The Importance of Speaking English

Italians see English everyday in their lives. They see English on signs and slogans, watch dubbed movies, listen to American music and wear clothing with English writing they don't understand. I was at a bar with some Italian friends and an old American song came on. I concentrated for a moment to try and remember the name of the artist and they asked me if I understood the lyrics. Well, yes. Of course I understand the lyrics, I speak English. They were so jealous! I've always taken for granted having English as my native language. This year has really taught me some appreciation when I've tried to explain expressions or slang that doesn't exist in another language or culture. American pop culture is global pop culture and it's spread and emulated all over the world. I think it's a little hard for us to imagine the importance of speaking English.

Last week, I continued a lesson with movie titles and taglines. Movies titles [as other things] are not translated exactly into Italian. The same words might not have the same meaning. My best example is "Home Alone." In Italian, the title is "Mamma, ho perso l'aero" aka "Mom, I missed the plane." Yes, if you missed the plane you might subsequently be home alone ... but regardless the titles are different and so it made for a good lesson where my kids had to understand the titles of a dozen American films and find the tagline and equivalent Italian title. One of my kids asked if they change the titles when they translate Italian films into English. I felt kind of bad because I had only heard of a handful of Italian classics before I moved here. We don't see foreign films on a regular basis and so I believe most Italian films are not even translated into English. We also don't usually listen to foreign music on a regular basis so I didn't know their famous singers like they knew mine. It's not an equal exchange. As Americans, we're not exposed to other languages and cultures as much. We don't have the same necessity and so we have a completely different frame of mind.

As self-righteous as it sounds, English is the common language people of different origins use to communicate. When I take the bus in the morning, I hear various immigrants in Italy on the phone in native languages and English words and expressions mixed in there, especially numbers and time expressions. When one of my private lesson students went to Barcelona with his class for a school trip, he told me that he lost his jacket at a club. He was arguing with the bouncers to try and find the jacket and didn't do this in Italian or Spanish but in English. I would have thought that they would succeed in understanding each other in their romance languages [as I spoke in Italian in Barcelona for example while ordering in restaurants], but it was easier for them to communicate in English. It was more likely that they would understand speaking in a common foreign language than one speaking Italian or Spanish. Most of my best students in English are immigrants who learned English before coming to Italy and/or had to use it before learning Italian or other languages to get by.

Although the importance of speaking English in our globalized world is obvious to non-native speakers, there also exists a kind of stigma with the skill. My foreign students tend to be isolated because they speak English and because of the way they speak English. As I've written in other blogs about my school and education in Italy, my students stay in the same classroom with the same classmates all day long. They don't change classes and have the option to take a course at a higher level of English in their regular curriculum. Most of my classes have a low level of speaking skills with a few high-flyers. My Italian friends might be jealous of me, but they are also college students earning degrees at universities. Instead, the students at my school resent the discrepancy in their speaking skills. Even more, my foreign students have strong accents [mostly coming from North African countries] and while they might speak fluently, they are hard to understand by the other students and teachers alike. At the beginning of the year a student arrived from Ghana and couldn't speak a word of Italian. Unfortunately, his English teacher couldn't understand him either. With some difficulty I was able to understand his English. Overall I think an American accent is the most liberal, because in the end our country came from many linguistic backgrounds to form our pronunciation and way of speaking. More than being a native English speaker, I am grateful for my American English which allows me to understand the variations in accents, Italian or foreign, pretty well. It really depends on the class. Some high-flyers raise the level of the class with their skills and interests, others are excluded and discouraged from speaking. Thankfully, the extra English oral exam preparation course I taught gave participating students an environment to learn and appreciate their interests. In the end, the constant reminder of English as a necessary international language for work and travel forces Italians to learn it, maybe resent it, and sometimes embrace it.


On our part, we are impressed if someone speaks fluently in another language, but do we require it? I went to London this past weekend and although I saw plenty of foreigners, every sign I saw was in English. I'm sure that when I go home in a few weeks, I'll notice less foreigners and see and hear less foreign languages. I can't help but be a bit disappointed that we lack the importance of speaking and learning other languages and cultures and I wonder how we would approach the rest of the world if this were different. Could we learn to embrace it?

Here are some photos from London:

Tower of London

Tower Bridge

We did the various touristy things like the Tower of London, a sightseeing bus ride, lunch at Harrod's, the Dirty Dancing musical, Victoria and Albert Museum and Hyde Park. We also just spent time just exploring the neighborhoods of the city and walking around places like Portobello Road and meeting a friend for tea in Camden Town with whom I studied in Paris. Of course, we had to stop by London's throwback to Harry Potter at Platform 9 3/4: 

King's Cross Station

Westminster Abbey and Big Ben