Timeline for How can I politely explain to my students that the texts in my course are all in English and it is their duty to read it nonetheless?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 16, 2014 at 16:35 | comment | added | Relaxed | @Blaisorblade “Effective” or “competent” are doing all the work here but that's not a reasonable definition. It's simply a “no true scotsman” argument. | |
| Dec 16, 2014 at 16:30 | comment | added | Blaisorblade | @Relaxed My point is I've never met any non-English-reading competent programmer, at least for my definition of competent. I think, with Dijkstra, that programmers are like neurosurgeons, so I'm not sure they produce "value" unless they're very good. EDIT: but of course, that definition of competent is highly questionable, and I don't have the needed evidence to be 100% sure of it myself. | |
| Dec 15, 2014 at 15:05 | comment | added | Relaxed | @Blaisorblade Yes, there are obviously some languages in which no documentation is available (I would have thought Italian is not among them but I don't really know; I was thinking more about French and German) and it probably depends on the technology/area as well. And at least reading English is in any case an asset. But the claim that English is absolutely necessary is much more onerous. It's enough to note that some people manage without it to disprove it while the (undoubtedly large) number of people who can speak English and are computer programmers is hardly relevant. | |
| Dec 15, 2014 at 14:46 | comment | added | Blaisorblade | @Relaxed: we see different anecdotes, but I've yet to meet competent programmers who can't read English (at least in Italy). So little technical documentation is translated decently (at least to Italian) that not reading English is a severe handicap (and Italians write mostly in English anyway, typically we aren't language nationalists). That might change depending on the national community in your subfield — say, Japan seems to have enough non-English-speaking Ruby programmers that I ran into Japanese-only information on internals. | |
| Dec 14, 2014 at 23:26 | comment | added | Relaxed | (-1) I think this is simply untrue. You need some English to do research in most fields but not merely to be an effective practitioner. Alexander's anecdote notwithstanding, there are in fact many computer programmers who know very little English. | |
| Dec 12, 2014 at 12:35 | comment | added | Taladris | I see a weakness in your argument: if English is an absolute necessity to work in a field, it means that English has to be learn somewhere before the graduation. It could be an independant English class, or a "English for Science/Engineer/History of Arts" class, or a class held in English. BUT it still need to be unambiguously agreed upon before registration in that class. | |
| Dec 11, 2014 at 18:12 | comment | added | Szabolcs | @Joseph You should mention that you teach History in the question. That put everything in a completely different perspective for me and I realize that some of the comments I wrote on your question don't apply. I studied physics, meaning we had a smaller volume of material and could rely mostly on class notes. | |
| Dec 11, 2014 at 17:45 | comment | added | user12512 | @jakebeal, you are absolutely right. Every semester I try to do that, but after some years I came to terms with the fact that my arguments are not convincing. It's a mandatory course. They can't graduate without passing it. None of the other professors are like me. Some don't even speak English. The faculty voted for ending foreign language classes in the department. And yes, if I told what I teach, the need for foreign languages would be so obvious that most would comment that this situation is ridiculous: I teach History -- Art History and Middle East Studies. | |
| Dec 11, 2014 at 15:45 | comment | added | Alexander | I once had a student in a summer prep class who wanted to study CompSci without knowing any English - he had had German, French, Latin and Spanish at school. I told him he should use the time until the official start of the course to learn some basic english. He didn't, tried to start in summer, and sunk quickly, although his math grades were not bad and the bachelor course is taught in German. Everyone else dropped because of the math - he dropped because of the english... | |
| Dec 11, 2014 at 13:49 | history | answered | jakebeal | CC BY-SA 3.0 |