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  • Supporters of official English in the United States can learn from Slovakia

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smatson@els.edu Sep 14, 2009 11:12 am

What a very slippery slope this policy will turn out to be. What fate would have awaited me, as an English instructor in a Slovak village in the mid 1990s, if the local polizie had overheard me speaking my own language on the bus to the home of the only other English speaker within 30 kilometers?(bad enough that locals stared, with their jaws dropping, to hear a language other than Slovak)..or what would have happened if the agents at the train station had not chosen to accept my primitive, case-flawed Slovak in order to sell me a ticket? Answer--I would still be living at the gymnazium out of a suitcase, unable to leave the country...But a little compassion and a lot of patience are the only path to helping outsiders learn a challenging language that, in essence, can only be learned in-country. --Susan Matson

Reply to smatson@els.edu at 11:12 am