Living in a Multilingual World

Mystudent looked surprised. I’d only said “How are we doing?” Yet he couldn’t understand why I’d included myself in that question. It was autumn 2019, a few months before Covid shut down the world, and I was teaching at an independent language school in central London. At the time I had a lovely group of advanced students from all corners of the world. This chap, a Japanese computer wizard, was pretty clued up about all things English. But even he was thrown off when I included him and me in my greeting. It wasn’t hard to see why. There was no smirking Mario behind me. Either a doppelgänger or alter ego. Surely, I meant to include him. Luckily, my students trusted me. One of the reasons for this was because I treated them like adults. Even those in their mid teens. A common weekend homework would be sending them off to a corner of London, off the beaten tourist track, and getting them to talk to their classmates on the Monday after about what they’d learnt about this lesser-known place. <a href="https://medium.com/writers-blokke/living-in-a-multilingual-world-16c1bb7d556a">Read More</a>