English lessons for immigrants
Social Policy Minister Michael Farrugia (left)
Social Policy Minister Michael Farrugia, taking a break from strolling along the Ragusa marina after getting off a boat with MEPA CEO Johann Buttigieg and one of the Elbros bosses, has been busy boasting that immigrants will be getting free English lessons.
How patronising. His party’s core vote is made up of people who don’t speak or understand English and yet there he is, his head in the sand, talking about English lessons for African migrants.
It’s about time our politicians faced the fact of a situation they have helped create themselves with their right-wing fixation on Maltese (i.e. patriotism) at the expense of English.
This situation is that Malta itself is a massive TEFL market, and not as a provider, but we’re too far gone in a state of denial to even see it, let alone admit it.
English lessons in Maltese schools now have to be TEFL lessons, but they’re not.
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The Malta Independent reported that “EU leaders have appointed Italy’s Federica Mogherini as EU foreign policy chief and Poland’s Donald Tusk as European Council president.”
Anglu Farrugia jonqos biex zgur ikollhom Tusk Force kompluta.
… and a ferocious one at that.
Tuks fors please
Does’t JPO have any other pair of trousers to wear? Should we start a collection perhaps?
Perhaps we can ask Jason Micallef’s help …
http://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2014/08/jason-micallef-throws-his-clothes-away-every-season-and-buys-new-ones/
The point is that the Minister is now flattering himself with being kind to the refugees his government did not want in the first place.
I doubt the idea of giving them English lessons was his. However I find it unbelievably shameful that the newspapers made no mention at all of the other person who appeared in the photos with the Ministers and who is no doubt the brainchild of the idea – he is a “mere commoner”.
Promoting national culture including the Maltese language is patriotism. Patriotism is the love of one’s country and is not fascism. Naturally the teaching and study of other languages as English and Italian should also be promoted and encouraged.
[Daphne – Promotion ‘national culture’, David, most definitely is fascist. It is, actually, one of the keys tool of fascism and the far right.]
Equiparating English and Italian is offensive to those of us brought up in a bilingual social and cultural environment. It is also a dismissal of the “national culture” you purport to uphold, which for just over two centuries included the English language as one of its main components.
English is not just “another language” as you put it. The rapid deterioration of English language standards locally is a grave loss to our national culture.
Incidentally, what does “promoting national culture” even mean? And how does one promote the Maltese language, to whom and to what end?
There is a difference between patriotism and nationalism. I wouldn’t be surprised if these guys are crypto-fascists themselves.
To Clueless and Painter, if there’s one thing that gets to me more than David’s drab comments. It’s your typical prompt replies to anything Italian as being fascist and that the rapid deterioration of English is a loss to our culture.
It’s the same coin.
I was bought up in a trilingual society, which gives me an extra instrument to understand and deconstruct both your theses.
Clueless, transcending the other Malta requires that which was for a millennium the language of this place, cyphers everywhere.
Painter, read Umberto Calosso, anti-fascist per excellence, refugee and rather fond of Malta.
Jozef, I agree on the point that this denigration of Italian has to stop. I for one don’t feel that Italian or English are mutually exclusive. In fact, knowing more languages enriches the mind and opens one up to more journalism, more literature (without the need for unfaithful translations) and, in the case of Italian, some of the best literary works in the world.
Clueless is right, because in the end, you have to choose your language of government. And you cannot choose all three.
This country made a tragic choice. It chose Maltese – a deficient, structurally inadequate, pidgin language.
To stupidity it added hypocrisy, by retaining English as an official language. What’s the point of an official language if it is never used in officialdom?
Italian? Yes by all means. But not as the language of government or instruction. Call it the language of engaging with your immediate neighbours, as Alsatian school children are taught German, or Lithuanian children are taught Russian.
P.S. The Cantilena sucks.
Happy or sad, good or bad, one way or the other – the Italian language was here earlier than the events bringing in the Fascism argument.
Italian was also an everyday language for many others, including myself. Italian and English rather than Maltese, initially.
Some thoughts and concepts are better expressed in one language than another and the conceptual fluency that is the resultant gift is enriching with each additional language one adds on.
One language is more precise in description than another:
take the simple difference between the German word for “strawberry” and the English. One says “straw” and one says “earth.” There is a conceptual difference.
These become more plentiful, and ingrained, in our insular village mentality where the population’s linguistic expression is so linked to provenance.
Where have I said that Italian = Fascist? Where have I mentioned Italian at all? I said that these guys might be crypto-fascists because of that ‘national culture’ stuff. Please, re-read David’s comment and my comment.
I don’t hate Italy, its national language or Italian culture(s). I don’t assume that Italians are all fascists just as I don’t assume that all the Maltese are festa-loving and football-crazed morons and that all British are tea-drinking snobs. Only a fool with a pea-brain reasons like that and you assumed I’m one.
“and that the rapid deterioration of English is a loss to our culture.”
There is no such thing as ‘our culture’ but cultures which are Maltese. My culture has nothing to do with a particular culture that exists in the Cottonera, even though I live there. It is different . I don’t spend my free time at some ‘każin tal-banda’ swirling tea out of a glass and talk about ‘l-armar tal-festa’ with men thrice my age. So to people like these, the deterioration of English is not a loss to them, but it is a loss to me because I do not limit myself to ‘festi’ and ‘każini’, where you are required to know only Maltese.
You seem to have misread what I wrote, Jozef. Nowhere have I denigrated the Italian language nor have I used the term ‘fascist’. However, it is a fact that Italian is no longer a mother-tongue locally as it was when my grandparents used it habitually at home. Incidentally, I speak fluent Italian, but I still consider it a foreign language. English is not a foreign language to me and to many others.
The risk here is that what happened to the Italian language in the interwar period will also happen to the English language. The damage to our identity, apart from our economy and standard of education, may be irreparable.
It is the “other Malta”, including David, that is transcending the minority of truly bilingual people not the other way around, by perpetuating the denigration of Maltese anglophones as unpatriotic and morally inferior.
If one loves one’s country, David, one gives the country’s children the best tools to get on with in life.
English is that tool and we spitefully discarded it.
Try getting a job in a hotel or restaurant and tell them you can recite Dun Karm but have only basic English or Italian.
Apply for work with a gaming or investment company and go quoting from Guze Aquilina… you won’t get far David…but you’ll have plenty of time to read Lino Spiteri’s pitiful short “stories”.
I think the observation the the level of English is deteriorating is rather superficial and does not do justice the complexity of the socio-linguistic situation.
It is almost certainly correct to state that the *average* level of English usage has dropped several notches because of the fact that far more many people use English nowadays than used to be the case in the past – or at least we all are exposed to levels of English usage among considerable swathes of the population which we were not familiar with three or four decades ago.
The democratisation of education – inherently obviously a positive development – has meant that a much larger proportion of the population know makes use of English. Different levels of linguistic ability mean that the average degree of mastery inevitably drops.
The social media have made sure that practically every person can parade his or her (lack of) knowledge to all and sundry.
So that is why many hotels, restaurants and other business are employing foreigners who cannot make the difference between ‘yes and no’ in English.
David, who was it who described patriotism as being the “last refuge of a scoundrel”?
Why do people who have very little historical knowledge insist on regurgitating MLP political propaganda , and socialist pseudo-patriotism in commentaries , without first researching the facts , and ending up .sounding like ignorant prats ?! As a very wise English teacher once told us – It’s better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool , than to open it , and prove it .
I agree David.
Har, har bleeding har!
http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2014-08-30/news/minister-gets-barracked-by-constituents-after-announcing-english-lessons-for-migrants-6398279681/
Patriotism, David!
The only thing Malta had going for it was the English language. I would not call the promotion, to the exclusion of English and Italian, mere patriotism; I would call it idiocy.
Not only is Maltese a language which less than 5% of Maltese people — if that — even know how to write, it is also a terrible language of instruction.
I challenge anyone to translate any text book from school in the field of Geography, Biology, Physics, Economics, indeed Linguistics. Impossible. There you have the most valid argument as to the level of idiocy that this bias verging on xenophobia has produced – a nation of people not literate in any language, not even Maltese, which from an academic point of view is totally useless anyway.
Ifrah, Gahan. We could all start using sign language. At least they will understand us in Sicily and Greece.
@David: If I understand you correctly, your notion of patriotism as the promotion of ‘national culture’ is the stereotyped reaction of an insular/provincial mind. Since the 60s, patriotism, at least in the developed world, has been dwindling rapidly and is now passe’.
In the case of Malta, it was well and good that after Independence we were made conscious of our roots to instill a sense of unity in our identity to carry us forward in the new political, economic and social scenario as an independent state.
But once that stage had been reached it was/still is imperative that we recognise the new world as it is — an interconnected network of cultures made all the more concrete with the social media.
Historically (and not only), Daphne’s comment is correct: patriotism combined with the ‘national culture’ is “one of the key tools of fascism and the far right”.
Malta, generally, may be out of the Middle Ages in terms of religious beliefs (though not in religious attitude and behaviour) but we’re still there intellectually in terms of many aspects of modern life. And let’s not blame it all on our insularity.
That sports jacket is from Ostin Rijt.
In fact, David, the old Mintoffian battle cry, ‘Malta L-ewwel u Qabel kollox’ is reminiscent of the German ‘Deutschland Über Alles’, and look what that line of thought brought on.
Can the Minister first provide work for the illegal immigrants and for the many gipsy-looking visitors who are annoying patrons of restaurants all along Republic street begging?
In about six minutes four beggars came begging – one in a wheelchair, one with a walking stick and two very healthy-looking women.
Tourists were very annoyed and asked if there are so many beggars in Malta.
[Daphne – Begging is actually against the law in Malta, as I recall.]
Begging is certainly illegal in Malta.
Apparently, the Sliema Police have not yet been alerted to a foreigner – admittedly in need of care of sorts – who regularly sits begging very close to the Tower Supermarket in High Street.
If they already have, they definitely have failed to take any action to-date.
Whenever I describe Malta as a bi-lingual country, I do so ironically. The truth is that a only a small segment of the population can speak and write English properly and the majority struggles with even the most elementary rules of grammar and pronunciation.
And this is not restricted to any particular social class. Several university graduates, put through the obsessive national language policies of successive governments, speak Maltese as a first language and cannot string together a proper sentence in English if their life depended on it. I meet these everyday in the course of my profession.
The mess will take generations to clear up and demands an educational policy which loudly trumpets the crucial role of high-standard English as a language medium on which the island’s economic future depends whilst giving Maltese the importance it deserves as a national language, even if only spoken by less than half a million European inhabitants.
…and written correctly by less than 20,000, you should add.
The problem is not only that English and Italian have been discarded but that it has not resulted in an equal increase in people’s knowledge of Maltese.
Three generations of unsuccessfully ramming Maltese down students’ throats has resulted in a semi-literate, monolingual nation incapable of communicating well in at least one language.
It is too late to backtrack now. The only time I see this monolingual (how would one say ‘zerolingual’?) parlous state of affairs correcting itself is an invasion and occupation by another country. Sad.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140831/local/hospital-cannot-take-weight-of-new-wards.533767
When will the elves understand a building can be designed NOT to take extra storeys on top? It’s not a defect you morons, it’s good economic practice.
The resulting undersized A&E was a consequence of a certain Alfred Sant plonking a couple of floors over the main wings.
Guess who forgot to add corresponding capacity.
Thank goodness Times of Malta just has to upload all their rubbish, gives a perspective of their state of the art: Plain lies.
And how scary is it to have a government which doesn’t check blueprints before proceeding with works?
Just as an aside, Sandro Chetcuti had called the removal of building height limitations a gimmick, that structural limits wouldn’t let Muscat’s vision kickstart the economy.
Now this.
Agree 100% on the standard of English. We have lost a treasure that had been presented to us on a golden platter. Fools! Even the one Mintoff once famously called “Bartlu” (in Parliament in 1997) has actually conceded this fact. Too late, Varist, you are also partly to blame.
Since we are on the subject of languages in Malta, here is something I spotted on the ‘Rajt u Smajt’ section in ‘It-Torċa’.
http://i.imgur.com/24Aq2EH.jpg
Looking inwards all the time.
They feel so secure within the small confines of our tiny island and their minuscule brains.
In my time – late 1940s – and for quite a number of years later, English was the language we started learning in Stage 1. We started learning Maltese in Standard 1(today’s year 3) and it proved to be a very good practice. An other difference was that we started formal education at 6+ not at 4+,
Then much later formal education was obligatory at 5 years ( 4+ for those born in December) of age. To add insult to injury, children at this age English and Maltese-were being taught simultaneously which I think was confusing the children.
Then during the mintoffian regime there was a head on attack on the English language, the result of which, can still be felt today.
To-day all classrooms in every school are equipped with the latest digital equipment and the opportunity to make learning vivid and interesting is available. But what is actually happening in the classrooms? It is here – after the home- that education should be flourishing. But is it really?
I would also argue that part of the problem is the increasing number of parents who dump the responsibility of educating their children solely on school institutions.
Bilingualism needs to be practised at home as well, ideally with one parent speaking one language and the other another language in a child’s early years. Moreover, Maltese television is hardly the best thing for children to watch growing up. Most parents nowadays simply ignore all this and expect their children to learn English at school.
At home – not if your parents can hardly even speak Maltese.
Would it be too much to ask whether the school that shall impart this education got the contract by direct order?