'Spe....cial En....glish' and Other Silly Things

On January 5, I mentioned VOA's special English and included a 14-minute audio report from their Internet site. Here's a response from Don, a friend, reader of this blog, and current contributor ...

Hi, I've been meaning to write about the 'spe....cial En....glish', but hadn't gotten around to it.

When I was in my (Peace Corps) village in Senegal, all the contact I had with the outside world was my little transistor radio. Amazingly, it picked up VoA. Most of the time I didn't bother as I was caught up in village life, like saving babies from dying, trying experimental gardens and digging latrines, but every once in a while, I would turn it on. The VoA programs in 'Spe...cial En....glish' would come on and I could listen for about 5 minutes before it drove me crazy. That was before I was an English teacher, but I used to wonder if anybody as a second language English speaker could make out of what was being read. The vocabulary and grammar level were not brought down to a level they would be able to understand, and if they had that good a command of English, those listeners wouldn't need special English. However, over the years, I have come across people who did listen to those broadcasts and enjoyed them.

Another phenomenon that always amazed me, (probably not as a boy, but later) was the Indian and Cowboy movies wherein the Indians spoke pidgin English but seemed to have an unbelievable vocabulary and knew all the irregular past tense verbs and past participles, relative clauses, present perfect and could pronounce all words correctly but still hadn't mastered simple verb 'to be' or the difference between subject, object and possessive pronouns. On the other hand, as a teacher in the Arab world, that doesn't seem so far fetched. If you can find them, watch some of the old westerns in which the Indians actually had conversations with the white man. And, by the way, who were those early ESL teachers teaching the Indians? Even the most out-of-the-way tribes seemed to speak English. It's not like they lived among the white man and 'acquired' it naturally.

Of course there are so many other aspects of the Indian and cowboy movies that are far fetched, too. The towns were always so well laid out and neat. The women all wore stylish clothes, modern hair-styles and walked around carrying parasols, the homes had over-stuffed furniture and lovely tie back curtains, and, no matter how long they had been on the trail, the cowboys were always clean-shaven. And if there was ever a dance, no sweat stains under their arms. I've been to Texas and I know, in the summer you can't even sit outside without the sweat trickling down, much less dance a square dance. And Oklahoma or Kansas are as hot. And those general stores were better stocked than my local cold store.

But nearly all historical portrayals are unrealistic, be they the old West or colonial America, the South of the Civil War or Merry Old England. Those people couldn't all have had perfect teeth, flawless complexions and gorgeous hair. In fact, the opposite is more historically accurate.

Check out a wonderfully realistic film of the 70s "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. It's about life in a gold-rush town in the Pacific northwest. And a poignant love story, as well. One of my all-time favorite films.