At SBN, one of our main goals, alongside free education, is the teaching of the English language with particular focus on non-native speakers. We strongly believe that the globalized, interconnected world is in urgent need of a global language to allow citizens to communicate their thoughts and ideas, and thus better understand each other and tolerate different cultures and points of view. It is a paradox that we do have communication networks allowing us to get in touch instantly with any place on the planet, yet we still face so much division in terms of tolerance and understanding among the people of the world.
English is the language of choice for many reasons: first, it is the language used by the academic and scientific world; second, it is the language used in the greatest amount of content available online; third, it is quite easy to learn as a second language, as it requires a relatively small amount of terms and rules to learn in order to start using it. This is not necessarily true for Romance languages such as Italian or Spanish, and even less so for Asian-rooted languages such as Urdu or Mandarin. Simply put, not knowing English represents a barrier which limits a person’s potential in terms of the quantity of knowledge we can reach, the comparison that should be made between what local media tells us and international opinions on the same subject, the opportunities (including working ones), and the possibilities to travel and eventually move to places that better fit our attitudes. The English language is thus a tool for international awareness and personal growth, and can be seen as a means of freedom from a certain point of view.
This is the reason why we opted (for now) to leave our main articles and quiz lessons in English, while giving users the possibility to hear the related audio in multiple languages. The idea behind this is to use the English resource but also to have the possibility of getting an audio overview of what the lesson is about in the students’ mother language. This editorial choice is still under scrutiny, though, as on the other hand, by not providing the full written lesson in the native language, we limit the reach of our educational offer (i.e., students interested in exploring curricula in their own language, just learning for a given subject). In other words, our choice to “force” the student to deal with English presents its own limits, and it is not a given that in the future we will not change or experiment with other approaches.
Bob Young.
