English Audio Request

When Members of Parliament (MPs) published a set of new proposals in early January on ways to improve the integration of immigrants in the UK, one of the most controversial concerned speaking English. The report form the All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Integration, chaired by the Labour MP Chuka Umunna, proposed that: All immigrants should be expected to have either learned English before coming to the UK or be enrolled in compulsory ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) classes upon arrival.
The assumption here is that migrants don’t speak English, or not well enough to integrate within British society. However, this disregards the fact that English is a global language, spoken by up to two billion multilingual people around the world. It is a case of what the linguist Adrian Holliday termed “native-speakerism” – the belief in the linguistic superiority of “native speakers” and the consequent discrimination of those who are considered “non-native speakers”. But the distinction between native speakers and non-native speakers is often not just based on actual language skills, but, far more disturbingly, on assumptions based on ethnicity.
An example of the sensitivities around this issue were clearly on display during a Channel 4 news report on the MPs’ report on January 5th. The report included brief interviews with two women currently living in the UK, one from Somalia and the other from Gambia. They were meant to represent examples of the particular category of migrants requiring compulsory English language classes under the new proposals. But both women spoke good English when answering the interviewer’s questions about the current lack of English class provision.
The two women were from Sub-Saharan Africa, were of an ethnicity that was visibly different from that of a typical white British person and, in the case of the Gambian woman, wore clothes that marked non-Judaeo-Christian cultural and religious affiliations. They not only represented migrants needing English language tuition but prototypical migrants, exhibiting suitably “exotic” traits that identified them as such.