It is not just inertia and coercion that work in favour of English. It is also, these days, popular demand. English is the language of technology. In Africa and South Asia, most higher education is in English, so those who aspire to a college education must master the language. “In higher studies, like medicine and engineering, English is a must,” says Atul Kumar Srivastava, president of the Association of Private Schools of Uttar Pradesh, and headmaster of St Basil’s School, Lucknow.
而支持英语的不仅是惯性和胁迫。还有如今广泛的需求。英语是科技语言。在非洲和南亚，大部分高等教育都使用英语教学。因此，那些渴望接受大学教育的人必须掌握这门语言。“在高等教育中，诸如医药和工程这样的专业，英语是必不可少的。” 北方邦私立学校协会主席兼勒克瑙圣巴兹尔学校校长阿图尔·库马尔·斯利瓦斯塔瓦如此表示。
English-medium education is no longer the preserve of the elite. Sameena Asif, whose husband is a street hawker, sends her three children to private school in Lahore, Pakistan. “They won’t get a degree or a job if they can’t speak English. I have a BA in Urdu, but it’s useless. I’m embarrassed that I was educated in Urdu.”
用英语教学不再是精英的特权。萨姆妮娜·阿西夫的丈夫是一名街头小贩，他们将三个孩子送到巴基斯坦拉合尔的私立学校。“如果他们不会说英语，就得不到学位或工作。我有乌尔都语的文学学士学位，但没有用。我很尴尬，因为我接受的是乌尔都语教育。”
Many state governments in India, like that in Uttar Pradesh, are establishing or expanding English-medium education. All primary schools are English-medium in Jammu & Kashmir; Andhra Pradesh announced last year that its elementary schools would convert to English; others are experimenting on a smaller scale. In Pakistan, the Punjab provincial government announced in 2009 that it would go English-medium, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa announced the same in 2013.
印度的许多邦政府，如北方邦，正在建立或扩大以英语为媒介的教育。查谟和克什米尔所有小学都是用英语教学；安得拉邦去年宣布，其小学将改为用英语教学；其他地区则在进行小规模的试验。在巴基斯坦，2009年，旁遮普省政府宣布将采用英语教学，2013年，开伯尔-普赫图赫瓦省也宣布了同样的做法。
The medium clouds the message
媒介使信息混乱
Yet there are problems associated with much English-medium schooling. Visitors soon discover that, except in elite establishments, interviews in most “English-medium” schools have to be conducted through an interpreter, in the local language, because neither teachers nor pupils speak much English. At the Lucknow primary school, the head teacher and two out of four teachers speak reasonably good English, but the other two little. Since most of the pupils’ parents are illiterate, they are unlikely to be aware of that.
然而，许多英语媒介教学也存在一些问题。参观者很快就发现，除了精英机构，在大部分英语媒介学校，面试者不得不通过精通当地语言的口译员进行，因为学校原来的教师和学生都不很精通英语。在勒克瑙小学，校长及四名教师中的两名都很精通英语，但另两名教师则很少讲英语。因为大部分小学生的家长是文盲，所以也没人意识到这一点。
Such difficulties are reflected in the findings of much research into the educational outcomes of English-medium schooling. The most-often cited study into private versus government-school outcomes in India, carried out in Andhra Pradesh in 2013, found that on average pupils in private schools performed a bit better than those in government schools. But pupils in Telugu-speaking private schools did considerably better in maths than those in English-medium schools.
对用英语教学的学校教育进行了诸多研究，结果表明这样的教学方式存在此类困难。2013年，在安得拉邦关于印度私立学校和公立学校成果的研究表明私立学校的学生平均成绩比公立学校的学生稍好，后这项研究被引用得最多。但在讲泰鲁古语的私立学校，学生的数学成绩要比在英语媒介学校好得多。
History provides some intriguing examples of the effect of being educated in the mother tongue or some other language. A policy change in South Africa introduced in 1955 by the apartheid government used the medium of education to sharpen the divide between whites and blacks, increasing the years of schooling that children got in their mother tongue. Two extra years of mother-tongue schooling, instead of schooling in Afrikaans or English, raised both literacy and wages, according to a recent study of historical data.
历史上一些有趣的例子表明用母语及其他语言教学的影响。1955年，支持种族隔离制的政府在南非引入一项政策变革，正是通过教育媒介加剧白人和黑人的差距、增加孩子们用母语接受教育的时间。最近对历史数据的研究表明，额外多出的两年母语（而非南非荷兰语或英语）教学时间，提高了识字率和工资水平。
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