferred language for world business. With many sectors now having employees who regularly converse in English, the requirement for learning English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is growing, even in countries where English is considered a native language.
It would be easy to imagine that the teaching of English to advanced learners is confined to those teaching English as a Foreign Language in non-English speaking countries like China and many others, but as Jeff Heasman, Dean of the Faculty of Law at Cavendish University explains below, this is far from the truth, and ESP (English for Specific Purposes) is a requirement in many parts of the world where English is an official language – including here in the UK.
In the third of this series on international communication, Barry Tomalin, Author of ‘The World’s Business Cultures and How to Unlock Them’ (Thorogood 2010) and our lead consultant on all things ‘cross-cultural’, offers us an insight into a little tool he has used to record many of the memories of more than 30 years working and travelling in more than 60 countries.