The Goal:
to allow adult or infant learners to acquire, as quickly as possible, a level of English that is a level of global and cross-cultural communicative competence characterized by tolerance and empathy

The Reasons:

• UN Millennium Goal # 2 (“achieve universal primary education”)
• UN Millennium Declaration (“to promote greater harmony and tolerance in all societies”, “allowing genuine participation by all citizens in all our countries”, “the right of the public to have access to information”)
• UN Declaration of Human Rights Art. 26 (“the right to education”, “Education … shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations”) and Art. 27 (“the right freely … to share in scientific advancement and its benefits”)

The Way: Basic Global English

The Core Idea:
BGE is created from successful linguistic forms between non-natives, most of which occur also in English, but not necessarily standard English. The acceptability of forms is based not on the question “correct or incorrect with respect to standard English?”, but on the question “communicatively successful or unsuccessful?”.

The Elements:
BGE includes:

• 20 elementary grammar rules and the most important guidelines for pronunciation
• apart from internationalisms, a basic vocabulary of 750 words, whose selection is based on actual word frequencies and on the frequencies of culture-independent things and ideas
• an individually selected vocabulary of at least another 250 words related to a learner’s own needs and wants (e.g. related to hobbies, profession, family members, or their culture).
• “emergency” strategies that enable learners to denote things for which one of the communication partners doesn’t know the name
• communicative strategies for the most basic and frequent communicative situations, which shall allow learners to speak empathically and respectfully with another person and which include solutions for communicative breakdowns and solutions for checking culturally-bound associations behind words
  BGE is not just a reduced language system like Ogden’s BASIC English, it is a system that includes linguistic, methodological and social competence for global communication.

BGE does not forbid standard English forms and does not allow every non-native form, it includes those forms that work successfully in intercultural communication.
BGE is not an artificial language like Esperanto, it consists of naturally occurring forms.
BGE is not a closed system, it is an open system that allows variation and later fine-tuning of learners’ command of an English according to their own desires.
BGE does not claim that intercultural dialog becomes unproblematic, it rather enables a first start of intercultural dialog and raises the awareness for potential misunderstandings.
BGE does not want to extinguish other languages, but is part of a model that promotes global trilingualism: one’s native language + Global English + a third national language of one’s choice.

Project Status (cf. also BGE website):

• completed: English teaching material for one school year for age group 7-11
• completed: material for 14 evening sessions or a 1-week block for adult learners (currently available for learners of German mother-tongue)
• completed: material for self-educated learners: The material shall consist of
  1. an English book as the necessary and sufficient basis
  2. a book with the metalinguistic explanations of the basic book in various the learner’s language, an audio CD and an exercise CD-Rom as “luxury equipments”.
  3. accompanying material in different language version (currently available for learners of German mother tongue)

Joachim Grzega