Barrister or Bankrupt

CELTA in Poland

[Squinting in the spring sun on the Wisła river in Kraków. Next to my head is Wawel Hill, site of the Royal Castle and the national cathedral]

I'm between jobs at the moment (really!), so I took the opportunity of spending a month in Kraków with the Talking Bear. We studied together here at the Jagiellonian University as part of our Polish degree course, and John loved it so much he emigrated the day after his finals. He's now firing on all cylinders with a translation bureau, a sideline teaching English & Linguistics and what must be the most uncommon name found in a Polish passport (John Beauchamp pronounced in Polish sounds something like Yon Bohamp). Thanks for having me, mate.

On the Bear's recommendation I signed up for a CELTA (Certificate of English Language Teaching to Adults) course during my time here. What I thought would be a holiday of sorts and chance to start revising for law school turned into four weeks of late nights spent familiarising myself with a new set of jargon (Gap-fills at the Clarification Stage, anyone? How about a spot of Test-Teach-Test before the Gist Task?) and preparing for daily teaching practice in real classrooms with real students. I really enjoyed being thrown into the deep end and teaching from the second day of the course. My fellow trainees were a great bunch of very interesting people and it made the world of difference that we were so well supported by experienced and inspiring tutors. I hope they get round to reading this post and decide to stay in touch (not least because my classmates each owe me 25 złoty. Grrr)!

So the CELTA was enjoyably challenging and may prove useful as a means of earning extra income whilst abroad. Unexpectedly, learning to teach English also gave me some food for thought about how learning impacts upon the lawyer's profession.

When presenting complex legal argument in court, advocates need to keep the target of their advocacy (single judge, panel of judges, jury) with them - "because of point A, we submit point B, the effect of which is point C", etc. This can be extremely difficult to do and is one of the reasons why some want to abolish juries in complex fraud trials. A little CELTA methodology might be useful here.

The course encourages analysis of the way in which individuals prefer to study and the adoption of a style of teaching with this preference in mind. If your judge has an auditory preference, offer to read her the section of the statute before directing her to a written version. If your magistrate is teacher-dependent, be prepared for questions for which answers are already in the bundle you have given him -  he wants to hear you say it.

Perhaps I am stretching the metaphor between advocate and teacher - effective advocates must also be great salespeople, and the teacher-student / advocate-judge relationship are totally opposite in many ways. However essential to both professions is the skill of conveying information and some reflection on how humans (this includes judges!) best receive and retain information might result in a worthwhile advantage.

BoB recommends International House Kraków for anyone wanting to take a full-time CELTA course for as long as Magda Markiewicz and Declan Cooley are the course tutors. The fees are approximately half of what one would pay in the UK and even after accomodation a significant saving can be made. The course is very intensive however so make sure you leave some time for sightseeing before or after (but not during) the course.

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Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of my employer. Because I don't currently have one.

English: the new regional language of the Netherlands Part 2

(A language map from Ethnologue. All but one of the (European) Netherlands traditional languages either has or has applied for ECMRL protection, and speakers of the remaining one (Vlaams) benefit from a 99% literacy rate in Dutch)

(A language map of my favourite part of the world from Ethnologue. Saba and Statia are so tiny that they are not named - they are the bits of the Netherlands Antilles that are not in a box, just NW of St. Kitts and Nevis)

It may be useful to examine the case for granting Sabans and Statians protection to use English in public and private life by investigating what the (European) Dutch government has done with other minority languages on its territory. The European Charter for Minority and Regional Languages (ECMRL) is "layered", in that once a state recognises a regional or minority language it can choose the level of commitment to its preservation and promotion. It can agree to be bound by the 8 fundamental principles and objectives of the charter ("Part II"), or it can go further and apply "Part III" - detailed rules in various fields including education, judicial authorities and the media. Part III is in itself variegated, allowing for a country to increase its level of commitment to a language when finances and political will allow.

The Netherlands currently extends "only Part II" protection to three languages: Limburgish, Low Saxon and Yiddish. Yiddish is a "non-geographic language" and hence isn't represented on the map above. Part II protection was requested by Zeeuws speakers in 2001.

Part III protection has been granted to the Frisian language, with the (European) Dutch government agreeing to be bound in the Province of Friesland by the provisions set out here in addition to those enjoyed by the "only Part II" languages.

I do not know the reasons why a Frisian tongue is a particularly privileged one in Holland. However if linguistic dissimilarity from Dutch plays a role, Statian and Saban English-speakers are well-placed to demand specific legal commitments under the ECMRL from their closer relationship with the mainland. That is, if two islands in the Caribbean can be considered "Europe".

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English: the new regional language of the Netherlands Part 1

(Me on Mount Scenery, Saba, 2003. This dormant Caribbean volcano is the highest point in the Kingdom of the Netherlands)

English can be considered a minority language in the Netherlands. Who could argue with that statement? Lawyers, that's who.

The terms regional or minority languages are defined in the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML), an initiative by the Council of Europe to protect and promote the use of historical regional and minority languages in Europe.

Article 1(a) of the charter:

"regional or minority languages" means languages that are:

1. traditionally used within a given territory of a State by nationals of that State who form a group numerically smaller than the rest of the State's population; and
2. different from the official language(s) of that State;

Languages used in Europe in the context of recent migratory movements are outside of the scope of ECRML. For example Arabic will almost certainly not become a minority and/or regional language in the UK due to the proposition that Arabic-speaking migration was not "traditionally used". The same would apply for English in the Netherlands regardless of how many Brits might make that country their home.

Following referenda in 2004-5 in each of the islands that make up the Netherlands Antilles, that country will be dissolved by July 2007 at the latest. Curacao and Sint Maarten will gain "country status" and the accompanying greater autonomy within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The smaller islands of Bonaire, Saba and Sint Eustatius voted to become municipalities of the European part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, confusingly named the Netherlands. It is this constitutional shift which BoB suggests may lead to Dutch recognition of English as an official regional language.

English as the lingua franca of Saba and Statia (the other islands of the Netherlands Antilles use Papiamento) reflects the laissez-faire attitude prevalent in the days of Dutch colonialism: administrators didn't care what country the inhabitants were from as long as they were somehow useful and they behaved themselves. Many Sabans have Scottish blood - Johnson is a very common surname on the island. Unlike territories prized for their ability to produce, Statia was the "Golden Rock of the Caribbean" because of its international trade. Just as a Statian slave was more likely to toil in a warehouse than on a plantation, the warehouse owner was more likely to be non-Dutch. It might also have been relevant to Statia's linguistic history that the island's golden age was contemporaneous with massive trade with the United States.

This has resulted today in the fact that the primary language of instruction in schools on Saba is English, and has been since it took over from Dutch in 1986. Meanwhile although Dutch is taught in schools next door in Statia, the official Statian Government website is only available in English (Dutch has been "coming soon" for as long as I have been watching it), and islanders use English in daily life.

All of this leads to a situation where it may be relevant that although the ECMRL excludes protection and promotion of non-traditional migrant languages, it allows no exception for regional languages that are "new" to the country by way of the signatory extending its jurisdiction into additional territory. Furthermore the proposed status of the "kingdom islands" in European law - that of most remote region status (see Inforegio) - is the same as that of the French Caribbean islands, the languages of which were listed by the French government as potentially qualifying for ECMRL protection in a 1999 report (in French).

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Migrant Advertising Part 1

(The slogan reads "I'm sending so much more than money". Apart from the firm's name, there isn't a word of English on the entire poster.)

A few weeks before I set up BoB I came across this advertisement on a bus stop in south Brent. It was written entirely in Polish and so came as quite a shock to me, my first language not having been widely used enough before in London for multinational advertisers to consider using it. At last count (December 2005) the Home Office's Worker Registration Scheme puts the number of Poles who have entered the UK labour market since EU enlargement at 204,895, though I am sure it is higher since membership of the scheme is not widely policed and does not seem to be a requirement for getting a National Insurance number (UPDATE May 11th 2006: The Economist thinks it is "over half a million"). The poster is proof of that number of working people with an interest in remittance services being a large enough market to focus advertising expenditure on to the exclusion of other language groups, even the dominant one.

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Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of my employer.