Philip Seargeant: The Idea Of English In Japan: Ideology And The Evolution Of A Global Language. Multilingual

摘要

There is a lot more to language than language, a lot more to English than English. This will not come as news to teachers, policy-makers, applied linguists, sociolinguists, or indeed to anyone who has taken a moment to think seriously about the stuff that flows from our mouths and pens. We all know that, as Philip Seargeant writes, 'our use of language is always influenced by the ideas we form of language' (p. 1), and we all know, too, that these ideas are inextricably enmeshed with a variety of non-linguistic factors. In The Idea of English in Japan, Seargeant gives substance and rigor to these intuitions, exploring, for example, why the Japanese, a well-educated people, instructed in generously funded programs by cadres of education professionals both foreign and native, have so little apparent success in mastering English.