BGE and the European Day of Languages

Today is the European Day of Languages. Therefore, I would already like to give the link to the self-teaching material for Basic Global English here, on an inofficial basis. When the accompanying material is ready in 2-3 weeks, there will also be an official publication on the BGE website and the ASEcoLi website. As a social-enterpreneurial contribution the central materials will be accessible for free.

The European Day of Languages has been celebrated since the European Year of Languages in 2001. It commemorates the promotion of multilingualism. I regard BGE as one way to multilingualism. Many people are afraid that a promotion of English as a thread to other languages. But I see it as a component of global trilingualism, or “global triglossia” as I have called it (and as it can be read in my publications, e.g. in an article in the Journal for EuroLinguistiX). This means that I see BGE as door-opener to other cultures. Once English has allowed to communicate with people from another culture, I can decide to delve into this culture in a more thorough way and start to learn the language(s) of that culture. When I am talking to people about this, I always use the same example, which happened when we taught BGE to children in a EU project. The German kids were not only able to communicative with their EU partner-schools via letters, but when they were in Italy they could already talk to their Italian partner-kids on a basic level. They found it so interesting that they asked their principal also for a course in “Italian”. Basic Global English as a door-opener to Italian; and it can be a door-opener to other languages, too.

Joachim Grzega