The article below made me think of Paco. Anyone know what he’s up to?
Date: 02/15/05
HEADLINE: For Mongolians, E Is for English, and F Is for the Future---- By
JAMES BROOKE
SOURCE: The New York Times
ULAN BATOR, Mongolia – As she searched for the English words to name the
razor-tooth fish swimming around her stomach on her faded blue and white
T-shirt, 10-year-old Urantsetseg hardly seemed to embody an urgent new
national policy.
‘‘Father shark, mother shark, sister shark,’’ she recited carefully. Stumped
by a smaller, worried-looking fish, she paused, frowned. Then she cried
out, ‘‘Lunch!’’
Even in this settlement of dirt tracks, plank shanties and the circular felt
yurts of herdsmen, the sounds of English can be heard from the youngest of
students – part of a nationwide drive to make it the primary foreign
language learned in Mongolia, a landlocked expanse of open steppe
sandwiched between Russia and China.
‘‘We are looking at Singapore as a model,’’ Tsakhia Elbegdorj, Mongolia’s
prime minister, said in an interview, his own American English honed in
graduate school at Harvard. ‘‘We see English not only as a way of
communicating, but as a way of opening windows on the wider world.’’
Its camel herders may not yet be referring to each other as ‘‘dude,’’ but this
Central Asian nation, thousands of miles from the nearest English-speaking
nation, is a reflection of the steady march of English as a world
language. Fueled by the Internet, the growing dominance of American
culture and the financial realities of globalization, English is now
taking hold in Asia, and elsewhere, just as it has done in many European
countries.
In South Korea, six ‘‘English villages’’ are being established . where paying
students can have their passports stamped for intensive weeks of English
language immersion, taught by native speakers from all over the
English-speaking world. The most ambitious village, a $85 million English
town near Seoul will have Western architecture, signs, and a resident
population of English-speaking foreigners.
In Iraq, where Arabic and Kurdish are to be the official languages, a movement
is growing to add English, a neutral link for a nation split along ethnic
lines. Iraqi Kurdistan has had an explosion in English language studies,
fueled partly by an affinity for Britain and the United States, and partly
by the knowledge that neighboring Turkey may soon join the European Union,
a group where English is emerging as the dominant language.
In Chile, the government has embarked on a national program to teach English
in all elementary and high schools. The goal is to make the nation of 15
million people bilingual in English within a generation. The models are
the Netherlands and the Nordic nations, which have achieved virtual
bilingualism in English since World War II.
The rush toward English in Mongolia has not been without its bumps. After
taking office in the wake of elections here last June, Mr. Elbegdorj
shocked Mongolians by announcing that the nation would become bilingual,
with English as the second language. For Mongolians still debating whether
to jettison the Cyrillic alphabet imposed by Stalin in 1941, this was too
much, too fast. Later, on his bilingual English-Mongolian Web site, the
prime minister fine-tuned his program, developing a national curriculum
designed to make English replace Russian next September as the primary
foreign language taught here.
Still, as fast as Mr. Elbegdorj wants the Mongolian government to proceed, the
state is merely catching up with the private sector.
‘‘This building is three times the size of our old building,’’ Doloonjin
Orgilmaa, director general of Santis Educational Services, said, showing a
visitor around her three-story English school that opened in November near
Mongolia’s Sports Palace. This Mongolian-American joint venture, which was
the first private English school when it started in 1999, now faces
competition from all sides.
With schools easing the way, English is penetrating Ulan Bator through the
electronic media: bilingual Mongolian Web sites, cellphones with bilingual
text messaging, cable television packages with English language news and
movie channels, and radio repeaters that broadcast Voice of America and
the BBC on FM frequencies. At Mongolian International University, all
classes are in English. English is so popular that Mormon missionaries
here offer free lessons as a way to attract converts.
Increased international tourism and a growing number of resident foreigners
explain some moves, like the two English-language newspapers here and the
growing numbers of bilingual store signs and restaurant menus. During the
first eight months of 2004, international tourist arrivals here were up 54
percent; visits by Americans doubled, helped by such popular moves as
‘‘The Story of the Weeping Camel.’’
Foreign arrivals increased across the board, with the exception of Russians,
who had a 9.5 percent decline. That reflects a wider decline here of
Russia and the Russian language. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union,
Russian was universally taught here and was required for admission to the
university in Mongolia.
‘‘Russia is going downhill very fast,’’ said Tom Dyer, 28, an Australian
teacher at the Lotus Children’s Center, the orphanage where Urantsetseg
was describing a shark family.
Russia, leery of immigration from Asia, has imposed visa requirements on
Mongolians. China has not. Today, it is hard to find a Mongolian under 40
who speaks better than broken Russian. Within a decade, Mongolia is
expected to convert its written language to the Roman alphabet from
Cyrillic characters. ‘‘Everyone knows that Russian was the official
foreign language here,’’ T. Layton Croft, Mongolia’s representative for
The Asia Foundation, said in an interview. ‘‘So by announcing that English
is the official foreign language, it is yet another step in a way of
consolidating Mongolia’s independence, autonomy and identity.’’
So far, Beijing has adopted a laissez-faire stance toward Mongolia’s
flirtation with English, though China is now the country’s leading source
of foreign investment, trade and tourism. Such a stance is easy to
maintain since Chinese language studies are also undergoing a boom.
For a trading people known for straddling the East-West Silk Road, Mongolians
have long been linguists, often learning multiple languages. But for many
of Mongolia’s young people, English is viewed as hip and universal.
‘‘Chinese is very boring,’’ Anuudari Batzaya, a fashionably dressed
10-year-old, said in the Santis language lab, pausing an interactive
computer program that intoned in crisp British vowels: ‘‘When he lands in
London, he’ll claim his baggage, and go through customs.’’
Stopped on a sidewalk on a snowy afternoon here, Amarsanaa Bazargarid, a
20-year-old management student at Mongolian Technical University, said
optimistically: ‘‘I’d like English be our official second language.
Mongolians would be comfortable in any country. Russian was our second
official language, but it wasn’t very useful.’’
With official encouragement, the American Embassy, the British Embassy, and a
private Swiss group have all opened English language reading rooms here in
the last 18 months.
After trying in the 1990’s to retrain about half of Mongolia’s 1,400 Russian
language teachers to teach English, Mongolia now is embarking on a program
to attract hundreds of qualified teachers from around the world to teach
here.
‘‘I need 2,000 English teachers,’’ Puntsag Tsagaan, Mongolia’s minister of
education, culture and science. Mr. Tsagaan, a graduate of a Soviet
university, laboriously explained in English that Mongolia hoped to
attract English teachers, not only from Britain and North America, but
from India, Singapore and Malaysia. Getting visas for teachers, a
cumbersome process, will be streamlined, he said.
If he can lure English teachers, Mr. Tsagaan spins an optimistic vision of
Mongolia’s bilingual future. ‘‘If we combine our academic knowledge with
the English language, we can do outsourcing here, just like Bangalore,’’
he said. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company. All Rights
Reserved.
