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powerful languages of the world may express national identities, or they may be the medium for the expression of other collective identities distinct from or even in conflict with the nation

Absorption and incorporation may be the preferred option for the powerful; for others – the majority, we suspect – the plurality and diversity of human expression, even within the world’s most powerful languages, is what the intercultural approach, moving from language learning to languaging, can both celebrate and encourage

It is therefore our task in the next chapter to begin to discover a way forward, to find theory and method sufficient to the task of creating critical dispositions for languaging and being intercultural

English actually trails Chinese and Spanish as the third most commonly spoken language in the world, just ahead of Bengali, Hindi and Arabic. In 1950 about 9 per cent of the world’s population spoke English as their first language. That figure is now about 5.6 per cent.

While the proportion increases significantly when you add speakers of English as a second or third language, we’re still left with around 70-80 per cent of humanity not speaking English. Being a monolingual English-speaker places you firmly in humanity’s minority group.

The view that ‘English is enough’ fails to acknowledge that being bilingual or multilingual is an increasingly necessary passport to personal mobility, opportunity and prosperity, particularly in knowledge and services based economies where the ability to collaborate and communicate effectively across borders is a prized skill-set.

Adopting the international language of business, diplomacy, and science and technology was about the only way this resource-less tiny island could guarantee its survival after losing its economic hinterland in Malaysia. Unemployment was at 14 per cent and rising.

Just as importantly, picking this race-neutral language demonstrated his government’s anti-communalistic stance, helping to keep the peace in a newborn nation made up of a polyglot-settler populace who had struggled for years with racial and religious strife.


For the sake of building “a community that feels together”, Lee pushed through the bilingualism policy in 1966. All students had to learn their “mother tongue”, Mandarin, Malay or Tamil, depending on their race, as a second language, and this became a compulsory and critical examination subject in 1969.

being knowledgeable and being intelligent are not the same. Being knowledgeable generally refers to having access to information and facts as well as the ability to recall them. Intelligence usually refers to a person’s ability to reason, solve problems, think critically, comprehend subject matter, use language to communicate effectively, construct relationships, employ logic, and manipulate numbers (Gardner, 1999)

Experiencing diversity challenges expectations not only by increasing acceptance of different cultural, ethnic, and racial groups but also by enhancing students’ overall psychological functioning (Crisp & Turner, 2011). Pascarella (1996) reached a similar conclusion from the national study of student learning that found that diversity experiences in the first year of college had long-term positive effects on critical thinking throughout college, particularly for white students.

Learning how to express emotions within a social system is knowledge acquired through social interaction governed by the rules and customs of the culture. One culture may encourage open and intense expression of emotional feelings, whereas another may see that same behavior as inappropriate. The exception is primal emotions, such as fear when confronted by a predator. Emotional expression is a matter of how much or the degree to which one expresses an emotion. Plutchik’s (1980) eight basic emotions include continuums from minimal to extreme expression: Trust: acceptance to admiration Fear: timidity to terror Surprise: uncertainty to amazement Sadness: gloominess to grief Disgust: dislike to loathing Anger: annoyance to fury Anticipation: interest to vigilance Joy: serenity to ecstasy Combinations of these basic emotions create other forms of expressions. For example, the combination of the emotions joy and trust produce love, while the combination of the emotions anticipation and anger produce aggression (Plutchik, 1980).

We must improve language learning and international education at all levels if our nation is to continue to lead in the global economy; to help bring security and stability to the world; and to build stronger and more productive ties with our neighbors.

The United States is a country made up of many cultures—and we often celebrate that diversity. But just as often, we rely on the predominance of English as the language of global business and higher education when looking toward the world.