Efectos de SPARC secretado sobre células endoteliales. endoteliales

The idea of a national culture as the sum of social, psychological and historical idiosyncrasies of a particular nation necessary involves a national approach to language education. In human history, education and media have been the main channels for constructing the national citizenship. In a modern society, national public discourse is established through the traditional printed media and audiovisual media such as radio and television, together with the more recent online media. In this process the consistent use of a standard language has played a significant role. Anderson (1983)depicted nations as ‘imagined communities’; although citizens belonging to the same nation do not know each other personally, they acquire a sense of togetherness from sharing a language, reading the same novels and newspapers, listening to the same radio broadcasting, watching the same TV programs and discussing the same issues of national interest.

In a world of global consumers of global products and information, national differences tend to dissolve. Opponents of globalisation criticize it for tending towards unification, standardisation, and referring to the source of many of these products – Americanisation. The process of Americanisation, according to Graddol, Swann and Leith (1996, pp. 93-94), started in North America in 1789, with Noah Webster pleading for ‘an American tongue’. George Bernard Shaw’s claim in 1912 that, “What has been happening in my lifetime is the Americanisation of the world”, indicated the rapid progress of this process (cited in Holroyd, 1997, p. 660).

Currently, globalisation often means the Americanisation of our public and private patterns of consumption, our ways of thinking, and the organisation of many domains of life.

The penetration of the English language and its associated culture is causing concern among nationalist movements all over the world. Several governments have

attempted to take protectionist measures against the alleged threat to their cultural heritage. France, for instance, appointed a watchdog committee to expel extraneous

vocabulary from official discourse. It also lobbied hard to convince Europe to protect its audio-visual media markets during the trade negotiations in the early 1990s that led to the GATS. However, English has never been regarded in any sense as a threat to Chinese languages, especially Mandarin, and as Xu (2002b) observes, “Since Chinese Putonghua (Mandarin) does not feel linguistically insecure in the face of the global spread of English, the government is generously supporting the teaching and learning of English in China” (p. 226). Protectionist measures like import quotas imposed on Hollywood movies have been taken for commercial considerations rather than against any possible threats to Chinese cultural heritage, which remains in many people’s mind too strong to be marginalised or made redundant. From a historical point of view, all cultures, including China’s, have developed through exchanges in which outside influences have been filtered, processed, adapted and adopted, even if this has often involved the relative dominance of one culture over others. In this respect, the nationalist objective to keep a particular culture ‘pure’ is completely artificial and still not prevailing in China.

Nationalist movements worldwide are concerned with the infiltration of the English language and American culture. They sense a threat to their own cultures and fear that their languages will gradually lose their communicative functions, to end up finally as a dialect merely suited for local usage. As far as language is concerned: local/national languages are not replaced by English on the fundamental level of grammar; only their vocabulary is enriched by lexical items for which there is usually no local alternative. A case in point is the influence of English on Chinese, which has been mainly lexical in the adoption of technical terms. Meanwhile, there has been a mild influence on the morphology of Mandarin (Putonghua), in that the acquisition of both direct loans (such as ‘mo-deng’ for ‘modern’) and loan translation (‘guanxi’ for ‘connection’) has created polysyllabic words in a basically

monosyllabic language (McArthur, 2003, p. 357).

Pennycook (1995) pointed out that English carries a set of ideologies, values, and norms based on the history of its development and use. Local cultures should not see communication networks in association with English as a threat, but rather as an opportunity to promote their own languages and traditions and to revitalize them by entering into dialogue with others. For non-English speaking Chinese immigrants in

English speaking countries, for example, getting involved in the long-cherished ‘mainstay community’ and striving for the re-emergence of submerged ethnic

communities rely on effective communication with the wider community (Richmond, 1984).

Linguistic power can be manifested by using one of the following power strategies: persuasion, regulation, inducement and force. Kachru (1987, p. 222) lists also some other reasons for the dominance of English around the world: its propensity for acquiring new identities, its power of assimilation, its adaptability to

“decolonisation” as a language, its manifestation in a range of dialects, and its provision of a flexible medium for literary and other types of creativity across languages and cultures. There are two hypotheses concerning language power: the intrinsic-power hypothesis and the acquired-power hypothesis. The first one claims that English would intrinsically possess certain linguistic characteristics that would make it a preferred language for international purposes (e.g. Jespersen 1905, cited in Kachru, 1986). This position, according to Kachru (1986), is similar to claims of racial superiority. The second hypothesis emphasizes the ways in which a language acquires power. English has also been referred to as a post-imperial language, signalling that colonial empires have given way to new types of alliance,

collaboration and exploitation. Our world is increasingly dominated by Coca Cola, CNN, Microsoft and the many transnational corporations for whom the key language is English, and who through processes of McDonaldisation are seeking to create a global consumerist culture, a single market. English is therefore a key and effective instrument in breaking down national borders (Phillipson, 1992). English became gradually a major tool for acquiring knowledge in the sciences and the humanities. It has come to represent modernisation and development, and, as a link language, it has acquired intra-national roles over the years.

The most important reason for the success of English is, according to Kachru (1986, pp.129-132) the historical role of England as a colonial power. In India, for example, the political power naturally attributed a power to the language of the Raj (also referred to as the linguistic elitism strategy), and it also became a symbol of political power. English came to be the language of the legal system, higher education, pan- regional administrative network, science and technology, trade and commerce, either

because the indigenous languages were not equipped for these roles or because the use of English was considered prestigious and powerful and English provided for a convenient vocabulary.

The spread of English as a result of exploitation and colonisation thus privileges certain groups of people (including native speakers and non-native elites who have the opportunity to master it well) and may harm others who have less opportunity to learn it. It is especially notable that in many ex-colonies of Britain, English is still the language of exclusive social elites. On the other hand, those who fail to receive education of English whatsoever would be denied the English-related jobs. English is a necessary skill for many of the global workers: for example, Malaysia in 2003 made basic proficiency in English a requirement for all foreign employees, just as Bangladesh signed an agreement to send 200,000 workers to Malaysia. Phillipson (1992), when discussing global English and local language policies, argued that the common label ‘English as an international language’ might serve to obscure the fact that it is a national language for some of its speakers. It is in this sense that its role as a neutral lingua franca remains in doubt. Native speakers of English are often at an advantage, whether at international conferences and as editors of so-called

‘international’ academic journals.

To reduce such risks, Harbord (2002) suggested that the evils of linguistic imperialism might be avoided so long as primary and secondary education, and perhaps also the first stage of tertiary education (BA degrees) are taught in the local language other than English. During this period, the students are receiving rather than giving, and there is no need for them to receive information in a foreign language. China’s language education policy is to some extent in conformity with this scenario. English courses are included in the primary, secondary and tertiary curricula as separate parallel courses with other subject courses like Chinese Language and Mathematics. No subject course is taught through English or any language other than Chinese in the primary, secondary schools. However, it has become an encouraged practice in tertiary institutions to provide English and Chinese bilingual subject courses.

This is a debate without conclusion. It is one thing to contemplate a cultural and linguistic evolution from a distance; it is another to take decisions on the political matters. While regarded unequal to favour the native speaker of English in Europe, it is also unfair in China to favour those have good mastery of English.