Week 15: Globalization and Language Teaching

To start off with this week’s discussion, I found most of the key ideas that caught my attention were from Kubota’s article on globalization.  I felt he carefully explained this concept as “an increased local diversity influenced by human contact across cultural boundaries as well as speedy exchange of commodities and information.”  He then continued to explain Japan and its situation regarding this concept and compared globalization to being like Americanization.  This was interesting to me because it made me think about any other country that other countries try to become similar to.  I think that each country has its own unique characteristics that make them fascinating and until I went to Europe I never really noticed how much of an influence American culture has on the world.  It then made me wonder if companies like Starbucks and McDonalds were somewhat of a combined effort of ideas from other countries or if America really took the reins and other countries just bought the franchise. 

The quote from the Japanese manager of a McDonalds, “if we eat McDonalds hamburgers and potatoes for a thousand years, we will become taller, our skin will become white and our hair blonde” made me wonder how he intended for this quote to come out.  In a sarcastic sense, it is humorous obviously because aside from weight gain, the effects of a big mac would not cause such drastic transformations on a person’s hair or skin color.  In a more out of the box analysis of this statement, if Japan accepts an American company such as McDonald’s among their culture, who knows how far that can unravel making Japanese citizens want to acquire more and more attributes from the American culture like our “white skin” and “blonde hair”.  The article also stated that this idea of globalization also causes increased nationalism.

It was interesting to ponder the fact that Japan is struggling between the promotion of English and its own nationalism.  I can see how acquiring more American ideas or customs would be an intriguing thought because it could draw more attention to their economy or even more visitors to the area but on the other hand I can see it being distressing because it may be seen as an abandonment of various characteristics of their Japanese culture.  English is often seen as a symbol of power that is superior to other languages because it is a lingua franca and enables an understanding of multiple areas of the world. 

The concept of a world English correlates nicely with the ideas expressed in Kubota’s article because it demonstrates its significance worldwide.  We’ve discussed numerous times in class about which dialect or accent should be deemed the “standard” English but the fact that there are speakers all over the world with their own unique dialect makes this idea of one uniform English close to impossible.  How would one acquire a pronunciation if it is almost impossible based on their first language?  I think that the English language has definitely brought us a long way from where we once were without a lingua franca but it’s understandable that globalization in regards to English can be a scary thought for some speakers of other languages.